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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is The Art of Fact, a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing in on particular objects, ideas, and moments in time.

What do you imagine when you think of a necromancer? Perhaps partially influenced by dungeons and dragons and various dark fantasy tales, you imagine a deathly pale wizard dressed all in black.

Perhaps partial to skulls and bones as their primary fashion accessory.

But, were we to look beneath their robes would we find a grisly pair of magical pants sewn from flayed human flesh and complete with the leathery remnants of the victims' genitalia?

Yes, according to Icelandic folklore. These are exactly the sort of trousers quite becoming of a necromancer.

Eleanor Rosamond Barclow describes the finbricker or finbritches literally magic pants in the book Beyond the Northlands.

The wearer would enjoy unlimited coins from the pocket of the pants as well as one presumes a certain slimming effect.

You can actually gaze upon a replica of the folkloric death trousers in the museum of Icelandic sorcery and witchcraft in Holmovik where they are called the Nabrak or Necropants.

Of course, there are rules to any work of magic or sorcery. It was said that the necromancer must first gain the permission of a living man and then dig up his corpse after death.

Then it becomes a careful matter of flaying the corpse and carefully crafting the necropants.

And the retention of the genitalia is key because the scrotum serves as the pocket of the necropants.

In order to activate them, the necromancer will need to insert a coin stolen from a widow and a sheet of paper bearing the correct magical sickle.

The original coin must remain, however, in the scrotum, otherwise the wealth-generating properties of the pants will cease.

At this point, the necromancer need only slip into the pants and feel them bond with their own skin.

Now, those pants can come off, mind you, but in order to avoid damnation for crafting such vile pants, the necromancer must make sure that someone else is on hand to step into the pants at the exact same time they are climbing out of them.

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