Wednesdays, April 12 - May 17
6-8 pm ET/New York City time (3-5 pm PT/California time)
$145 (Patreon members) / $165 (Regular admission)

PLEASE NOTE: Classes will be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

Death is the great mystery of human life. Today, we tend to view death through the lens of science and rationalism. Our ancestors, however, experienced death as part of a rich, invisible world with its own personalities and terrains, with eloquent myths explaining the origin of mortality and what happens to our souls when the body dies. These world views—or cosmovisions--were replete with their own dedicated gods, goddesses, monsters, and demons; psychopomps who oversaw the journey through liminal space from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead; rites of passage to contain and define the journey; and detailed descriptions of the places where the souls of the dead traveled to when the stage of embodiment came to an end.

In this six week class--comprised of lavishly illustrated lectures, suggested readings, homework prompts and class discussions and presentations--Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein will lead students in a deep dive into the fascinating ways our ancestors understood and imagined death and its personages and terrains, with an eye towards commonalities, and how these ideas live on today in religion, psychology, and a renewed interest in the occult and the invisible realms.

Along the way, we will examine the differing ways in which matriarchal and patriarchal cultures viewed death, the roots of “good” and “evil,” death in cultures of balanced complementary duality instead of binary opposition, the ways in which dominant Christian beliefs differs from most cosmologies around the world, and Jungian notions of symbols and mythologies of death and the dead.

For a final project, students will create their very own death deity, psychopomp, or map of geographies of life and death. Students will also have an opportunity to give a class presentation on a death cosmology or deity of their choice, perhaps one from their own ancestral heritage.

CLASS STRUCTURE (order of topics subject to change)

Week One

• Introduction

• Death and Mythology

• Ways to understand mythology

• Myths of how death is enters the world

• Jung, Campbell and Myth

• The Soul in a variety of traditions

• Good, evil, and complementary duality in various cosmovisions

• Life, Death, Rebirth: Fertility and Sexuality

Week two

• Death Mythology Case Study: Ancient Egypt

• Death Mythology Case Study: Mayan

  Death Mythology Case Study: Haitian Voodoo

Week Three

• The Journey: moving from the land of the living to the land of the dead

• Final Judgement

• Geographies of lthe dead

• The Upperworld

• The Underworld

• Heaven, Hell, Purgatory

• Apocalypse

• Liminal Spaces/inbetween realms

• The Veil: That which separates the realms

• Times when the veil is thin: Death Festivals and visiting with the dead

• Ghosts and spirits

• Revenants

• Staying in touch with the dead: Ancestor veneration, cadaver traditions, and Spiritualism

• Intercessions for the dead

• Keeping the dead from returning

Week Four

• Psychopomps: Guides to the journey

• Messengers, arbiters, and angels of death

• Deities of the Dead

• Demons and monsters

• Animals

Week Five

• Presentations

Week Six

• Present final Projects

Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based writer, award winning curator, photographer and graphic designer. She is the creator of the Morbid Anatomy blog, library and event series, and was cofounder (with Tracy Hurley Martin) and creative director of the recently shuttered Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. Her books include Death: A Graveside Companion, The Anatomical Venus and The Morbid Anatomy Anthology (with Colin Dickey). Her work has been covered by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired, National Geographic, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and more. You can see her Tedx talk—Death as You've Never Seen it Before—here.

Images:

1. The Goddess Nyx—Greek primordial goddess of night and mother of the twin brothers personifying sleep and peaceful death, as seen inThe Night Escorted by the Geniuses of Love and Study, Pedro Américo, 1886

2. Freya: Norse goddess of love and fertility, associated with sex, lust, beauty, sorcery, gold, war, and death.

3. The Sea of Acheron, Adolf Hiremy- Hirschl, 1898

4. Anubis attending Sennedjem’s mummy, c.1292-1187 BC

5. Mictlāntēcutli and Mictēcacihuātl , Aztec God and Lady of the Dead

6. Hina, the moon goddess of Ancient Hawaii, goddess of life, death and rebirth

7. Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead (version 1), 1880

8. The Three Fates, Alexander Rothaug, circa 1910

9. Yama, god of death and lord of hell in some Buddhist pantheons

10. Devotion to Santa Muerte, Mexico City, 2019