Ecce Mortem

In his 2015 book, Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us, Paul Koudounaris noted that Ecce Mortem, or Behold Death, was written on the walls of a catholic charnal house in Italy where monks had erected monuments to the dead using the deceased bones. Such displays are looked at in our culture as a curiosity of a previous era. Yet, such memento mori, or reminders that we all will die, served as the catholic church’s grave1 rebuke to protestant challenges that they were too ornate or lavish. I am interested in this concept of pursuing a practice where the goal is to make society behold death for very human ends. However, dear reader, the egalitarian aims of this project preclude us from erecting memento mori for pursuits of power. No, I want you to behold death for more generative, emancipatory purposes. I want your beholding of death leaving you feeling radiant and alive with possibility.

Death in my Irish tradition is not some finite end point to be feared. No, it can be a fertile horizon of possibility. John O’Donohue’s thoughts on death, elucidated most clearly in his text Anam Cara, opens up a broader understanding of the possibilities of death. In Anam Cara, Donohue notes that the event of a death is a portal to understanding deeper facets of ourselves that remained hidden or obscured by our culture’s insistence that we are immortal (what he calls our “cult of immortality”):

Indeed, as O’Donohue so aptly notes, it is in that moment when we behold death fully that we realize that our culture’s insistence that we will live in an endless summer is a farce. Within that rupture, there is an opening where we glimpse that divine spiraling spark within us. That moment, when we are walking the tight rope between this world and the ancestor realm of the Otherworld, is a tremendously generative place where we discover, as Laura Murphy has eloquently noted in her poetry, that tomb is womb and womb is tomb. Indeed, when we behold death fully, we see that truly it is just the beginning of a new spiraling iteration of our existence where we are in full unity with the great flow of nwyfre discussed in my druidic tradition.

I want to take this idea one step further and suggest that one does not need to behold the transition from their clay vessel form to make a break with the cult of immortality. No, one approaches countless moments in their life where they behold death fully. My first came, like the centering stillness of the eye of a storm, as the light escaped a brisk January day and I told my mom she could let go. Her last breath escaped her as the winter light dimmed. There was no where to hide as we sat with her body waiting for the funeral home representative to arrive. I found no solace in the clichés I used to bypass previous deaths that happened around me. “They are in a better place,” or “their suffering is over,” made as much sense in that space as a set of randomly selected scrabble letters. I couldn’t avoid this death, as when I did not attend my grandmother’s service. My mom waited on me to continue on to the ancestor realm. Beholding her death was always my birth rite and was always meant to be a death for me as well.

In the wake of her passing, I experienced my first death and rebirth cycle. You see, I had no tools for dealing with my mom’s transition, believing like many others that we lived in the endless summer, immortal to the cold winds of death. Instead of allowing myself the space for rest and grieving, I plowed through and developed maladaptive coping strategies, like generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder (“OCD”), for bypassing all the feelings associated with her passing. It wasn’t until I found weaving two years later, a skill she always wanted to learn, that I started doing the death work that would see me go therapy and allow myself to be fully transformed by her passing. I learned how to deal with my generalized anxiety. I availed myself of the marvels of anti-anxiety medication. I went through exposure therapy for my OCD. With the space opened up by my treatment, I found rebirth there at the loom and in my writing practice. There, in the engulfing flames of that transition back to life, I found my own ability to wield magic that I didn’t even know existed before beholding sacred death. I was born into a new life with new purpose. Like O’Donohue noted, beholding sacred death opened up a pathway to me realizing my own divinity, it opened boundless possibilities.

I hope you can learn from my clumsy experience of learning to walk through the sacred portal of death. I hope that you may approach your beholding of death as a divine encounter with your own unique spark that you have inside you. I hope you will have the strength to walk your path with sacred death and the overflowing chalice of conflicting and difficult emotions that come with it, so that you may find yourself at the end of the journey born anew in a new world full of possibilities. I hope you can stay the course when things feel hopeless. I hope you will feel emboldened to continue your journey knowing that wisdom comes with each trip through the veil. Finally, I hope you will have the strength to ask for help if you become lost in your encounter with death. There is no shame in getting help on your pathway to rebirth.

Oh, Ecce Mortem,

Ecce Mortem,

Ecce Mortem, ahh.

For there is a way to our own divinity and that is through the great portal of sacred death.

Again and again,

we pass through the veil

learning more about our divine spark

with each death

until it is time for our transition to the otherworld

until we rest in that womb that many mistake for a tomb.

Now, I sit on a new precipice some eight-plus years since my mom’s transition getting ready to take a deep dive into spiritual death work training with Hannah of Mourning Light Divination. My first experience beholding death led me to find my magic and learn to use it. Having gone through the portal of sacred death again with my transition to fatherhood in an international pandemic,3 I see myself on the cusp of new horizons in my practice. (A process I discussed a few months ago in an essay called “The Seed of Rebirth.”) Now that I have learned about my magic, I want to practice it in service of others who may be beholding death and need assistance. I see this intensive spiritual death worker training as jumping into the deep end to open up that space to learn how to be of service. I don’t think I know how to do that currently. Through the training, I want develop a set of enchanted services that I can offer folks for trade, donation, or on a sliding-scale-need basis to help them through their death and rebirth processes.

This deep dive has been a long time coming, as my current death work offerings are unclear or not explicitly advertised. I have only gentle alluded to the possibility that I could make death work weavings for folx. I mean, sure, I talk about fiber death work in essays, most notably my When Magic Follows Death essay. But does the manifold emotional complexity of beholding death ooze out of my weaving? All told, I think I have made two or three death work weavings, with my favorite one being the one I made for Rachel Wylie, a fellow death worker who runs the Where the Love Lies Patreon (see above). I think these works are successes, but I want to dig deeper, feel more in my work. I want to capture the deep emotional complexity of beholding death in the symbols I include to craft weavings that help you feel sacred death in all its depth. To date, I don’t think I have done this. Through the training, I hope to redefine what a death work weaving is, what it can help its recipient with, and what ceremonial magic will support it. With this renewed clarity, I hope more people will contact me for such an offering.

I am also very excited by the possibility of offerings I could develop in the training that I cannot even fathom yet. In my fiber magic-related posts, I talk a lot about the emergent character of the messages I receive while hand spinning or weaving. I think I am most excited about what messages or directions I will be gifted by the journey my friend has curated for us. Who will I be at the end of the training will not be the same person who is writing this essay now. That excites me, which is a new feeling for this person with generalized anxiety and OCD to say. I rarely welcome change. But, yes, I am truly excited to go through the transformations that have to occur for me to deepen into my death work practice.

I also want to thank myself for putting in the hard work in therapy and my life to be in a place where I can take this action which is in alignment with my goals and values. Six months ago, there is no way I would have felt up to this deep practice of inviting myself into the spiraling work of beholding death. THERE IS JUST NO WAY, HOSS! I was in year three of a death process that needed more than just time. I needed to clean house, erect boundaries, and get myself on a schedule. I let my aries rising and virgo sun take over, and we got on this path we are on today. I have built our daily protection magic practice. I have established our weekly essay series here on substack. I am doing fiber spell commissions for trade. I am signed up for classes and seminars to help me grow. All this is a dream and I am consistently more buoyant and happy because of it.

Finally, let’s just thank Hannah, ok? What a force of nature that Hannah is! This person has poured her soul into a training that will change people’s lives. Now that is some potent hecking magic, folx. LFG, HANNAH! Proud to call you a friend and collaborator.

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