The Mythologies of Death: Psychopomps, Liminal Spaces, and Underworld Realms; A Live, Online Six Week Class with Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein, Beginning May 4
The Mythologies of Death: Psychopomps, Liminal Spaces, and Underworld Realms; A Live, Online Six Week Class with Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein, Beginning May 4
6 Week Online Class
Taught via Zoom by Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein
Wednesdays, May 4, 11, 18, 25 and June 1, 8
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:
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
Freya: Norse goddess of love and fertility, associated with sex, lust, beauty, sorcery, gold, war, and death.
The Sea of Acheron, Adolf Hiremy- Hirschl, 1898
Anubis attending Sennedjem’s mummy, c.1292-1187 BC
Mictlāntēcutli and Mictēcacihuātl , Aztec God and Lady of the Dead
Hina, the moon goddess of Ancient Hawaii, goddess of life, death and rebirth
Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead (version 1), 1880
The Three Fates, Alexander Rothaug, circa 1910
Yama, god of death and lord of hell in some Buddhist pantheons
Devotion to Santa Muerte, Mexico City, 2019