Psychopomp: Crossing Over Passage in Ancient Ghostlore
Modern science has, for the last two centuries, replaced most of the spirits, entities, demons and ghosts of the ancient world with logical explanations demonstrated through scientific experimentation, but there is no arguing that people in the ancient world mostly believed the human soul existed somewhere else after death, in an afterlife, and that the quality of the soul’s next life depended greatly on how their bodily remains were disposed of after death, evident in preservation methods such as mummification. A psychopomp refers to an entity that guides the soul to cross over the realm of the afterlife.
Carved relief in a funerary lekythos at Athens depicting Hermes as psychopomp accompanying the ghost of Myrrhine into Hades (ca. 430-420 BC). National Archaeological Museum of Athens (Marsyas / CC BY-SA 3.0)
According to Ancient Encyclopedia ghosts appear in the cultures of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Mesoamerica and all over the Celtic world, and while descriptions of afterlives differ from culture to culture, often from village to village, ghosts of the dead seen at their mortal lands and properties were intercepted as omens of things in this reality being ‘out of alignment,’ or anomalies in the spiritual world, and great steps were taken to assist tormented souls on their way to the other side and to clear these perceived blockages in the flow of crossing over to the other world.
