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Death, Nature and Uncertain Spaces: A Commentary from Paganism

Contemporary theorists have hypothesized that individuals seek to maximize feelings of ontological security against a modern background of increasing risk, fragmentation, and uncertainty. For some, modernity has become an epoch of death denial consciously divorced from nature through the legacy of the Enlightenment project. Conversely, celebrations of mortality are central to contemporary paganism, particularly where linked to the honoring of the regenerative cycles of nature. For pagans, mortality is often linked to carnivalesque celebration taking place in ambivalent spaces, termed heterotopia, where symbols of life and death meet. In these spaces death is sublimated into a nurturing, rather than life-denying force, strengthening pagan identity and solidarity. Effectively, death becomes interiorized by pagans. Ritualization around “death” becomes not merely a way of assuaging fears about one's own mortality, but an opportunity for insight and self-transformation.