Is Animating Dead Evil?

[JacktheRabbit]

I do believe the description says you can use whatever human or humanoid parts you want to use.

I don't have the creature description handy, but does it say that flesh golems are made from the bodies of people?

(and hey, if you ask me, a flesh golem is just as bad as animating a skeleton, absolutely, but WoTC didn't ask me. )

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I know I am really late into this discussion but I have a really simple question.

If animating a Zombie is evil then why isn't creating a Flesh Golem evil as well?

Both are mindless creatures made from the bodies of deceased people right?

In my opinion skeletons and zombies are not evil and creating then is not evil because they are no more than automatons animated by the casters magic.

The Real Answer is the mythic context decides what is evil, not the superficial details.

Animate Dead or commanding the spirits of the dead is the standard fare of evil Necromancers in legend. Even if the practitioner happens to not be evil, such magic is "always" considered dangerous and corrupting.

Golems as we know them come from the Jewish Cabalistic tradition. These are very dangerous creations, but were created by very morally virtuous, wise, and learned individuals.

The flesh golem is Frankenstein's Monster, a 19th century melding of the golem tradition with trappings of necromancy and science. The creature was actually childlike and morally neutral--until everyday humans & and his creator teach it to be otherwise. Interestingly the success of this project seems to have driven Frankenstein to the near edge of insanity, an echo of the dangers of necromancy.

D&D simplifies the picture by just saying golems are golems are golems. Animating the dead is evil. Period. If you have to draw the line somewhere, that makes sense considering the cosmology of the D&D universe.

(There are indeed older traditions of legendary automatons, but the Caballah is the real source for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, so they are not considered here. Automatons, whatever they are make of, are typically much less morally interesting than the two mentioned here.)

 

[Xylarthan]

Re: Souls and the Animated Dead

More than once during the course of this discussion, there has been the comment to the effect that:
I'd love to know where this notion comes from. It doesn't appear in the SRD spell description nor the description of Skeletons or Zombies. So I was wondering, where does this idea originate?

Raise Dead (p. 242) and Resurrection (p. 246) have the pertinent points.

Raise Dead - "A creature who has been turned into an undead creature or slain by a death effect can't be raise by this spell."

Resurrection - "You can revive someone who has been slain by a death effect or somone who has been turned into an undead creature and then destroyed."

The spells that restore a soul to the body and the body to life cannot work due to the Animate Dead spell. Also note that if an animate corpse is destroyed it still requires the greater power of the Resurrection to restore the person to life; the Raise Dead is not sufficient to undo the damage to the soul caused by the Animate Dead.