Cookiemancy

[crisper]

Millennia past, the art of necromancy was still widely practiced. Many of the great early civilizations only developed, in fact, because they had vast reserves of slave labor drawn from their ranks of their own dead. But the wizards who had the ability to do this were gradually seen by the regular old Powers That Be as a threat, as they controlled more and more of the infrastructure of state with their undead throng. So there was a gradually, carefully orchestrated and subtle shift of opinion orchestrated against the practice, largely during the transition from Bronze to Iron Age, which hit its flashpoint in the explosive rise of the Risen Son (in the form of Attis, and possibly Mithras, and certainly Jesus) which made the return from the dead something entirely Other from its previous form. Indeed, it made the traditional return-from-death look cheap and tawdry and cruel, and the necromancers quickly found themselves on a giant bullseye. So they quickly removed themselves from the world, those few who survived the immediate pogroms and massacres - disappeared into an underground life and set about using what remaining influence they had to eliminate records and traces of their ever having existed, wiped from the mind of humankind. But they carried on, in their secret places, keeping practiced in their arts, and trying to pass that knowledge along to future practitioners (for no necromancer was ever able to escape death himself; all true magic is rife with irony and for necromancy it is the fact that it can give you power over every death but your own). Since necromancy was now forbidden in virtually every civilized place, they needed a mechanism for encoding their rituals, their recipes, their procedures. So they wrapped all those ancient spells in a new superficial practice that could be easily documented in public, with no one the wiser about the true nature of these new writings: they described them as recipes. To help clue in fellow practitioners as to the nature of the subject, they looked to the metaphor of making something rise, and thus they worked with bread. Baking, that was their cover. Baking was their secret code. But over time, the true necromancers were fewer and fewer, while the "recipes" found themselves in wider and wider use by an entirely ignorant world that just wanted something yummy. Baking became the end, not just the means, and the world forgot that every act of baking could be transcribed back to an act of necromantic power, if only you knew the translation process. Which was lost for many centuries, until recently, when I discovered it in an old book wrapped in oil skin tucked into the crumbling wall of a piece of property that had been a bakery at the dawn of white settlement on this continent. That's right. If you can bake it, I can use it on the dead. Which I have been. So, would you like some more of those cookies you've been eating? Here, let me have my… servant… fetch you some more.

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For consideration: how many things in history have been encoded only to have the encoded version become more meaningful than the original content?