worth nothing that historical "black magic" or "necromancy" did not really involve reviving corpses or the undead, but it still very often involved desecrating them and disturbing the rest of the dead by using them for divination or other purposes. Now, many records of such "black magic" are actually slander but it still reveals how disturbing the dead is one of the most heinous acts you can commit. In fact, this is still something that is considered as such by virtually all, and again, not to get into very political territory here, but it is considered one of the worst crimes that can be commited and have been actually judged in courts of law and considered war crimes.
Which is why to me there's such a whiplash when there's a quirky chungus D&D necromancer character who practices "ethical necromancy", or players or writers who kind of understand that a necromancer is supposed to be feared and kind of bad and villagers should close their doors and shun them, but they don't understand why, like, is it because they're too goth? No, it's because of the above.
Yeah, write whatever you want and so on, but if you're writing horror you should understand where the horror part comes from.
I forget where I saw it, but I did see one of those "ethical necromancy" worldbuilding projects where a focus was put on each corpse being held for a certain number of years before being used. The idea was to wait until it was out of living memory, so no one would have to see someone they'd known alive walk around undead. I thought that was neat.
I do wonder how many of the various taboos around corpse desecration come from the fact that if a corpse isn't properly disposed of, people start dying from disease. I don't know enough to make a claim, but intuitively, it seems like it should be a significant factor. I've seen some worldbuilding where cleanliness of the corpses being used is a factor as well.
Biologically, yes, that's very likely where most of our taboos and issues come from (similarly to the uncanny valley is probably very much related to corpses). However, there is still a cultural thing; every culture has a way to dispose the death and more importantly to process grief and loss after death. It's not only the physical object but the death itself.
I can imagine that necromancy, in a fictional world where it exists as in "raise the undead" concept, may be part of that in some cultures, but you need to take it seriously enough.
I had a setting which drew a line between "evil" necromancy and "holy" necromancy (in universe referred to as "Theurgy"
Basically, reanimating someone is energy intensive. Necromancy attempts to cut as many corners as it can in order to bring the energy costs down so they can raise a bunch of zombies. This includes but is not limited to, letting undead rot (body preservation costs energy), using the victims own soul as fuel (and killing them in cruel ways so their soul has more emotions/ire to burn up), using seeking alternative often unethical energy sources (draining the land or making deals with demons)
Theurgy on the other hand does as much as it can fairly. A theurgist has to:
Power their undead entirely with "holy magic" which is granted/allocated by the holy/light/human centric deity
Get permission from the involved grim reaper/psychopomp who serve the goddess of death
In order to do step 2 they have to draft up a contract with clear goals/end clauses/time limits that the soul of the deceased has to agree to
And only after doing all that is a theurgist "allowed" to resurrect someone, again on a temporary basis for a specific contracted purpose. The many hoops to jump though means that under normal circumstances Theurgist's are much more limited in scope and ability than necromancers. But occasionally there are problems which make both the holy god and the death goddess sign a blank check to a theurgist to make it go away.
