Mother, Lamia and Necromancer in Raised By Wolves

Of all the mysteries surrounding HBO Max's excellent MythSciFi show Raised By Wolves, one was specially annoying me lately after its second season finale. Why is Mother, who told us that her name is Lamia, called a Necromancer? There's no direct evidence in the entire series that would tell us she's a necromancer, i.e. someone who practices the art of communicating with the dead. So instead of waiting another year for an answer, I summoned my obsessive-compulsive spirit of researching in order to make sense of it for myself. It turned out that the answer was linked to the name Lamia itself.

Lamia the Mother
©HBO Max/Coco Van Oppens

First, we note that necromancer can be used in a more general way, i.e. practicer of dark arts, black magic or witchcraft, since one can safely say that the necromancy that we use today is in fact a conflation of two names: the medieval Latin 'nigromantia,' which means divination via dark arts, where niger meaning black/dark in Latin, and the ancient Greek 'νεκρομαντεία' (nekromanteia) which means divination via death or dead, and its root consists of the words νεκρός (nekros) meaning dead, and μαντεία (manteia) which means divination.

Second, Lamia could also mean/refer to a witch, specially if you adopt the modern reading of its etymology as a 'nocturnal spirit,' which leads us immediately to the goddess of magic and witchcraft, Hekate. This way, you can even add the extra religious component, i.e. using the translation identity 'Lamia = Lilith,' and all the occult stuff that follows from the character of Lilith.

Lilith
John Collier (1889)
©Atkinson Art Gallery Collection

Lilith also translates as the 'screech owl,' and in the magical context, it refers to the association of striges with witches, and that witches in the old times used to shape-shift into owls and later, into wolves [1]. One good example is when Apuleius uses the word Lamiae (plural of Lamia) to address the witch sisters Meroe and Panthia, and that their third witch sister, Pamphile, transforms herself into an owl [2]. You can find other instances of owl/strix ↔ witch in the literature as well.

Now, you might think Lamia-Mother in the show is not a witch. What the hell I'm talking about?! But I think she is, though a Sci-Tech witch instead. She certainly flies, screeches, shape-shifts, doesn't eat or drink (normal stuff), manipulates the gravitational field around her, with the ability of telekinesis. And of course, her "magical" super strength and all that jazz about the Serpent and healing. So yeah. Even in the archetypal sense, we observe that Lamia the Necromancer is the polar opposite of Lamia the Mother, and we can see that both in the 'Mother axis' and, with her undergoing the "spiritual" transformation, in the 'Virgin Mary-The Witch' axis.

Lamia the Necromancer

I've also read that magic (including necromancy) was practiced in the ancient Mithraic tradition (pre-Zoroastrianism) in Iran. In fact, the origin of the word 'magic' itself goes back to the Middle Persian word, 'Mogh,' which was given as a title to such a practitioner. Note that the 'gh' in Mogh has a unique pronunciation in Persian which is not part of the English language phonetics. Later, Mogh was also became the title of the priest of Zoroastrianism, and finally it transformed into the word 'Magus' in the ancient Greek and Latin.

So, in summary, magic and necromancy were not alien to original Mithraism, though I don't know about its Roman spin-off that most people are familiar with today. In the case of Raised By Wolves, I think showrunners simply didn't want to use the (cliche) word witch, which is understandable, so they went for Necromancer, i.e. a chthonic neuromancer :)

References

1. Leinweber, D. W. (1994). Witchcraft and Lamiae in “The Golden Ass.” Folklore, 105, 77–82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1260631 
2. Apuleius. The Golden Ass. Translated by E. J. Kenny. 1998