The other time we saw a black altar was when the wife of a traveling preacher was using it to bind a reaper. That’s some serious necromancy, too, and about the last place in the world we expected to find it was behind the tent at a religious revival. This binding spell involved a vial of human blood built into a Coptic cross, and the whole black altar in the basement shtick. Once the vial of blood broke, the reaper came for the preacher’s wife, restoring the balance she’d upset when she bound it. Necromancy is about creating that kind of imbalance, and if whatever is bound by necromancy gets free, the first thing it does is take the necromancer’s life as part of the restoration of that balance. In this case, the reaper took the preacher’s wife and that was that.
Reapers aren’t exactly demons—near as we can tell, they don’t take sides in the whole good-versus-evil thing—they’re just death given form, and they operate as what’s called a psychopomp. Dad had a bit about the psychopomp in his journal:
Psychopomp. Term for god or entity responsible for guiding souls to the afterlife. In Greece, Hermes. In Norse myth, the Valkyries. In Egypt, Anubis. Voodoo traditions, going back to their African roots, offer Ghede. Irish, Ankou. In most shamanic traditions, the shaman is a sort of psychopomp both at the beginning of life and at the end. He or she was present at birth to usher the child into the world, and present at death to see the soul on its journey. Medieval legends of the sickle-bearing Grim Reaper perhaps connected to practice in some parts of Europe whereby the dead were stabbed or buried with sickles. The real reapers are purely psychic entities, with power over time and perception. They can change the way a human sees his surroundings and change their own appearance, usually to ease the transition from life into death. The reaper’s true form is hard to pin down, but most accounts suggest that the natural way for a living person to see a reaper is as a wraith-like figure wearing tattered winding sheets or burial cloth.
We’ll just add that we can attest to the fact that the reaper is a powerful illusionist. Dean, near death after the encounter with the Demon and the car accident that followed, had a long conversation with a reaper who looked kind of like Meg Tilly back when Meg Tilly was hot.
We even read somewhere that Peter Pan is a kind of psychopomp figure, because in the book it says that when children die he leads them part of the way so they won’t be afraid. Jeez, way to ruin a good kid’s story.