Ceremony and Ritual with the Harbingers and Agents of Death

A Livestream Class with Angie Buchanan

Sunday, February 9 at 3:15 pm in The Enchanted Parlor

As humans, nothing that we do is more magical than birth and death, the two sacred rites of passage that bookend and thereby define the human experience. By virtue of our entrance and exit to human existence on the Earth plane, we are by nature magical creatures. Yet, while we’re seemingly not so reticent to talk about our birth, we are intensely reluctant to talk about our death.

Through the ages, every culture has recorded death rites and rituals. Death—or the agent of death—has often appeared in mythology and folklore as an entity. These archetypes are the harbingers, the harvesters, the reapers who come to capture the last exhale and take it off to whatever comes next. They are not always Death themselves, but they bring it. They collect, ferry, guide, or midwife. Some are agents, some deities, some take animal form, some human.

From the Beansidhe of Ireland, the Accabadora of Sardinia, the Mothman of North America, the more recent Santa Muerte, and others, the mysteries and folklore that surround these entities are meant to inform us, warn us, and help us prepare for our own final rite of passage. There is magic contained in the ability to be present—to recognize and to connect with them in the final hours: our own or others with whom we may find ourselves involved.

In this presentation and meditation, you will meet a few of them and learn their stories, as well as how to work with their energy in the death threshold through pagan ceremony and rituals that help us honor our dying and our Beloved Dead and ease them during their final rite of passage and afterward.