The Pagan Book of Living and Dying: Practical Rituals, Prayers, Blessings, and Meditations on Crossing Over

Introduction

Several of us Pagans and Witches, as we have aged, have had considerable firsthand (or hands-on, if you will) experience with death and dying. We have been challenged as to how to deal with it—intellectually, energetically, emotionally, physically, and spiritually—and have found no resource at hand to help us through these crises. As Carol Christ has said,

Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected, they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement or defeat.

In 1988, when my former husband, a Witch, was dying, in his great pain he called for the Witches. We came, and we did everything we could to draw off pain, to ease his transition, but we had no written resources within our own spiritual tradition. We found comfort in reading from Francesca Fremantle’s translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and I believe Rod took comfort from our oral readings. We chanted Set Sail and Gone Beyond, chants we use at Samhain (and that you will find elsewhere in this book). We cleared the way to the West. We hung an image of the Tibetan Goddess Kurukulia on the West wall. We laid on hands to comfort and ease pain. We purified the air with salt water. (Incense and candles were not an option in a hospital room with oxygen equipment.) We did everything we could think of, or were inspired to do, and we did it with love. We drew from every source we knew, however eclectic. It was a great privilege to be present at his crossing over. Yet we did not have our own Craft material.

A few days after Rod’s passing, we took his ashes out into the ocean beyond the Golden Gate and performed a short service there. We again used the chants and songs we had used before his spirit left his body. Starhawk said inspired and eloquent things at the ceremony. But still, we had no resource of Craft liturgy, prayers, and songs.

In 1992, Starhawk’s mother declined in health and left this existence. Since then, Starhawk has worked on creating liturgy for death.

This book began with Starhawk’s vision. Fortunately for me, (Macha) she saw this work as a place where I could explore and expand my understanding of death and dying. And fortunately for all of us, she also saw this book as a place where we could display, in the best setting possible, the vast talents, insights, spiritual depth, and richness of present-day Pagans and Witches.

The Reclaiming Collective (of which both Starhawk and I are members), based in the San Francisco Bay Area, heartily supported our first effort at making much of this material more widely available. Reclaiming paid for the production of the original edition, called Crossing Over: A Pagan Manual on Death and Dying, published at Samhain 1995. We created that book for our co-religionists, to help them move through times of challenge and pain.

I wrote in the Introduction to that 1995 precursor of the present volume, We—Reclaiming Collective and Friends—offer this book as a point of beginning as we as a Pagan community create and define our approach to death, and our working with death… We consider this to be open-ended, a work in process, as we all continue to define our Craft and Pagan tribes. So we ask you to contribute your feedback for possible future expansion and refinement.

This request produced many of the wonderful contributions that have found their way into this current work. In all, forty Witches and Pagans—not only from California but also from New England, New York, Florida, Iowa, Illinois, and Texas, as well as from British Columbia and Alberta to the North, Britain to the East, and El Salvador to the South—have shared their experiences and contributed meaningful liturgy.

Not everyone who contributed writings and songs to this book is in our small Reclaiming Collective, or even in our larger community. But all have graciously shared their work with us because we asked. We thank them.

All prayers, chants, and songs not specifically identified as being written by someone else were written by Starhawk. Prayers and chants within a specific essay are the work of the writer of that essay. Transitional material was written by Starhawk and Macha.

Part One

Pagan Tradition

1

The Sacred Cycle

Go into a forest, a meadow, or a garden—anywhere plants grow and die and insects, birds, and animals forage. In any natural environment, death is constantly occurring. Leaves drop to the ground; plants end their lifespan. A butterfly ceases its fluttering and falls. A rabbit lies dead behind a bush.

Instantly the processes of decay begin. Subtle cues of scent or some unknown sixth sense alerts all the families of creatures that feed on death, from the tiny one-celled bacteria and fungi, to the beetles and termites, and on up to the vultures and coyotes. The earth takes in the dead through a thousand mouths that reduce each body to its most basic elements, and those elements, in turn, feed the living, nourish the roots of the great trees, and send the vultures winging aloft. As any good gardener knows, it is the processes of decay that sustain the fertility of the soil. All growth arises from death.

This cycle of birth, growth, death, decay, and regeneration is the basic life-sustaining process on this planet. From the time of the emergence of human beings as a thinking, conscious species, people who have lived embedded in nature have observed these processes in action and have acknowledged our dependence upon them by naming them sacred. They have understood death as a natural part of the cycle of life, and have known, not through faith but through direct observation, that death is the matrix in which new life is born.

For human beings, the death of a leaf at the end of summer, the culling of seedlings, or the salmon’s end after spawning is easy to accept as part of the natural cycle. But our own death, or the death of those we love, is not. We feel fear, pain, and grief at the thought of our own consciousness coming to an end.

Religions, theologies, and mystical traditions worldwide have attempted to reconcile us to death. Perhaps the major impulse toward a religion, for most people, comes from the recognition of our own mortality, from the deep desire to believe in an afterlife and the wish for comfort for our losses.

This book describes the understandings and practices of one of those traditions, the Goddess tradition as it has evolved over the last twenty-five years in the extended community that has grown up around the Reclaiming Collective of the San Francisco Bay Area. Our traditions around death arise from our deepest core values and beliefs about life, so we begin this book with some background in our history, practices, and thealogy. We cannot talk about death without delving into the mystical, entering the realm of spirits, voyaging through the otherworld, examining the nature of the soul. But even confirmed skeptics and atheists can take comfort from the roots of our tradition in the observed processes of nature. You do not have to believe in the cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth, or take it on faith as revealed truth, or accept it as dogma. You are not asked to accept truths mediated through someone else’s experience, even the experience of a great teacher or mystic. You can simply walk out into a forest and observe the cycle in process.

Pagans—another name we use for ourselves—have preserved understandings of death that can be helpful to Pagans and non-Pagans alike. Because our spirituality is rooted in the earth, we honor and embrace the natural cycles of birth and death. We are taught no distaste for bodily reality, no sense of corporeal life as somehow unclean or of matter as inferior to spirit. Our worldview includes layers of reality that go beyond the visible and quantifiable, and we do believe our connection to those we love extends beyond death. But we have no desire to make our view a dogma. We offer our insights with respect for intellectual freedom and in the hope that they can be helpful personally and collectively in our encounters with death.

Acceptance of death as part of the natural cycle can be a healthy counterbalance to our present-day combination of denial and obsession. Modern Western culture hides death away in hospital rooms, isolating the dying. We undertake tortuous and heroic measures to prolong the last physical signs of life, without considering the whole wellbeing of the dying person. Although recent years have made us more conscious of the rights of the dying to refuse painful, last-ditch interventions, heroic measures are still the norm. Helping the terminally ill to consciously end their lives is a crime, while denying health care to the living is seen as sound fiscal practice.

At the same time as we fear and deny death, we are obsessed with violence. Who could begin to compile the body count from our movies and television shows? Daily we watch people stabbed, shot, blown up, and burned—often at the hands of those who claim to love them—or vaporized by space aliens. The children who grow up watching this fare fear that their schoolfellows are packing weapons in their book bags. Our young men, and even our young women, can be shipped off to fight electronic wars that seem like video games as long as the blood and stench and suffering are far away.

Our disconnection from the cycles of birth, death, decay, and regeneration runs through every aspect of our society. We have forgotten the connection between decay and fertility. Our agriculture substitutes quick-fix fertilizers for compost, mulch, and manure, thereby impoverishing the soil and polluting our waters. Our technology creates products with no thought of how they will end their useful life and be returned to the cycle of the elements. We make plastic bags of a nearly eternal substance in order to carry a lettuce on a twenty-minute trip from the grocery store to home. We create a whole nuclear industry before we have solved the problem of what to do with its wastes. Our landfills are overflowing and toxic-waste sites dot the land, because we behave as if death and decay were anomalies instead of integral parts of every activity.

Acceptance of death as part of the cycle of life has both personal and social implications. Imagine if we truly understood that decay is the matrix of fertility, if we designed our products with that truth in mind, as nature does, if everything we manufactured were recyclable or could, in its breakdown, feed something else. Our landfills would empty and our true collective wealth would increase. Our cemeteries might become orchards. We might view our own aging with less fear and distaste, and greet death with sadness, certainly, but without terror.

The cycle of birth, growth, death, decay, and regeneration is the core of Pagan thealogy—from Thea, Goddess, rather than Theos, God. Pagan, a word that comes from the Latin root Paganus, means country dweller. Pagans, who lived close to the land, held on to their ancient understandings of life and death long after Christianity had seemingly converted all of Europe. Pagan has been used as a pejorative term for centuries, but today throughout the Americas and Europe many people are proudly reclaiming the term as we both reclaim the insights and understandings of our ancestors and adapt them to a new time.

To Pagans, as to indigenous cultures worldwide, nature is sacred—that is, from nature we draw our inspiration, our teachings, and our deepest sense of connection. Nature has an inherent value that supersedes human convenience or profit, and the balance of nature cannot be ethically sacrificed to human ends. Our Goddesses and Gods are immanent: embodied in the living processes of nature and human culture. Or perhaps we might more accurately say that our deities are themselves embodiments of the complex interrelationships and cycles of the natural world.

Today scientists such as James Lovelock propose what they call the Gaia Hypothesis—the theory that the earth functions like a living, self-regulating organism. This theory is not news to Pagans (or to any other indigenous culture on the planet). We see the earth as a living being, and all of life as interconnected. The networks of microscopic fungi that inhabit the roots of the great redwoods feed those giants. The great forests of the West Coast create the rains that fall inland. The pollution of a small stream in the Rockies eventually flows into the ocean and then circles the globe.

To Pagans, all life is imbued with consciousness and all living beings are constantly communicating. The consciousness of a tree may be different from yours or mine; indeed, unless it is a very large and old tree, it may be less the consciousness of this individual seedling oak and more the consciousness of oakness—a group or collective sense of being. But awareness, presence, is still there—in a tree, even in a rock or a mountain. When birds sing and dogs bark, we can hear their communication. Although trees communicate less perceptibly—perhaps chemically or energetically, certainly in ways that are harder to define—we can train our ears to hear and learn ways to speak back.

Indeed, Pagans know that conversation is not only possible but necessary and desirable. We see human beings as part of nature, with our own tasks to perform and role to play in the balance. We need to talk to trees for our own health and connection and well-being; and trees likewise need and want to talk to us, just as they need to communicate with insects, birds, mycorrhizal fungi, and soil bacteria. Humans are not the pinnacle and ultimate justification for the universe, nor are we doomed to be a blight on the planet, inevitably destroying what we touch. The terrible imbalances of present-day culture are an anomaly in the million-year human heritage, and we have both the capability and the moral responsibility to bring our way of life back into balance. Only by understanding the cycles of birth, growth, death, and rebirth can that balance be achieved.

Pagan spirituality is centered in community. While many of our practices further personal growth and healing, our goals are centered not so much on individual salvation or enlightenment as on communal health and balance. Individuals need the love, support, and challenge offered by a strong community in order to survive and thrive. We meet for ritual in small groups, circles, or covens, the members of which develop intimate bonds and deep connections with each other. Today we also often gather in larger groups for seasonal rituals or festivals. Our definition of community includes the animals, plants, rocks, trees, and waters that surround us, the broader human community around the globe, those who have come before us, and those who will come after us. Death does not sever community.

We hope this book will help to strengthen and empower our communities. Hillary Rodham Clinton popularized the African proverb It takes a village to raise a child. We might paraphrase that to It takes a whole community to get through a death. Only the love and support of those around us can help us let go of life when our time comes, or weather the pain of bereavement when someone we love dies.

However we define our thealogy and whatever images we use to clothe the Sacred, we recognize that the ultimate heart of the world is mystery. The great powers of life and death can never be wholly known, defined, or controlled. We can approach them with awe and wonder, we can increase our own knowledge and wisdom without limits, but we will never know all. Acknowledging the mystery lets us approach the world with wonder and humility, with caution to limit our errors, and with a sense of joy and liberation.

Goddess and Goddess Tradition

Goddess is the word we use as shorthand for the great cycles of birth, growth, death, and rebirth or the heart of mystery. When we speak of the Goddess, we often mean that life, that consciousness, which underlies the living being which is the earth, and who is herself a cell in that great living being who is the cosmos.

We also use the word Goddess, however, to refer to various aspects of that life-force that have taken on particular attributes, faces, and personalities: Demeter, the Greek Goddess of grain and agriculture, for example, or Kali, the Hindu Great Goddess of birth, life, and death. There are thousands of Goddesses from cultures all over the world, as well as thousands of Gods—male deities who also embody the cycles of life, death, and regeneration.

Goddess tradition refers to the many branches of Paganism that hold as central a focus on the Goddess as the embodiment of the cycles of birth, growth, death, and rebirth. Goddess-based spirituality includes men, although some groups and some traditions within the larger movement may be for women only or focus exclusively on female deities. Men, too, may choose to create ritual with other men, and great power and healing can come from women’s and men’s mysteries.

We of the Reclaiming tradition honor many Gods, many male images of deity. But our emphasis is on the imagery of the female, the life-bearer, because we value life itself as the domain of the sacred. We do not elevate spirit above matter; we hold that spirit is immanent in matter, in the physical, material world. This emphasis on the world itself as the body of the divine affects our view of death, karma, and rebirth, as you will see.

We also feel that at this time in history an emphasis on the female is necessary to counterbalance millennia of male domination in the spiritual as well as the material realm. Don’t we need balance? people sometimes ask. Why not a neutral term rather than either ‘God’ or ‘Goddess’?

Our imaginations are conditioned to read neutral as male. In theory God is a neutral term—yet how many of us can use it without subconsciously thinking of a man with a long white beard? Perhaps our children, or their children, will not suffer the same constraints of the imagination, but that transformation lies in the future.

Balance is not stasis, but movement. Think of a seesaw. If one end is down on the ground, you cannot bring it into balance by standing in the center. You must put a weight on the opposite side. The term Goddess does this. In time, when the arms of the seesaw are truly balanced, neutral language may work well, but twenty-five years of a feminist spirituality movement cannot counterbalance many ages of patriarchy, especially when male domination is still the rule globally.

In compiling the chants and prayers in this book, we have tried to strike a balance between female and male imagery. We encourage you to rework the material here, if necessary, so that its imagery fits your own beliefs.

Witch and Witchcraft are misunderstood terms that we proudly reclaim, both in these pages and in the Pagan community. While the popular understanding of Witchcraft often includes either devil worship or the wielding of supernatural powers, we know that the term has a more ancient and honorable history. It derives from the Anglo-Saxon root wic, meaning to bend or twist; it is related to willow, a sacred tree much used for its flexible withes in basketry and building. Witches were those who could bend or twist fate, who could weave new possibilities, who used willow bark (from which aspirin is now derived) and other herbs in healing, who preserved the communal knowledge of the properties and uses of plants, who kept the old earth-based way long after most of European culture was at least nominally Christian.

Today the word Witch is generally used for a woman or man who follows an initiatory Pagan tradition with the Goddess at center, for a priestess or priest who has made a deep personal commitment to their earth-based spiritual path. We have no separate word for male Witches.

Throughout this book, we will use the terms Goddess tradition and Paganism roughly interchangeably. When we describe our thealogy, practices, and beliefs, readers should be aware that nobody can speak for the entire Pagan community. We interpret the Goddess tradition through the lens of Reclaiming’s perspective, and further, through our own individual insights and intuitions. We encourage everyone who uses this book to adapt and change its elements as needed to fit your own values.

This book is not the place for a full history of the Goddess tradition or for a comprehensive survey of its current revival, but a little background information may prove helpful.

A Short History of the Goddess Tradition

While earth-based spirituality lies at the root of religions and cultures worldwide, most people who identify as contemporary Pagans trace their roots back to the indigenous earth-based traditions of Europe and the Middle East. The earliest images of Goddesses—indeed, the earliest artwork of any kind, are found in the Paleolithic big-bellied, full-breasted, wide-hipped figures found from the Ukraine to the caves of southern France and dating back more than twenty-five thousand years. Iconographically, they are closely related to the many thousands of Goddess figures found in the sites of what archaeologist Marija Gimbutas terms Old Europe, an area encompassing Anatolia (Turkey), Greece, the Balkans, and westward to Iberia (Spain and Portugal) and the British Isles; stretching eastward and south into Egypt, ancient Canaan and Mesopotamia; and extending in time from the seventh through (in places) the third millennium before the common era. This ancient civilization was a mosaic of village cultures that were roughly egalitarian, peaceable, and creative. Agriculture, pottery-making, architecture, writing, and mathematics all were born in this time. Religious imagery focused on the cycles of life and death, on food, fertility, and sexuality as images of the sacred.

Archaeologists may argue about this picture, but for contemporary Goddess worshipers what is important is that it presents a model of a cooperative, peaceful, and innovative society lying hidden at the roots of European culture. Knowing that such societies are possible, we need not accept war and domination as inevitable. To identify with the Goddess is to consciously choose cooperation over domination, peace over war, freedom over systems of control.

Goddess traditions today do not claim an unbroken lineage going back to the Stone Age. Rather, we say that the same symbols that moved people then speak to us today, that the same cycle of birth, growth, and death honored in Old Europe and among indigenous cultures worldwide can inspire us today to create, to change, to face life’s powerful moments of challenge and transformation, and at the end of life, to accept and honor death.

Beginning in roughly the fourth millennium and continuing over a period of several thousand years, Old Europe was challenged by the emergence of a new, warlike culture characterized by reverence for male gods, mythologies of conquest and domination, fascination with weaponry and battle, and hierarchies of power—in particular, male domination over women. Most historic religious traditions of Europe, the Middle East, and India date from this period of transition or later and contain within them a mixture of elements, strands of the older tradition that reverenced the cycles of life interwoven with myths of battle and domination.

In Europe, the old ways lingered on as folktales and customs, traditions of healing and magic, the domain of the Witches. When Christianity began to spread, it at first coexisted with the Old Religion, much as in Latin America today the church is often the site of processions and celebrations that remain from precolonial times. Every village had its Witch—its herb woman or cunning man—who served the ordinary people who had no access to doctors. In fact, the herbal healing techniques were probably preferable to the medical science of the time, which depended heavily on astrology, bleeding, and reference to Greek philosophers rather than empirical science.

But beginning with the Crusades against heretics and peaking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries C.E. (common era), the institutional church, under a variety of pressures and challenges to its power and authority, unleashed a persecution directed at traditional healers and all the remnants of the Old Religion. Women, primarily but not exclusively, were its victims. Estimates range from hundreds of thousands to millions who lost their lives over the roughly four hundred years of the Burning Times. Anyone could be accused of Witchcraft, and once someone was accused, the victim’s denial of wrongdoing was read as refusal to repent. People were tortured into false confessions and forced to name others as accomplices, and so the accusations spread.

This period left a legacy of fear and horror around the word Witch and the dynamic, evolving worldview held by the traditional healers. The Old Religion was forced into a period of secrecy, which also contributed to people’s false ideas about what Witchcraft represents. Only in this century have Witches felt safe enough to come out of the broom closet and resume the open practice and development of our tradition.

In the 1940s, a retired British civil servant named Gerald Broussard Gardner discovered a coven of Witches in the New Forest area of England, and he began practicing and later writing about and teaching the tradition. The Craft grew in a small way throughout the sixties, when many people were searching for nontraditional spiritual forms. Beginning in the seventies, many women were drawn to Paganism as an alternative to the male domination in the major religions as well as many of their wilder offshoots. The eighties saw a new influx of both women and men involved in environmental and peace issues who were drawn to a spirituality that puts the earth at the center. Today, in the nineties, the Goddess tradition is continuing to grow organically and widely, and Pagans are increasingly open and vocal about who we are and what we stand for.

The Reclaiming Tradition

This book on death and dying has emerged from a community that practices the Reclaiming tradition of the Craft. The Reclaiming tradition began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as a small collective teaching the Goddess tradition and creating public rituals that linked our spirituality with our political awareness. Today we have grown into a distinct tradition of the Craft with sister communities throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and El Salvador. Our Wiccan roots are in the Feri tradition as taught by Victor and Cora Anderson, but our practice encompasses many, many sources, including direct inspiration. Our political roots are in feminism, nonviolence, peace, justice, and environmental and gay rights activism. Starhawk has been one of the major voices of our tradition, and many people have been attracted to that tradition through her writings. But she is not the author of the tradition; rather, her work emerges from a living, evolving community of many creative minds and visions.

The Reclaiming tradition resists the tendency of our culture to elevate gurus and create spiritual celebrities. One of our core values is that each individual is her or his own spiritual authority. That authority extends to the most basic and intimate decisions about our bodies, about our own unique encounters with the forces of life and death. As friends, as lovers, as partners, as family, as community, we have the right, the ability, and the responsibility to help one another through the dying process, to care for our own dead, to comfort and support the bereaved. This book can be a guide, but we fully hope and expect that every suggestion, every prayer, and every instruction will be weighed by each reader against an internal sense of what is right for that individual.

In a book about death, questions of ancestry are necessarily relevant. Reclaiming’s tradition draws particularly from the ancient Goddess traditions of Europe and the Middle East, especially the pre-Celtic peoples of the British Isles.

Reclaiming’s style of ritual has also been strongly influenced by the vibrant diversity of the San Francisco Bay Area, by the wealth of spiritual traditions in which we were raised or which we have studied, and by the land itself and the living wisdom of its first peoples. We would be arrogant and stupid not to learn from the wealth of spiritual traditions that surround us—but we would be liars if we set ourselves up as authorities on any of them.

Because of the legacy of the Witch persecutions, people of European ancestry are often unaware of the rich tradition of earth-honoring spirituality in that heritage. The hungry take food where they find it, and often that has meant drawing on cultures and traditions that are not one’s own, that seem more earthy, more whole, or more exotic.

Indigenous people are raising the issue of cultural appropriation, and rightfully do not want to see their spiritual teachings mined for nuggets of salable insights or misrepresented for profit by those who have no true authority. Too often spiritual teachers and traditions are unclear about the origins of their ceremonies and the source of their authority. Cultural traditions are often taken out of context and stripped of their meaning, or used to make profits for those who are not part of the culture the traditions come from. European religions and culture have dominated and suppressed many indigenous traditions. Can we wonder that there is resistance to the wholesale use of native imagery, symbols, mythologies, and ceremonies? It is as if the invaders had confiscated the house, wrecked it as fast as they could, and then demanded to be freely given all of Grandmother’s finest jewelry.

To approach another tradition with integrity, we need a sense of our own roots and a willingness to become involved in the real-life struggles of people for land, for the preservation of culture, sometimes even for simple human survival. When we can meet other traditions not with romanticism or patronizing charity but with the friendship of equals, the possibility of fruitful interchange exists.

As a Euro-based tradition, we must own both sides of our inheritance. We, too, were suppressed by the Europeans—but we are them! And whatever ancestry we claim, all of us are the descendants of both victims and victimizers. We cannot redress all the injustice of the past, but we do offer the material in this book, and we do so to all people regardless of your roots, your background, your gender identification or sexual orientation, and your beliefs about Paganism. In addition, we encourage you also to seek out and incorporate the traditions of your people, to find the prayers, the songs, the food, and the offerings that will make your ancestors feel at home.

Whatever our roots, we recognize that our era is one of great cultural contact and interchange. The Reclaiming community includes ancestors from Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the native peoples of this continent—in short, from around the globe—as well as from all the varying cultures associated with differences of class, religion, sexual orientation, and place. Any real spirituality must take root in the place in which it is practiced, and it is inevitably influenced by the traditions around it.

With other traditions of the Craft, Reclaiming shares a focus on the Goddess as the wheel of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. Life and the elements that sustain it—air, fire, water, and earth—are sacred, along with human creativity and sexuality in its diverse expressions, passion, and freedom. Because what is sacred must not be exploited or despoiled, the Reclaiming tradition sees action in the world in the service of the earth as one of the core expressions of our spirituality. But that action comes out of a deep understanding and disciplined practice of magic—in Dion Fortune’s terms, the art of changing consciousness at will, a definition that might also serve for a politics that aims at transforming the power relations of both individuals and society. Perhaps what most defines our tradition is that we see magical practice, social action, and personal healing as three legs of a tripod that must each be strong for the community to be in balance.

Death is a highly political subject, and certainly this book reflects our views, both directly and in our choice of material. You will notice, for example, that we do not have rituals for the military and we do include rituals for abortion. Nevertheless, we would rejoice if opponents of abortion drew comfort from this book when faced with death, and would heartily bless any person in the military who drew on this material to create her or his own rituals.

Our tradition highly values egalitarianism. Each individual is a living embodiment of the sacred. We work in nonhierarchical structures, and our rituals are usually designed for maximum participation. The rituals in this book are written with the underlying assumption that we are each the ultimate expert on our own death, and we are all capable of healing, comforting, guiding, and blessing one another, of creating our own rituals and being our own priestesses and priests. At times of grief and crisis, however, we need to be taken care of, to have others create and lead ritual for us.

Because freedom of thought is important to us, we accept no dogmas and implement no required beliefs. We do, however, have a working model of the universe that includes interconnected realms of matter and spirit. This worldview underlies all we say and do about death. But we offer it to you in the spirit of an evolving hypothesis. Test it against your own experience, and change or revise