I recently watched the film The Messengers and there were a lot of crows in the film, but I never really figured out why. As I thought about it I wondered if they were meant to be psychopomps. Maybe they were and maybe they weren’t but it has given me an idea for today’s post.
I first came across the word psycopomp a few years ago when I read Stephen King’s The Dark Half. I looked it up and found out that a psychopomp is an entity that has the responsibility of escorting the souls of the dead to their destinations. If you like, it could be compared to a sort of otherworldly lollipop man who helps spirits to cross over to the other side.
For an example of a psychopomp found in Egyptian Mythology you would have to look no further than the jackal headed God Anubis. If you looked in Greek mythology Hermes would be your man (god). Muut was the Native American Indian equivalent. As you can see psychopomps can be found in many different belief systems and, if I were to take a sceptical view of it all, I would say that it is probably because primitive man, wherever he/she is situated in this big old world of ours, had one thing in common: the fear of dying and therefore found comfort in the belief that he/she would not have to make that final journey alone.
That’s what I would say if I was trying to play the sceptic and rationalize things. I don’t really have any opinion on the subject though. I just find it all rather interesting.
In The Dark Half the psychopomps appeared in the form of sparrows, but horses, dogs, crows, dolphins and many other things are also representative of psychopomps. Personally I would rather have any of those to guide me than that Grim Reaper dude, he’s pretty… well… grim.
In some belief systems the fly was also believed to be a psychopomp and because the fly was believed to be a carrier of dead spirits it was often believed that if a woman swallowed a fly, unlike in the song, she would not die, but become pregnant.
Busy little fellows these psychopomps.