I started creating this bookshelf altar during the day and evening of September 22, which was the Autumnal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. The altar features a colorful scattering of dead leaves gathered during my evening walks, a copper string of white lights, a mirror for self-reflection, an incense holder, a small jar of home-mixed … Read moreAutumnal Equinox Memorial Altar 2020
Humanist poet, speaker, organizer and ritualist Daniel Lev Shkolnik writes for Patheos on a self-devised memento mori/carpe diem rite: When I pass into a cemetery alone, a calm settles over me. I watch the hawks hunt from the pines. The hares dash through among the stones and the bones of slower hares. The puffball mushrooms … Read more“Dancing with the Dead: Two Techniques for Spiritual Rejuvenation”
Click here to read Sasha Sagan’s 2014 essay for The Cut: My parents taught me that even though it’s not forever — because it’s not forever — being alive is a profoundly beautiful thing for which each of us should feel deeply grateful. If we lived forever it would not be so amazing. In this video, Sasha … Read more“Lessons of Immortality and Mortality From My Father, Carl Sagan”
The Art of Dying Institute, an initiative of The Open Center, is dedicated to fostering an engaged community of practitioners, researchers & scholars, educators, front-line innovators, partners and investors to address the need for a cultural awakening around the theme of death and our mortality, how we die and the consequences for how we live. … Read moreThe Art of Dying Institute (New York City)
Coreopsis is the semi-annual journal of the Society for Ritual Arts: Our mission is to support the ritual arts community through the advancement of arts and scholarly research in the fields of spirituality, consciousness, healing, performance, and visual media. We support work that advances freedom of spiritual practices globally, the scientific study of spirituality and … Read moreCoreopsis: Rituals for Living and Dying
I was delighted to stumble across this ritual firefly procession in honor of the Twilight King during my evening walk last night. The event was arranged and performed by a troupe called The Art of Spontaneous Spectacle, which has been organized by local actors and directors unable to ply their craft in orthodox venues due … Read moreThe Art of Spontaneous Spectacle
In the climactic scene of Mr. Holmes, the titular detective – aged 93 and very near to the end of his own life – mimics a memorial ritual he had witnessed in Japan to honor the deceased. In the context of this story, the scene has a special poignancy in that it seems to contradict … Read moreSherlock Holmes Honors the Dead (“Mr. Holmes”, 2015)
Here’s a gallery of atmospheric video memoirs from the Atlas Obscura’s semi-annual Into The Veil events, which have been staged at the arts-friendly Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NYC and also at Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.
For about a month now I’ve been trying to recall where I’d seen a memorial rite involving placing flowers in a skull’s eye sockets, and today it suddenly came to mind. The 1994 film Nell was based on Mark Handley’s play Idioglossia and stars Jodie Foster as a young woman raised in complete isolation by her reclusive, deeply … Read more“Mi’i waw wi’a Law”: How Nell Honors Her Dead
By Tony Wolf I recently took part in the month-long online course Make Your Own Memento Mori: Befriending Death with Art, History and the Imagination, which was organized and taught by Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein. This course combines extensive and fascinating weekly readings and viewings, lectures, discussions, art and writing prompts and so-on, towards a “final project” of each … Read moreThe Flowerskull Mask: A Thanatopositive Art Project