The Past is a Foreign Country;
But They Still Eat Ketchup There
I mean that quite literally. That bastardization of a quote from British novelist L. P. Hartley begins to sum up a little of how I think about history.
History, to me, is a place we can never visit - an unrecoverable place that is very different from our own. But it is still our world. The laws of physics that keep my pencil on the table today kept Da Vinci's pencils on his table. Or quills. What was it that Da Vinci wrote backwards with anyways?
I love to flip open this old cookbook - the 1876 Gettysburg Centennial Cook Book - and glance at the section on sauces. There are so many Ketchups!
The Gettysburg Centennial Cook Book lists nine different recipes for Ketchup (or "catsup" as it was spelled in the cookbook). There's Cucumber Catsup. There's both Cold and Raw Cold Catsups. Grape, Pepper, Currant, and Walnut Catsups all make an appearance. And there are two different recipes for Tomato Catsup.
This encapsulates exactly how I like to think about the past. The past is a world fundamentally like our own. It is a world structured just like ours is, but which operates entirely differently. It's what entrances me about history - we can peek in, crane our necks around, but never really understand it.
But people are people - they put Ketchup on things then and now. And its those stories I love to recover and share - the moments where someone is gently spooning ketchup onto their hot dog or roast beef.
Not literal ketchup.
Practical Necromancy is trying to resurrect the dead and interrogate them, so we can better understand where we are today and where we are going tomorrow. This is not history for history's sake - it's understanding and sharing the past so that we can chart a better future. It is - in the truest sense of the concept - applied history.
The past is the same world we live in today, only not. And that's what makes it exciting. The same petty squabbles we get into today, they did then. The same base impulses and jealousies we feel today, they did then. The same yearing for purpose or meaning we feel, they felt. They fumed. They laughed. They made mistakes. They hated and loved.
They ate ketchup. And although sometimes that ketchup was different than ours, it was still ketchup nonetheless. People are and always will be people. And that's who I seek to find - people, with all their flaws, idiosyncracies, and joyful cracks.
Also, did you know there was a condiment called “Tomato Mustard!?”