Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image,...And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them,...For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.
Deuteronomy 4:16,19/Ecclesiastes 9:5,6
"Pagan works portray contact with the dead as ghoulish and repugnant,
but, if approached gingerly and undertaken for desirable ends, it was
justified.
Revivification of the dead was a major feat that required
concentrated syncopation with cosmic powers, and such collaboration was
realized and made safe through carefully executed rituals.
For example,
in his novel The Golden Ass, the 2nd-century pagan 
philosopher
Apuleius relates a story of the corpse of Thelyphron, whom the Egyptian
prophet Zatchlas temporarily revivifies so that the deceased can solve a
mystery regarding his sudden demise.
Thelyphron had recently married, but he died shortly afterward. As
his funeral procession winds through the streets of a city in Thessaly,
the rumor goes out that his wife had killed him by the use of poison
and the ‘evil arts’.
She protests, and the crowd settles the matter by
asking Zatchlas to recall the spirit from the grave for a brief time and
to reanimate the body as it was before his death. Zatchlas agrees.
He
begins the resurrection by placing a herb on the cadaver’s mouth and on
his chest.
Then the priest turns to the east and prays silently
to the
majestic sun,
asking that the corpse be granted a momentary reprieve.
The irritated dead man comes to life and complains that he was already
being ferried over the river Styx; he asks why he had been dragged back
among the living and begs to be left to return to his rest.
The shade
then confirms that his wife murdered him."
aeon/M.Rampton
