Everyone knows that death is part of life, but most of us are taught not to think about it. In Western culture, dying people are often cared for in institutions, we use softer words like 'loss,' and we expect doctors to do everything possible to prevent death. This avoidance weakens our understanding of death as a guide to living, which is the central argument of this essay.
Shamanic and other spiritual traditions believe that ignoring death is a mistake because it can make things more difficult for both the dying and those left behind, and it can also take away from the meaning of life. People who accept their own mortality often live with more presence, freedom, and a clearer sense of what matters. The phrase 'memento mori' means 'remember you will die.' It is not meant to be depressing, but to help us live more fully.
Death in the Shamanic Worldview
For shamans, death is a transformation rather than an ending. The body stops, but the soul goes on. This belief is more than just faith for them: many practitioners say they have experienced new states of awareness, met the recently dead in the spirit world, or been with people as they near death.
Shamans believe the universe is filled with souls at different stages: people living now, ancestors in the spirit world, the recently dead in between, and the unborn waiting to arrive. Death is seen as a crossing, not a barrier. The soul continues, but where it goes and what it becomes depends on the tradition, the practices, and the soul’s growth.
If you want to try this for yourself, here is a simple visualisation: Sit comfortably with your feet on the ground and close your eyes. Imagine a point of light just below your feet. This is the Earth Star chakra. Let your awareness move downward, connecting that point with the deep, steady presence of the earth. Notice a sense of rootedness and strength rising up to support you. Then, focus above the crown of your head on a point of light called the Soul Star chakra. Feel its gentle brightness, as if you are opening to something larger than your own story, connecting to guidance, purpose, or a sense of belonging to something lasting. For a moment, picture yourself held between these two points—the roots below and the light above—and simply notice what you feel. You can return to this short practice whenever you want to feel steady and connected through the changes of life and death.
In many shamanic traditions, the shaman has a special role related to death called psychopomp work. The word comes from the Greek 'psychopompos,' meaning 'conductor of souls.' The psychopomp helps guide the newly dead across the threshold, supporting souls who are confused or stuck in the Middle World because they are too attached to their old life. This work is both practical and compassionate: souls who are stuck may disturb the living, are not at peace themselves, and their loved ones cannot fully grieve or let go.
Hermes, the Psychopomp from Greek mythology, is a well-known example of this role. He was a divine messenger who could move between worlds and guide the souls of the dead to where they needed to go. Many cultures have figures similar to Anubis in Egypt, the Valkyries in Norse mythology, the bodhisattva Ksitigarbha in Buddhism, and Azrael in Islamic stories. Each culture recognises that death is a crossing the soul may not make alone. The specific techniques and ethics of this work, as well as the practitioner’s relationship to mortality, are further explored in a separate piece on psychopomp work.
Scottish Death Traditions: A Threshold Held Close to Home
Scotland’s death traditions are among the richest in these islands, and they show that death can be kept close rather than pushed away. For generations, people in the Highlands and Western Isles did not keep death at a distance. Instead, they kept it close, spoke openly about it, and shared it among the living.
The caoineadh, or keening, was a formal vocal lament for the dead, usually led by women who gave voice to grief. It was not quiet weeping, but a structured, often improvised cry that named the dead, remembered their life, and allowed the whole community to grieve together instead of alone. The wake that followed kept both the body and the community together. Neighbours would sit through the night with the dead, sharing food, stories, and sometimes games, refusing the silence that often comes with institutional death today.
If you ever walk alone by a quiet stream or ford in the Highlands, watch for the bean-nighe. This 'washerwoman' or 'washer at the ford' is one of Scotland’s most well-known death omens: a solitary woman, often described as strange or unsettling, seen washing the bloodstained grave clothes of someone who will soon die. She is one of Scotland’s fairy women, related to the Irish bean sídhe, whose name became the English word banshee. Tradition says that if you see her first, rather than her seeing you, you keep some power in the meeting, and she may answer three honest questions if you catch and hold her.
All of these traditions come together most strongly at Samhainn (Oidhche Shamhna). As the Wheel of the Year reference notes, people believed the dead, Na Mairbh, returned at this time, with a place set for them at the table and stories of family ancestors told by the fire. The Yew, described in the Plants & Trees reference as Scotland’s ancestor tree and a gateway between the living and the dead, is also part of this night. It is no accident that yews stand in many of Britain’s oldest churchyards, sometimes older than the churches themselves. A fuller discussion of keening, the wake, and the bean-nighe as a psychopomp figure will come in a separate piece. For now, it is enough to know that this is not a borrowed tradition. It is one Scotland already has, fully formed and close to home.
The Art of Dying
Great spiritual traditions have developed detailed teachings on how to die well because they treat preparing for death as a practice rather than an afterthought. Death is seen as a threshold that requires readiness, so these teachings are meant to help us approach it with intention.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the Bardo Thodol, known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is a guide to the experiences of consciousness in the bardo, the state between death and rebirth. Traditionally, it was read aloud to the dying person and then to the deceased, to guide consciousness through the visions that arise after death. The idea is that how we die matters: the quality of consciousness at the moment of death shapes the transition, and a mind trained through practice is more likely to recognise the clear light of reality that the Tibetan tradition says appears at death, and to reach liberation in that moment.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead serves a similar purpose. It contains spells, prayers, and instructions to guide the soul through the trials of the Duat, the underworld, to the Hall of Ma’at, where the heart is weighed against the feather of truth, and finally to the Field of Reeds, the Egyptian paradise. The book was not read to the dying but prepared in advance as a personalised guide, buried with the body to help the soul on its journey. The aromatic resins burned and used in embalming during this preparation, the sacred smoke of the ancient world, are explored in more detail elsewhere in this series for anyone interested in that topic.
In the Western Christian tradition, the ars moriendi, the art of dying, was a genre of practical and devotional texts developed in the fifteenth century to guide both the dying and those who attended them. They addressed the temptations that might arise at the deathbed: despair, impatience, attachment to worldly things, and the spiritual resources available to meet them.
These traditions hold that death is not just something to endure, but something we can approach with preparation, intention, and even readiness. The dying person is not passive; they are taking part in one of the most important acts of their life. Taken together, these traditions show that facing death well is part of living well.
Supporting the Threshold: A Simple Practice
Most of us will, at some point, sit with someone who is dying, and many of us won’t know what to do to help. Spiritual teacher William Bloom has written about this, offering a simple three-part practice for anyone—not just trained professionals—who wants to make that crossing easier rather than just endure it.
The practice begins by staying calm and warm in your own body, because a frightened or grieving helper can pass that fear or grief to the dying person, even if they try to hide it. Once you feel settled, think of whatever has connected you to something bigger and kinder than everyday life, such as nature, music, prayer, meditation, or love. Let that feeling fill your body, not just your mind. Then, holding onto that warmth and connection, extend it to include your companion, gently sensing them as they move through this time, without forcing or rushing anything.
This work is not dramatic and does not require any special beliefs. It only asks for presence: a calm body rather than a tense one, and a willingness to stay rather than turn away. A frightened, tense helper cannot offer much, but a warm, grounded one can offer everything that truly matters. The same is true, gently, even after someone has died, if things feel unfinished.
A peaceful, quiet, and comforting room helps with this practice, as does the steady presence of people the dying person trusts, such as family, friends, or trained companions like soul midwives and death doulas. These are now recognised, though still small, fields of end-of-life support in Britain. Emotional completion also helps: having the chance to say what needs to be said, to forgive and be forgiven, and to hear clearly that it is alright to let go. Often, anxiety at the threshold is really unfinished business disguised as fear.
The Modern Death-Positive Movement
A new conversation about death is happening in the contemporary world: in the hospice movement, in the emerging field of death education, in the death café movement (informal gatherings in which people meet to talk about death over tea and cake), and in the work of practitioners who call themselves death doulas, soul midwives, or end-of-life guides.
This is partly about reclaiming something. For most of history, death was a community event. People died at home, surrounded by family and neighbours. The community, not professionals, prepared the body for burial, and grief was shared openly through rituals. The medicalisation of death in the twentieth century brought real benefits, such as better pain management and longer life, but also real losses: the closeness, presence, and community support that once surrounded dying. Part of what has been lost is what this essay aims to name.
Death doulas are attempting to restore some of this. Working alongside the dying person and their families, they offer emotional and spiritual support, help with practical preparation, facilitate conversations that might otherwise be avoided, and are present during the dying process in ways that medical professionals often cannot be. Some come from nursing or social work backgrounds; some from spiritual or shamanic practice; many from their own experiences of bereavement that sent them toward this work.
Grief as Sacred Territory
Grief is love with nowhere to go, but in the modern West, we often treat grief as a problem to solve—something to get through quickly, a wound to close rather than a place to spend time in. This approach misses the deeper meaning of grief and even misunderstands its most famous source. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose work on denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance gave us the idea of 'stages,' spent much of her later career pushing back against the idea that grief is a simple, linear process. She described these states as recurring, overlapping, and sometimes happening at the same time, never as a checklist to finish before moving on.
I can speak to this from my own experience. When my mother was in the final stages of stage four breast cancer, On Death and Dying brought real comfort to both of us—not because it gave us a checklist, but because it put words to what we were each feeling, both together and apart, making things bearable instead of confusing. My mother and I were very close, and that closeness can make a terminal illness even harder: there is more to lose, what is left unsaid feels more urgent, and the urge to protect each other from the full truth can get in the way of the honesty that actually helps. Having a real map, instead of a neat one, let both of us be where we truly were, not where we thought we should be.
Shamanic and depth-psychology traditions offer a broader perspective. In these traditions, grief is not a disorder but a process—a natural and necessary response to loss that has its own wisdom and timing. Trying to cut it short or hide it does not make it go away; it just pushes it underground, where it keeps working in less visible and more difficult ways.
Grief that is fully expressed—cried, spoken, raged, sung, danced, witnessed, and honoured—is grief that can move and change. This kind of grief can transform us, not by erasing loss, but by helping us carry the memory of the loved one into our lives in a way that enriches us instead of only hurting us. (If you want to explore this through scent, the emotional aromatherapy article on this site covers Rose, Frankincense, and other oils used to support grief in detail; this essay focuses on the broader practice, not that specific tool.)
In many traditional cultures, grief is something the whole community shares. The entire village mourns together; some people are chosen to hold space for everyone’s grief, and there are rituals, timelines, and ceremonies that give structure to feelings that might otherwise be overwhelming. Scotland’s keening tradition, mentioned earlier, did just this. The person who is grieving is not expected to do it alone, to get back to normal quickly, or to be grateful for the time they had instead of feeling angry about what was lost.
We are slowly relearning this wisdom. Grief circles, death rituals, and ancestral ceremonies—these practices of intentional group mourning—are returning to modern life because the need for them is still here. The usual cultural response of pretending grief is not there, getting over it, or just looking on the bright side has clearly not helped us. As we recover these practices, we also find a new way to understand what the dying can teach the living.
What the Dying Teach the Living
There is a unique gift that being close to death can bring: clarity. People who receive a terminal diagnosis often talk about a complete shift in what matters to them. Old habits and obligations fall away, and what truly matters becomes clear: relationships, beauty, and the present moment. Not just the idea of these things, but their real presence in everyday life. This is one reason why thinking about death can help us understand how to live.
This kind of letting go often starts long before any diagnosis. Carl Jung wrote about the 'afternoon of life,' a later stage when the things that shaped the first half—like building a place in the world or forming an identity through roles and achievements—start to matter less, and something quieter asks for attention. Retirement, ageing, illness, and everyday losses can all open this threshold before the final one comes. Meeting these changes with honesty, instead of resisting them, is its own kind of practice for the bigger transition ahead.
This is what thinking about death can give us, even if we never receive a diagnosis. The Stoic practice of memento mori, Buddhist meditation on impermanence, and shamanic work with ancestors are all ways of remembering what is real. They remind us that this moment is all we have, that the people we love will die, and that we will too. When we carry this knowledge gently and honestly, it is not a burden but a kind of freedom. From this remembering, life becomes richer and more fully lived.
Not every tradition agrees on what, if anything, happens after death, and it is important to be honest about that. The existentialist view is that death is simply the end of experience, with nothing beyond it. But even this view does not diminish the value of memento mori. Knowing the end is real and unavoidable is what gives the present moment its meaning. The traditions in this essay differ on what comes after death, but they all agree, spiritual and secular alike, that facing death honestly changes how we live before it.
Death is a great teacher. Its lesson, for those willing to listen, is simple: be present. Be here now. Be here fully. More than anything else, this is what you will wish you had done.
This is the opening essay in the Aether section’s Death, Dying & Soul Transition series. Future pieces will explore psychopomp work, Scottish keening and waking traditions in detail, grief as a dedicated spiritual practice, the death-positive movement, and preparing for one’s own death with intention. For the sensory work of grief, see Aromatherapy for Emotional Wellbeing elsewhere in the Aether series.