Wrapped in flowers, surrounded by loved ones, soaked in tears – death, for humans, carries the grandness of grief, brought to life by the power of love. Love cannot exist without loss. Looking at nature we see how loss is woven into the fabric of life. The death archetype is embedded in every seed that finds its way into soil, in every sprout that finds its way toward the sun. Life is never without it. Death is not just an ending, but a prerequisite to existence.
Why We Need the Death Archetype
Destructive, dangerous, fierce, ferocious, mysterious, metamorphic, lamenting, and liberating, the death archetype is intense and necessary. We are fascinated with it. And our imagination goes wild in our search to make meaning with it. When we think of death as an end, we find ourselves frozen with fear. Fight, flight, or freeze, are the nervous system’s responses to the threat of it. Animals are programmed to try to avoid it. Our fear of death has led humans to create mythic maps and tell stories that help us cope with the immensity of it. The death archetype helps us make a meaningful relationship with the inevitable.
The Archetype of Endings and the Fear of Change
As I began to write this, my mind wandered into the chaos of our times, into the apocalyptic stories woven with the thread of social, political, financial, and technological upheaval. Everything is changing. Structures are collapsing. I couldn’t help but wonder if there’s even a point for me to keep writing this piece. With AI taking over so much of the creative realm, is there a point for me to keep doing my work? What is left for the human voice in this shifting paradigm? And then I wondered, as I often do, if this worry is the shadow of my own fear of change – the very pulse of the death archetype itself.
The shadow of death looms over everything on the journey of life. It’s not just that which awaits us at the end of life itself. The death archetype is present in all the transformations we go through, in all the changes we undergo. Our identity, our relationships, our careers, the stage of life we’re in, our children’s childhood, who we thought we would be, our dreams, our goals. Nothing lasts. Everything shifts. There’s an end to everything. There’s renewal that comes through every death.
Between European Grim Reaper and Mexican Santa Muerte, Pre-Greek Hecate and Indian Kali, Celtic Morrigan and Sumerian Inanna, Hebrew Samael and Norse Hel, mythology of death from around the world has woven together cultures and their relationship with death.
The beauty of death as an archetype is that it helps us process our fear of death. It personifies the presence of something so scary and inevitable. It stands in the threshold of every new beginning. It offers an imaginative, mythic quality to something that fills us with concern and discomfort, worry and pain. Impermanence is life itself. The death archetype gives us access to acceptance. It unlocks grief’s threat by turning it into a ritual. It revolutionizes how we organize and assemble our lives by teaching us the art of release.
Death as Threshold – What We Lose to Be Reborn
Change is what the universe IS. Nothing exists without destruction, dissolution, and reinvention. Even that which is stuck, rigid, and ossified, becomes brittle and then breaks, which then gives way for something new to rise.
Mythically, there’s a threshold between death and rebirth; a liminality and a boundary. The gates of the underworld. The River Styx. The Veil between the worlds. There are gatekeepers such as Cerberus from Greek Mythology, Anubis from Ancient Egypt, and Neti from Sumerian myths.
Looking into the magic of the cosmos, we see that there’s less of a space between an ending and a new beginning. Death and life are on a continuum. The universe banged itself into being, and by destroying its previous condition of wholeness, it created (and continues to create) new forms. Things break and rejoin in new ways. It’s hard to tell where something ends and another begins.
Life’s cycles of death and rebirth are not linear. It’s not that as soon as you let something go, a new thing is born. And sometimes it’s the birth of something that causes something else to die. The tapestry of creation is woven with threads of decay, untethered threads, pieces that fell off but can never be separate from the whole.
When The Veil Thins: The Sacred Season of Decay
When mid-Fall arrives, the mysteries of death dance in the shadows of a darkening season. The nights lengthen and the last fruit falls to the ground. The leaves finish their color metamorphosis, and drop off the trees. The world spins with nature’s tales of death and decay, and human imagination is haunted with ghosts.
Ancient cultures embraced this time in the cycle of the seasons, and celebrated the dreary, the gloomy, and the dead, giving mortality an altar in the temple of the year. For Pagans in Pre-Christian Europe, this time of year was celebrated as New Year’s. Samhain is the Pagan holiday that marked the end and the new beginning, death and rebirth, darkness as that which holds the spark of renewal, the tomb as the womb.
Samhain is the origin of Halloween, and is celebrated on October 31st and on November 1st, when Mexican culture celebrates Dio De Los Muertos – Day of the Dead – when altars are crafted to remember and honor the deceased.
They say that the veil between the worlds thins, that the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead is more permeable, and that spirits are more likely to be seen during this time of year. This is the season of the ancestors; a time for going down into the roots. Leaves and decaying fruit fall and nourish the roots of the trees. Humans remember their ancestral roots. Soups with root vegetables are cooked in cauldrons. The world darkens and guides us down into the underworld.
Death Myths and the Soul’s Journey Through Time
The collective soul of humanity travels through the landscapes of mythology, with which it shapes up reality. Humans need mythology, as it offers ideas for us to gather around, to build community and culture. It takes us into the unconscious, where memory, imagination, creativity, fears, desires, and innovation mingle and rise from. It invites us to interpret the stories we’re told and the stories we tell, and decide which lenses to view the world through.
The spirit of each of us undergoes journeys of death and rebirth, endings and new beginnings, rising and falling, becoming and unbecoming. Death myths are often also rebirth myths. Death symbolism is a strong motif that appears everywhere; in stories, in relationships, in art, in politics, in movies, in music, and in living life.
Myths about descent to the underworld, about journeys of loss and reclamation, about the process of decomposition and resurrection, saturated the ancient world. Many of them are being reclaimed now, because the soulfulness of humans is anchored in a meaning making process, and the need to understand and to weave ourselves in cyclical ways, is profound.
Persephone and the Descent Into the Dark
There are so many layers to the story of Persephone, so many threads of death and rebirth to pick from, and weave meaning with.
The myth of Persephone comes to explain and to symbolize the cycle of the seasons. Demeter is Mother Earth. When she loses her daughter she is enraged. Her grief sends the world into disarray. She pulls herself away from nourishing the growth of the crops. She lets everything die and return to the soil, just as nature does in Fall and Winter. When the Maiden of Spring reunites with her mother, the world begins to bud and to bloom again. Color and beauty returns to the land, and the grain begins to grow again.
Persepshone and her mother, Demeter, undergo a transformative journey. Demeter’s loss – her daughter’s disappearance into the underworld – is the story of a daughter’s separation from the mother, which is necessary and difficult, healthy and painful, important and full of grief.
Like every young woman, part of Persephone’s journey is to rebel, to question who she was told she was, to let go of old ways, and to recreate herself. So we can question the way that she is presented in the story; a damsel in distress, abducted by the horrible Hades, God of Death. When I look at the story, I see a young woman falling madly in love with a hot as hell bad boy, who takes her to the coolest, darkest, dingiest underground clubs. She takes off the flowery dress and puts on some chains and leather. She is scared, sure, and she misses her mother, of course, but she is also in the midst of the most exciting revolution of her own persona.
Persephone loses her identity, sheds who she was – the maiden of Spring – and becomes who she is – the Queen of the Underworld. She goes through a metamorphosis. She untangles from her innocence and roots herself in her power. This is the story of a woman’s recognition of her strength and capabilities, and her process of embracing her potential and building who she is.
Kali, Hel, and the Feminine Faces of the Death Archetype
The goddess of death mythology shows up in ancient cultures from all over the world. The dark feminine is often the symbol of the underworld, playing the role of the transformation archetype, waiting for us in the shadows, pushing us to reclaim our power.
Kali and the Dark Feminine Power of Transformation Through Integration
Kali’s ferocity is the call to enter the deep layers of our soul. In the stories, she’s a demon slayer. Spiritual teachers often present her as the killer of the ego. Personally, I don’t subscribe to the idea that our ego needs to die, and I don’t believe that it’s possible. There’s no one more narcissistic than the guru who claims that their ego is dead. We need our ego. We just need to keep it in check. And there’s no way to keep it in check if we deny it.
With her lolling tongue she sips the toxic blood of a demon whose every drop of blood clones him. Kali is facing an army of this demon. On the inner battlefield, every part of you that you are not willing to integrate, multiplies. Kali’s fierce face is not only her mad eyes and her wild rage, the head of the demon in her hand, dripping blood, the belt of severed arms, the necklace of skulls adorning her. The intensity of this great goddess is in the unravelling of falsity, and the uncharted territories of radical receptivity.
All the things you hate about yourself, all the things you hate about the world, must be drank in, and assimilated. We have to find a way to make that which we reject, our own.
Kali is the original shadow work. She is no bullshit. She is naked, not because we finally found our “true self.” Kali cackles wildly at that idea. The point is not to purify and arrive at the essence of you. You are complex. You are a mixture of things. You are many, not one. The point is to learn how to make all of it your own. She is naked because she’s primal. She wears the inner most hidden parts of the self on the outside so that we can finally sit with our shame and our grief and our pretenses with honesty.
If you’re into this and want to explore the shadow in more ways, read this essay about the Shadow Archetype.
She is covered in ashes because in the fire of transformation we burn certain aspects of ourselves that we don’t want to carry with us moving forward. Yes, she embodies the letting go archetype, but she won’t let those parts become separate. Everything needs a place. Nothing really goes away. We must find a place in us for everything that we are, for everything that we were, for everything we’ve ever been, for our desires, and even for the fear of what we might become.
Hel, Norse Goddess of Death: The Tomb is the Womb
Burial mounds, deep underground caves, a fire pit within which the souls of the dead burn, an icy underworld; Hel is the death archetype in feminine form, Mother Death, the spirit of the underworld.
Yes, the word Hell comes from the womb of this goddess, from the myth of death and rebirth, which was diabolized by Christianity. When Hell was Hel, it was the womb of regeneration. It wasn’t a place of punishment, it wasn’t eternal torture, it was the land of the ancestors, a “uterine shrine, and a sacred cave of rebirth” writes Barbara G Walker. It was a womb full of fire, like a volcano.
Hel’s deep burial cave is also a uterine shrine. The flames that burn the spirits of the dead are the fire of regeneration. That which dies sparks the possibility of renewal. The tomb is the womb. Everything that is born must die. Nothing is eternal except for change. That which rises must fall. The womb is also the tomb.
Like the Greek Hecate, Hel wore the face of the triple goddess. Most known as a crone, but like Kali, she is the womb of creation, she is the part of us that can hold in it all the parts. Radical receptivity is a key trait of Mother Death in all her forms. No one can escape her. Death comes for all of us, and holds us all in its embrace. In Norse stories, even the gods end up in the pit of the underworld, in the fire of Hel.
Read more about Hel in this Substack piece, and if you’re a lover of the Goddess, and you want to go deeper with different aspects of the Divine Feminine archetypes, check out this essay.
The Dying God and the Cycle of Renewal
In the womb of The Great Mother, she gives life, she nourishes, she devours, and she cooks the god who is sometimes her son, and other times her lover. Many of those stories reflect the cycles of the seasons. Myths of a dying god who the goddess resurrects saturated the ancient world.
In the Celtic tradition the grain mother and her son/lover spin the tale of the seasons with the death and rebirth of the son who is the sun, and the earth mother’s womb of regeneration. Death in mythology often leads to some form of a rebirth myth.
Osiris, Egyptian God of the Underworld: The Death Archetype of renewal
Egyptian Osiris is killed and dismembered by his brother, Set. Isis, who is their sister, and also Osiris’ lover, is devastated. Isis is the goddess of magic, motherhood, fertility, healing, death, and rebirth. She is love, truth, and muse. Goddess of Nature, Star of the Sea, Mother of the Gods, Queen of Heaven. Protectress of the people – rich and poor, kings and vagabonds. The embodiment of both lunar and solar powers. Isis wears the sun disc on her head and her wings spread as wide as the universe
Her wings stretch from Egyptian goddess with influence in that region for thousands of years, and reach into other cultures and other goddesses such as Aphrodite/Venus, Demeter, Persephone (she is both mother and daughter), Athena, Astarte, Mother Mary, and the Magdalena.
The story of Osiris travels throughout the Middle East and later on becomes the story of Jesus. Isis is both Mother Mary and Mary Magdalen. She gives birth to a divine child; Horus, the falcon god who is the rebirth of the sun (the son). Horus is made by his mother’s magic powers that reconnected all the dismembered parts of Osiris (except for his penis, which she couldn’t find because it was swallowed by a fish, so she gave him a golden one, and then had sex with him, resulting, in some cases, in Horus). He is the reincarnation of Ra and/or Osiris – the sun, the son, the father, the spirit.
The Birth of Horus: Rebirth and Renewal in the Death Archetype
In some variations, Horus is an immaculate conception deity. Some stories say that Isis flies around and around the corpse of Osiris that she had reassembled, and that Horus is born out of her incantations and her whirling around. Some say Horus is born of Isis immediately after her own birth, saying he was conceived by Isis and Osiris in the womb of Nut. Other myths say that Horus was the original sun, rising from the primal mother’s lotus-yoni at the beginning of time.
Horus is the child of dismemberment and the capacity to reassemble.
Osiris is space and dirt, sky and soil, moving as the cyclical nature of the world. His mother is the sky, goddess Nut. His father is the land god Geb. He is god of the underworld and god of resurrection. Before he becomes the underworld ruler, he rules the land and teaches agriculture, laws, and is said to spark ideas about evolving civilization in humans.
Horus is the son of death and rebirth.
Perhaps, Osiris – god of agriculture first, and then of the underworld – can guide us individually and collectively through the process of transforming the anthropocentric, harming ways of humanity. Down into the underworld go the harmful practices that we inflict on the land. There, we can renew a relationship of reciprocity with all life, with how we grow food, and how we treat animals, plants, and one another.
Osiris and the Horned God: The Mythic Roots of Satan
The word Ba meant soul in ancient Egypt. It may be related to the word Aba and Baba – Hebrew and Arabic for “father.”. It is associated with the ram (baaaaaa) and the worship of horned animals.
Is he the original Horned god who later on becomes the Devil? It seems likely. His association with the underworld, with death, and with horned animals, weave the tapestry of Satan. The word Satan comes from the ancient Egyptian serpent deity, Sata, who was the creature of the dark subterranean worlds. Isis is adorned, like many ancient goddesses, with serpents.
If you want to un-demonize Satan, read this essay about the Devil archetype as the Trickster. And to move into the Subterranean worlds of Satan, Egyptian serpent Sata and the connection with other serpents, and the etymology that takes us to Samhain, check out this Substack piece.
Osiris, Green God of Rebirth: Where River Meets Land, and Death Feeds Life
Is Osiris the origin of the European Green Man? Sophie Strand thinks yes. She considers Osiris to be the elements themselves. He is a cyclical being. He is seasonal. He is the river’s surging and receding. The body of the Nile river IS Osiris; flooding, swelling, and then disappearing into the underworld in the dry season.
The god is the relationship between the river and the land. The river is the god, the land is the goddess. The river and the fields are alive, and the psyche, along with the earth around the Nile is fertilized by this imagery of interconnected, woven together tapestry of death and rebirth.
The great goddess loves; her beloved, her child, her brother. Love flows though her heart and body. Her tears of grief flood the Nile each year, bringing fertility and life to the land. She brings the fragmented parts into a whole, weaving gold into the alchemy of regeneration. She is the power of healing. She is the transformation archetype, and the integration of all parts.
The Shadow Gift of Death
While I was writing this piece, my kid was home from school with a little virus. Nothing too serious, but all I wanted was to tend to him. I needed to finish this essay. I kept being pulled away from what I was doing, and it took me forever to be able to refocus myself. Constant interruptions. A mixture of guilt and frustration. And the preciousness of being able to have him next to me, to hear his laughter, his play, his ideas.
Stronger than anything was this deep sentiment; how fleeting his childhood is. My daughter is already a teen, and he’s still young, and I have this keen awareness of how ephemeral their childhood is.
Knowing that it has an end adds a deep flavor of sadness to this season of motherhood. There’s an acute sense of loss, which forces me to slow down, to pause, to be more present, to soften the frustration and make more room for the gentle taste of the moment.
The gift of death and the archetype of endings is the reminder to not take anything for granted, to embrace the phase you’re in, to love life, to appreciate the little moments, because nothing is here forever. Everything has an end. Tears.
Transformation Through Surrender
It takes effort to give into some of what life has to offer. It takes discipline to teach ourselves to let our children grow. It requires a strong vessel to allow some of the experiences we go through flow through us. Surrendering to aging in this culture is a heroic act. Surrender may sound like a passive term, but most of the time, it demands our showing up and engaging – it doesn’t just happen.
Giving birth requires a softening into unimaginable intensity. Our bodies are used to holding on tightly when we are in pain, but to be able to birth a baby, a woman has to find a way to relax in order to open, to release in order to let the baby out. This fierce pain can become the most euphoric experience when the mind and the body work together to release within the ferocity.
I imagine dying is similar. Our bodies are designed to try to stay alive. It tries hard until the last breath. Softening into the arms of death is not an easy task.
Letting go is not easy, yet there’s magic and meaning in the process of release. The death archetype hides within every facet of life, in every bite of food, in every exhalation.
Finding Beauty in Decay – The Alchemy of Ending
When something ends, grief washes over, its liquidity helps the form of what has ended slowly break down and become a new reality. The process of deconstruction, of breaking apart from something that was there, of getting used to the empty space, to the absence, is complex and full of feelings.
New growth is fertilized by the transmutation of compost. Death is a doorway to a new life. The death archetype is a guide.
Everything that is released, is alchemized within the realms of existence. Nothing goes away. Decay transforms that which has died into the next form. A body breaks down after death, and slowly becomes the soil. Worms and bacteria and fungi are nourished by death as they help the process of decomposition. The soil is nourished and other things grow. Fruit falls and decays. Pits and seeds are revealed. The earth slowly takes them in. New trees are born.
Living with the Death Archetype as Teacher
Facing loss is an essential part of life. When we allow ourselves to learn from death, we enter a deeper relationship with life. We are ever changing, constantly in the process of shedding and renewal. That which doesn’t carry vitality drops, nourishes the dirt, and makes room for whatever’s next to germinate and sprout.
When we sit at the feet of the death archetype, we learn to not push away the difficult, dark, painful aspects of life. We allow the tears, the fears, the anger, the discomfort to have their place. Disappointment invites us not to give up, but to allow the process of being stripped away to feed the ground and the seeds of what comes next. The death archetype creates a container for heartache, for horror, for tragedy, for apocalyptic times . In the pit of despair we learn to surrender to the authenticity of the full range of embodied experience. We learn to let ourselves be held.
If you’re ready to work with the Death Archetype in your own mythic cycle, in your own poetic way, and ritualize your grief, your process of release and renewal, get my free Ritual Guide – it offers accessible ideas and tools to honor receptivity, transformation, and the cyclical nature of reality.
Try this mythic yoga practice if you want an embodied way to work with the death archetype.
Share this with a loved one who might need this right now.
With much love,
Hagar