Swan Song is a new, grassroots death acceptance/community deathcare festival in Canada. Local events under the Swan Song umbrella are held during late October. Here’s a look at the 2019 event presented by the Cariboo Community Deathcaring Network in Williams Lake:
In Starhawk’s ecotopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (1994), the pacifistic, neoPagan residents of San Francisco in the year 2048 must endure and somehow prevail over an invasion by the militaristic Stewards from the South Lands. As part of a multifaceted strategy, the San Franciscans conjure the ritual of “haunting”, in which the friends and … Read moreMaya Greenwood Embodies the Reaper
In this interview, Belgian theater practitioner and ritualist Barbara Raes discusses devising new rituals of mourning: I make these rituals as co-creations with artists. I feel that many artists have a certain sensitivity for our profoundly human need for consolation and empathy, and are more adept at connecting to a more spiritual context. Art can … Read more“Today is a Wonderful Day to Die”
More details on the Fiesta de las Ñatitas (“Festival of the Little Pug-Nosed Ones”) are available via this 2015 article from The Smithsonian. Interestingly, as with the Mexican Day of the Dead, the Bolivian tradition has been undergoing a revival (and, possibly, some degree of reinvention) since the 1970s.
NPR offers this survey of how the COVID-19 crisis is affecting the funerary rites of a variety of religions: The World Health Organization in its March 24 guidance on burials of COVID-19 victims says dead bodies are generally not infectious. But its recommendations that relatives not touch or kiss the body and government rules on social distancing … Read more“Coronavirus Is Changing The Rituals Of Death For Many Religions”
Eva Aridjis’ 2007 documentary is available for rent or purchase via Vimeo. In more recent years the cult of Santa Muerte has spread beyond Mexico and is now considered one of the fastest-growing new religious movements in the world.
This video offers a sense of how and why, after the devastating tsunami of 2011, visiting an old-fashioned phone booth in the yard of landscape gardener Itaru Sasaki has became a ritual of pilgrimage for thousands of bereaved people.
The innovative mid-’80s TV series Robin of Sherwood incorporated aspects of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon mysticism into the Robin Hood mythos. In this scene Robin, Marion, Little John, Much, Will Scarlet and Friar Tuck – and then, to the surprise of the rest of the group, Nasir the Saracen – commemorate their fallen comrades by firing … Read moreNothing’s Forgotten; Remembering the Dead in “Robin of Sherwood”
Georgia Perry’s memoir for Narratively reflects on the value of small, comforting traditions in the wake of bereavement: “You can still be in mourning and have ice cream,” my mother explained. She told me this was tradition — that when she was a little girl her father took her and a handful of her cousins … Read more“The Shake of Death”
By Tony Wolf Since the late 1990s I’ve been sporadically developing a philosophically rational, ecologically sound and communally festive approach to mortality, inspired by the motto memento mori ergo carpe diem – “remember death and therefore seize the day”. My interpretation of carpe diem encompasses Epicureanism as well as the perspective that a meaningful life … Read moreFlower Skull Marottes