I’ve just sent in the final .pdf proof of my next solo book, Skin Spirits: Animal Parts in Spiritual and Magical Practice, which should hopefully be out in the next couple of months. Already there are things I wish I could add in, even though I know there’s a certain point where one has to say “Okay, the book is done, get it out there!”
Over the past few months I’ve been working with my relationship with Death. It’s a rather uneasy one. I haven’t had anyone really close to me taken suddenly, and the deaths among family and friends have been few. This has historically caused me to feel anxious about Death, and what it will be like the first time I do lose someone close without warning. Plus, of course, there’s dealing with my own mortality, especially as I’ve entered into my early thirties, and I don’t feel quite so immortal as I did in my twenties.
One of the alterations I’ve made to the rituals I go through when purifying things I’ve made out of animal parts is to consider the mortality of my own flesh. I look at the hides and the bones lying prone and dead on the floor, and I then look at my own flesh, and the bones beneath it, and I contemplate the fact that some day this vehicle that I am intimately connected to 24/7 will cease to move, and will be akin to the remains around me. It makes me even more appreciative of being able to work with the remains of these once-living beings, and by extension being able to continue my life by eating the remains of animals and plants that were only recently still alive.
It’s like the (in)famous epitaph on certain gravestones, which are variants of this:
Remember Man as you go by
As you are now so once was I
As I am now so shall you be,
Prepare yourself to follow me*
And this all goes back to a large part of why I work with animal parts in my art and spirituality. Yes, there’s practicality to it, but there’s also reverence. I never view the skins and bones as trophies, or toys, or really even as possessions. It is a privilege to work with them in the way that I do, aware of the death that occurred, and that these were once warm, living beings the same way I am now.
I know I can’t inspire the same reverence in those who buy my artwork, but it’s my hope that at least some of them will see what I create as more than just “pretty shinies”. I know there will be people, for example, who buy the totemic dance tails as fashion accessories, not as connections to archetypal spiritual beings, or even the individual spirits of the animals whose tails they were when living. And I know that some of the things I create as ritual tools will end up instead as part of people’s “collections of dead things”, more for display than active work.
But that’s why I do the spiritual work I do, and then write about it, and how others can utilize it. Because some people will pick up on what I do, and adopt it to their own practices.
And it’s also why I do the food totem work that I do, honoring the totems of the animals and plants whose physical counterparts I eat to stay alive. I cannot live without killing something, unless I went entirely fruitarian, and even then some would argue that eating seeds contributes to the loss of potential life.
I don’t take Death for granted any more. No matter whether the death was from a trap or bullet or disease in the wild, or by gas or electrocution after a lifetime in a cage; no matter whether the intention of the death was for food or for fur; no matter whether the death was at the hands of humans, or another animal; no matter whether it occurred after two weeks or two centuries; the fact is that some living being ceased to be a part of this life and the world that I still have the privilege to interface with, and that is reason for a moment of solemnity, moreso if I was directly involved with that death.
All of the afterlife theories in the world cannot provide incontrovertible proof that there’s anything once the body shuts down. That objective uncertainty is even more reason to be aware of when we send another being into that unknown before us, and to be aware of the fact that someday we’ll be there, too. Not necessarily to dwell in gloom over it, but to simply consider the immense change we are facilitating when we contribute to a death.
* Of course, there’s also the witty reply to this: “To follow you I am not content/How do I know which way you went?”
Therioshamanism 
There is so much more I could add to this where I possessing of all my mental faculties, but I do relate a lot with what you say here. As a (fellow) Sacred Scavenger, I hold a profound amount of respect and reverence to the remains I work with, and honestly it makes me cringe when I hear of some of the reasons for people purchasing these remains, or artwork made from them, from either of us. To render them down to “pretty shinies” seems to hold not much respect for life, as well as this Pokemon-mentality I’ve seen on a shared community I’m on.
I’ve had very close experiences with death. I’ve seen someone die in a nursing home, lost a childhood playmate to the war in Iraq, and also my grandfather who helped raise me (though his was inevitable old age). When I worked at a small family veterinary clinic at age 15, I assisted in euthanasias, and carried their corpses–some of which were dogs that weighed almost as much as me–to the freezers in the back. Later, when working at wildlife centers, I had to kill food animals using nothing but my two hands, and to scrape off the road–even kill, other animals.
My Patron and Father is not only a Death-god, but a god of Warriors and War, the orphaned and the marginalized. My views on Death are very different, I think, from a lot of people out there. Death is not solitary, it’s simply another form that the energies of Life take. Nothing ever stops, it only flows, and transforms. I am profoundly respectful of this process (or, I struggle very hard to be based on experience and learning from my Patron, as I am an imperfect being), even if I may seem cold and mechanical, even irreverent about it at times. This Gallows humor or surface-irreverance is sometimes the only thing that keeps me sane.
You can rest assured, Lupa, that anything I have acquired from you will be treated with the dignity and respect it deserves. I wish I could say the same to everyone who comes to people like us, or even others like us who probably have a lot more still to learn (though in the end, we all do now, don’t we?)
I do hope you keep writing about your experiences with this work. There aren’t that many of us who do it as a spiritual practice, and I love being able to see how other people design and maintain their own practices.
And I always know that whatever I send to you will be going to the best of homes. It helps to make up for the times when things don’t work out despite my best efforts and intentions. Thank you for that.