Tomás Prower - Morbid Magic: Death Spirituality and Culture from Around the World

About the Author

Toms Prower is a graduate of the University of California: Santa Barbara with degrees in global socioeconomics and Latin American studies. Born and raised in Southern California, his fluency in English, French, and Spanish gave him the opportunity to work for the French government as a cultural liaison throughout South America, with extended assignments in Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and the Amazon jungle. Since then, he has been the External Relations Director for the American Red Cross, LGBT+ Programs Director for entertainment productions in Los Angeles, and a licensed mortuary professional in California and Nevada. Currently, Toms resides in his hometown of L.A. as a writer and author of popular fiction and nonfiction works.

Copyright Information

Morbid Magic: Death Spirituality and Culture from Around the World 2019 by Toms Prower.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

As the purchaser of this e-book, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the authors copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

First e-book edition 2019

E-book ISBN: 9780738760629

Cover design by Shannon McKuhen

Book format by Samantha Penn

Editing by Annie Burdick

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Prower, Toms, author.

Title: Morbid magic : death spirituality and culture from around the world

/ by Toms Prower.

Description: Woodbury : Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., 2019. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019021987 (print) | LCCN 2019022255 (ebook) | ISBN

9780738760612 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: DeathReligious aspects. | Death. | Magic. | Occultism.

Classification: LCC BL504 .P76 2019 (print) | LCC BL504 (ebook) | DDC

202/.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021987

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022255

Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publishers website for links to current author websites.

Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

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Id like to dedicate this book to you, yes you, reading this here now. Tomorrow is guaranteed to no one, and there is a finite amount of time each of us has here alive on earth. So Im honored that youre choosing to spend some of that finite precious time with me exploring the morbid magic of our human tribe around the globe, before your own time inevitably comes

ALL ABOARD

Its not that Im afraid to die. I just dont want to be there when it happens.

Woody Allen

What to do with a dead body? I mean, weve got to do something with it, right? Should we toss it in a large fire so that only pseudo-recognizable fragments of bone are left? Should we remove its brain and internal organs and anoint it with herbs and oils so that it can hopefully last forever? Should we cut off chunks of flesh and eat it so that its spirit will reside within each of us? Or maybe we should bury it in a hole in the ground?

Then again, if we want to be very modern, we should do what everyone else calls traditional. And I mean traditional in the modern US sense: paying strangers thousands of dollars to take the body away, store it in a refrigerator with other dead bodies, replace all the blood with super toxic carcinogenic chemicals, sew the mouth shut, superglue the eyelids closed, paint the face with stage makeup so that we dont have to be inconvenienced by seeing the visual reality of death, place the body inside a metal container so that it doesnt get dirty when being put in the ground, put that metal container into another container so that the grass above wont shift and thus become more expensive for a cemetery to mow over it, and then affix a small metal plaque on the top with a pithy tagline that summarizes a human beings entire life achievements into a three-second read. Ah, tradition

Now, I know this might come as a shock, but brace yourself, because Im about to let you in on a little secret our modern Western funerals arent really traditional. So then why do we do them this way? How did we as humans go from leaving our loved ones to decompose back into the earth wherever they fell dead to the bankruptcy-inducing pomp and circumstance that is the modern-day embalmed funeral service? That was the very question that set me off on my global trek around the world, exploring the funerary traditions, beliefs, and afterlife magic of our human tribe throughout millennia.

Working in the US funeral industry as a mortuary professional, Ive seen a lot of families come in and try to answer that very first question I asked you at the beginning of this introduction: What to do with a dead body? I always tried my best to help families make the choice most correct for them and their deceased loved one, but at the end of the day, past all the razzle-dazzle of personalized funeral and memorial services, the family really only has two options: pay a lot of money to put their loved one in a Russian nesting doll series of containers thatll be buried in the ground or pay a lot of money to incinerate them and grind their bones in an industrial blender so that the remains look like sand or ashes. Of course, it also doesnt help that these expensive and permanent decisions are being made in a severe emotional state without much foreplanning and have to be made soon.

But it didnt use to be like this. Before advancements in medicine and the capitalist industrialization of handling the deceased, it was the family and the local village who used to take care of a loved ones corpse. It wasnt just the body they dealt with, either. Creative and participatory rituals were developed to care for the soul of the loved one and ensure their safe passage to the afterlife. There were deities worshiped whose sphere of influence included underworlds, destruction, decay, and the mystery of what happens after we shuffle off this mortal coil. Magical spells were even developed to extinguish the life of an enemy as well as to protect us from the supernatural harm and vengeance that the dead could enact upon us.