Introduction
The term ‘psychopomp’ derives from the Greek psyche ‘soul’ and pompos ‘guide’. A psychopomp is a ‘guide of souls’. In shamanic traditions, a variety of deities and spirits, along with human practitioners, act as psychopomps.
Psychopomping is a core shamanic practice and involves helping the dead, typically those stuck in the Middle World or between the worlds, to cross to a suitable place in the spirit world in accordance with their beliefs.
The dead can become stuck for a number of reasons. One of the main causes is sudden or traumatic death. When a person dies traumatically, such as in an accident or a natural disaster, in war, or by murder or suicide, the shock can deprive them of their faculties and their ability to pass cognisantly. This can also be the case with those who are heavily medicated at the time of death. Sometimes, these souls do not realise they are dead. They can remain stuck at the place and time of their death until they recover their faculties or a psychopomp from the spirit or the human world helps them to pass over. Sometimes, they wander in confusion through the Middle World, or end up between the worlds (a place where lost souls are commonly found, referred to in core shamanism as the interworld, in the Christian tradition as Purgatory and in Buddhism as Bardo).
Souls can also become ‘bound’ in the Middle World for personal reasons. They might not want to leave a loved one or a loved one might not be able to release their hold on them. Those with unpaid debts, a desire for vengeance, or unassuaged guilt may refuse to leave until their affairs have been put into place. Those with addictions may find it difficult to leave the objects of their addiction.
It’s important to remember that not all souls who die traumatically need psychopomping. Some pass naturally or with the help of their spirit guides. Also, just because a soul is in the Middle World or between the worlds, doesn’t necessarily mean they need help. Like us, the souls of the dead can move at will between the worlds. It is common for family ancestors to visit and to look out for their descendants and to guide them home at death. Some ancestors choose to stay around as guides and protectors.
Vindos / Gwyn ap Nudd – An Ancient British Psychopomp
My patron God, Vindos / Gwyn ap Nudd, ‘White son of Mist’, is an ancient British deity who rules Annwn ‘Very Deep, the Otherworld, and its people, the spirits of Annwn or fairies. It’s my personal belief that He also rules the dead. He is depicted gathering the souls of the dead back to His realm. As Pen Annwn, ‘the Head of the Otherworld’, He is the keeper of the Cauldron of Rebirth.
It’s my intuition that prehistoric burial monuments with stonework made from chalk and limestone, with deeply defined white-marked boundaries, were associated with Vindos and were marked this way to guide Him to the dead.
In a medieval Welsh poem called ‘The Conversation of Gwyn ap Nudd and Gwyddno Garanhir’, Gwyn is depicted as a psychopomp, as a ‘Bull of Battle’. He appears to guide Gwyddno, a dead warrior-king, to Annwn. At the end of their dialogue, He recites the names of a number of famous warriors whose souls he has gathered from the battlefield.
In later folklore, Gwyn appears with the Cwn Annwn, ‘Hounds of the Otherworld’, as a leader of the Wild Hunt – a chase for human souls. In one instance, He is depicted with a black face and horns on His head hunting down a ‘sinner’. The hunt rides yearly, on Nos Galan Gaeaf, and through the winter, gathering up any souls of the dead who have not passed over.
He and His people, the spirits of Annwn, or ‘fairies’, are often seen to guide and even to ‘take’ the souls of those who die suddenly or traumatically.
Witnessing with Gwyn
Since I met Gwyn, I have been working with the dead in a number of ways. I have long been journeying to learn the stories of forgotten ancestors in my local area and to share them in poetry and prose. This has included witnessing their deaths, for example, a cotton worker who died of pneumonia.
I have journeyed with Gwyn, physically and in spirit, to witness scenes where He has served as a psychopomp. One example is a visit to the site of the tragic Battle of Arfderydd, where Gwyn gathered the soul of Gwenddolau and Myrddin Wyllt became mad due to battle trauma. I spent time in meditation there, journeyed into the scene, and wrote about it.
Gwyn has shown me how He has been there for the souls of the battle dead from ancient times and still supports soldiers who die in war whatever their beliefs.
He’s also revealed to me how He’s there for people who are considering suicide and supports them, whatever decision they make. I met Gwyn when I was experiencing suicidal ideation. A number of others who have become devoted to Him have told me they met Him during dark times.
It’s my personal belief that Vindos, whose name means ‘White’ or ‘Clear Light’, is the white light that is seen at the end of the tunnel in reports of Near Death Experiences and that’s how He appears to those who don’t know His name.
Psychopomp Work
Most of my experiences of psychopomping have happened spontaneously. My first experience was many years ago, in my locality, where I came across a Roman soldier who had left a battalion, who according local legend still march along the old Roman road. He was fed up and wanted to go home. With my guides, I took Him through the Middle World back to Italy, to one of the rivers near Naples that is associated with the Roman land of the dead. A Roman guide appeared and took him across the river and he vanished.
A few years ago, during a meditation, I came across three Victorian boys wandering through the forests of the Otherworld. They told me they were afraid they wouldn’t be allowed into Heaven and had wandered into the forest and were lost. I asked them if they would like to go on to another life and they agreed. So I led them to Gwyn’s cauldron to be reborn.
During my shamanic counselling training with the Sacred Trust, I had a difficult experience, which led to an unexpected psychopomping journey. I was acting as client, with a drumbeat on headphones, speaking my journey out loud, in a hall packed with people, like sardines, doing the same. I’m autistic and hate wearing headphones, virtual drumbeats, and crowded spaces. It was incredibly claustrophobic. Failing to get to the Lower World, I got stuck in a mine, where I found a dead canary. I was told to put it into my heart. I was then led to a holding place between the worlds where there were hundreds of dead canaries. I released them all. My heart cracked open and molten gold poured from my heart with the canaries down the tunnels. It flowed from the mine through all the mines in industrial Britain. This was accompanied by a sense of release and healing. I kept the canary in my heart for a few weeks and finally returned it to a magical place on the other side of the Canary Islands where canaries sung like stars on trees.
Shortly after leaving the Sacred Trust training due to ethical issues, I asked for a healing for something that happened during the initiation rite. Afterwards, I found myself transported to a cellar under a pub in York. There was a man who I intuited was also autistic and had his hands over his ears. He was dressed in clothing that looked like medieval sack cloth. He explained he couldn’t stand the unfamiliar noise of the city up above. I offered to take him to a place where there was no more noise. He agreed. Following the guidance of my spirits, I took him to a pool in the Otherworld, where he was mesmerised by watching the beautiful dragonflies. This calmed him. I left him there for a few days. Only then was he ready to recall his painful memories of how he died. He had got drunk (a way of shutting out the world) whilst working in the cellar and had an accident with the barrels. I was then guided to take him to Gwyn’s cauldron to be reborn.
Several months ago, during my morning meditation, Gwyn guided me to help an ex-soldier who had initially passed to the Otherworld but had been lured back by a bottle of beer left outside the Royal British Legion club in my locality. He told me that he and his wife, who had also passed, had visited the Niagara Falls in the Middle World before going to the spirit world and that he needed to tell his grandma about it. I asked my guides to find his grandma, who was in the Lower World, in a little house looking over a cliff. He told her his story, then his wife appeared, and they stepped over the cliff into the mist.
When it came to covering psychopomping towards the end of my shamanic apprenticeship, I told Gwyn I was open to further opportunities. One arose in the context of some ancestral healing. The ancestral journey involved releasing a part of the soul of my great grandfather, Harry Shell Allen, which was trapped at the site of his death in the London County Asylum so the energy could be returned to him in his present incarnation in Spain.
On our visit to the asylum, I noticed a young woman who was mopping and seemed stuck with two grey looking spectral figures beside her. Afterwards, I consulted Gwyn, who suggested I could try to help her. I received the name Jane Locksley. When I looked up the Locksley family in London, I saw that they were from Nottinghamshire, but there were records of them passing through to do business and that there was a Locksley Street. I received the gnosis that the two figures were Jane’s parents and they left her at the asylum, due to a mental health condition, on their way to get a ship. They felt unable to leave the Middle World because of their guilt at abandoning Jane.
When I journeyed to help Jane, I discovered that she was deaf, but could communicate telepathically. She heard people’s thoughts in her head. That was why people thought she was mad. She enjoyed mopping as it helped shut the thoughts out. The swish and slop of the mop and the water calmed her. She also enjoyed spending time in the garden. When the voices got very loud she got distressed and had to be medicated. The last thing she recalled was being heavily medicated and confusion before being drawn back to mopping.
She was aware that the garden was gone and it was scary outside. I explained to her gently that she was dead and told her that were far better gardens in the spirit world. She asked me if I meant the Garden of Eden, which was somewhere her parents told her she would never go if she didn’t behave. I said I could help her get there if she wished. She was unsure. I suggested she might want to say farewell to her parents, to which she agreed. My guides brought them and I also called to Saint Michael as a psychopomp, who was familiar and could take them all to Heaven. In the end, Jane said she didn’t want to go with her parents to Heaven.
I took Jane, with my guides, from the asylum across the Middle World to find an entrance to the Otherworld and she said she wanted to go to Nottinghamshire. She pointed out Sherwood Forest and told me she had always loved the legends of Robin Hood, Robin of Locksley, who was associated with her family. She particularly loved Maid Marian. Marian and her maids appeared in the forest and she danced with them into the Otherworld.
Reflections on Psychopomping
When I started reading about psychopomping, I came across a number of stories about people who had been called to it as a vocation from a young age. They had long seen the dead. They had long been called to help them (1). I heard stories of people so bothered by the dead they needed to create waiting rooms. I realised this wasn’t me. I only started seeing the dead in my late teens. I wasn’t called to help them any more than living humans I saw about.
I read about others who are called to war zones and scenes of accidents and natural disasters to help the dead pass, or to check places where people die in confusion, like hospitals and mental hospitals, and realised this wasn’t me either.
This confused me, because I am devoted to a God of the dead who is a psychopomp. When I asked Gwyn about whether I should be more open to the dead or should seek out more opportunities to help them, He told me that I should maintain my boundaries and wait until told for psychopomp work.
My experience of psychopomping to date has been limited but varied. I have worked with persons from across time periods of a variety of different backgrounds and ages. A common theme has been working with people who, like me, find noise overwhelming and have experienced addiction to alcohol. I wonder if this is because we carry similar energetic vibrations. I noticed that the souls who I was guided to help did not hold strong Christian beliefs and were amenable to a shamanic conception of the Otherworld.
A learning that occurred that I hadn’t heard about before was that if a soul is stuck at a site of trauma, it might not be the whole soul, but a part of the soul. Of course, I’d come across this when doing soul retrieval. It highlighted the complexity of this work and the need for discernment and listening to my guides, as the processes of releasing a stuck soul part and crossing a soul, in its wholeness, to the Otherworld are a little different.
Another point to note is that I had heard from many sources of psychopomps taking souls ‘to the light’. This felt familiar in that there are places in the Upper World that are incredibly bright and beautiful and are associated with intense emotions and ecstatic states. In the writings of Iolo Morganwg the Upper World is known as Gwynfyd. For me it’s the state of being in the arms of Gwyn. So I can see why people would want to go there. However, I came across a cautionary tale in a book by a death midwife (2), wherein she suggested a dying man go to the light and he recoiled because it was incredibly painful for him because he associated the light with migraines. This shows that we should always check in about where a soul wants to go.
Psychopomping as an Offering
My experience to date of pyschopomping has been one of a slow education under the guidance of Gwyn. As I have progressed with psychopomping, I have steadily grown in confidence in my abilities to communicate with the dead in a clear and compassionate manner and assist them in crossing to the spirit world. I was unsure about whether I would be called further to do psychopomp work in spite of receiving good feedback on my progress so far from my mentor.
Then, to my surprise, earlier this week, Gwyn requested that I begin offering psychopomping as a free service for Him and any souls who might be in need of help. If you have any concerns about the passage of friends or family or persons in your locality, please get in touch. I can’t promise to be able to help everybody, but I will take on cases that I feel are within my ability as guided by Gwyn and my spirits.
(1) See for example, Soul Rescuers, by Natalia and Terry O’Sullivan.
(2) The Art of Death Midwifery by Joellyn St Pierre.
Thank you for sharing your story, this was lovely to read! I hadn’t connected the light at the end of the tunnel with Gwyn but that fits my gnosis as well. I suspect He likes to introduce Himself to people by demonstrating His name in some way, whether it’s light or simply having long white hair.
Like you I’ve wondered if I “should” be doing more psychopomp work like I heard others doing, and then recently I came to an interesting conclusion through a conversation with a friend who is very connected to the dead: That’s not my calling. It seems I have other spirit work I’m being called to, and that I’m excited about. It’s odd considering Gwyn’s role as Gatherer of Souls but I’ll try to trust Him to know what He’s doing!
Thank you for reading. I get the impression that Gwyn presides not only over the dead but over shamanism and spirit work in general. He’s said to me that a larger part of my role is carrying out healing work for the living so they’re less likely to become traumatised dead. I’m sure whatever work you are doing with be of great value both to Him and your communities.
Hi Lorna, thank you for such a beautiful and informative post! I have been called many times to help earthbound spirits crossover. Like you it seems to have mostly been when I have come across th
Thank you for reading and for sharing that you have had experiences with earthbound spirits. It looks like there’s some text missing from your reply.
Hi Lorna, thank you for such a beautiful and informative post! I have been called many times to help earthbound spirits crossover. Like you it seems to have mostly been when I have come across them while living my life although one time a group of physical humans and I gathered together to help cross over as many people as wanted to show up at that particular time place. I’ve always felt incredibly honored to have the opportunity. For a long time during and after lockdown I was not spiritually able to do that work. But I have felt called to do it again. The last spirit I helped cross with someone who had spent 30 years attached to a table at my place of work. That was about a year ago. I was able to help them get ready and feel like they could let go of what they were holding onto and in the end they preferred that one of my guides help them make the final transition. It is such a sacred thing to hold space for these people. There’s a place near my house that Gwyn and my Fianna Family have been encouraging me to check out to see if it would be a good spot to meet people who might be ready to cross. Like most things in life I kind of learned how to do it both from my guides and by trying on my own. I’ve never thought about soul fragments versus whole spirits before and that gives me a lot of food for thought. Thank you for that insight! In your experience are the different worlds that people are drawn to after death separate spiritual spaces or different manifestations of the same place? I’m just curious about the person who didn’t want to go to heaven but instead went to the other world. I have always felt that there is more or less a single realm or dimensionality to where we go after we die but like this world it consists of many countries or localities and can also change shape based on people’s belief systems and what they’re comfortable seeing. But I can very much be wrong! You have seen much more of the world beyond than I have. Thanks again this was an amazing article to read. Éilis
Many thanks for visiting and replying and for sharing your experiences of psychompomping under the guidance of Gwyn and your Fianna Family. It is very sacred work.
In answer to your question… ‘In your experience are the different worlds that people are drawn to after death separate spiritual spaces or different manifestations of the same place?’…
In my experience, the way I see things at the moment (and that might change) I tend to see the Otherworld as a whole composed of separate spaces that might be differentiated between by spatial orientation (ie. Lower World, Middle World, Upper World) and / or name (ie. Annwn, Abred, Gwynfyd). I feel their differing names and appearances across cultures are a result of what has come from the interfacing of the living spiritual realities and the Gods and spirits across time. So slowly, names, places, stories have built up, been passed down by generations. Alive and shifting. So a bit like countries or localities if you would. I believe our minds create them in relationship with Spirit.
I believe there are places that are qualitatively similar (ie. Heaven and Gwynfyd and the Summer Stars in Brythonic tradition) that are similar expressions of Spirit but not quite the same. And that Jane’s transition to what I’d say was the Lower World through Sherwood Forest would be a very different experience for her to going to Heaven.
As someone with no real experience in psychopomp work, this post is so interesting and beautiful. Thank you for sharing your work (and also for DOING the work). It’s always fascinating to read the experience of people called to other work than me.
Thank you for reading. I’m glad you enjoyed the post.