Last Quarter (Zodiac Series): The anthropology of mortality

Hello. It's Friday, and there has been a death in our home. Yesterday my owner's immensely elderly cat, whom I had also come to care for over the years and who in fact managed to be a part of my life slightly longer than my familiar was, passed out of this world with our help after it became plain that her quality of life was no longer what she deserved. I am not going to write further about it here because it feels to me like a rather private situation and also because I've only barely begun to come to terms with what's happened. I will certainly survive but my heart is still very heavy, including on my owner's behalf.

Given these circumstances, while I have plenty of time to write today I do feel disoriented about what I intended to offer you. On the one hand, this was a week meant for death work, and indeed death sits very squarely in my mind. On the other hand, I had meant for this to be my zodiac series' entry for the cosmopolitan Sagittarius, examining diverse cultures' practices around death — and now I doubt that I currently have in me the requisite precision for the anthropological sampler I had in mind.

What I have in me instead is, I think, a far more poetic piece that would normally qualify as an Occult post but that I'd like to make an exception for this week, especially with how many posts I've skipped outright of late.

(Death) takes many (forms)

How do we know?

There is the release,
Breath and grip & light,
& the slowing,
Breath & blood & song,
& there is cold & fog,
& stink & stiffening,
Locked up with the last knowing,
The kernel of life sealed in rotting ice,
Hidden from our sight & kept for
An alchemical hereafter.

We give them to the fire, we give them to the earth, we give them to the air, we give them to the water, and even to the firmament. A day it may take, or a week, or months frozen while we prepare, but there will always be some dissolution: sudden, slow, unseen, naked, quiet, violent.

Pyre. Tomb. The birds, the womb.

The scythe and broom swept them, or the thread was cut. The hag called. The dry gourd was shaken, rattling seeds. The Devil came back to the crossroads.

Something is gone —
It may be the them of them —
They are not here.

But how do we know?

Echoes made forever
(Forever is an edge):
Tokens & trinkets,
Parcels & packets,
In memory bone, organ, relic, effigy.
Now she lives around your neck.
Now his heart beats in a box.
Now they sit on your porch,
Adorned in splendor.

The names are still spoken for a good while, and the images are graven, holy as they ought to be, and some of us make them homes, some of us build them armies, some of us leave them meals. A little fox sleeps at my breast every night, host to a shadow.

In many places they know what the un-place has forgotten,
Marking how we walk always in the past with them
& how what walks with us is never there,
already gone.

How do we know?

They are above and above is good, they are below and below is good, above is bad, below is bad, above below nothing no side, they are through.

(Beyond)

So there is not only one death — instead many —
& there is not one way to be alive

Thank you for reading. I expect there is a decent chance at a good, substantive post on wassailing practices for Jól next week. After that, there will be an Occult-tier post.

Please hold your cats close this season.