A Gift from the Dying: https://atheopaganism.wordpress.com/2018/10/07/a-gift-from-the-dying/?fbclid=IwAR3bJs7PVCSeK6UgNLJqki7a_qdlxRSxHo0pO1_-tgQcIgbWrKKwJjPWE1E

 

S2E38 TRANSCRIPT

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Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host Mark. 

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: And today we are going to talk about death And decomposition, especially the latter part. It's a it's Halloween season, Hallows, samhain season. And so we're going to talk about that aspect of the life cycle. That includes the the disassembly of.

Organisms after they are no longer functioning as alive.

Yucca: And I'm very excited for this topic today because this is one that I really like to nerd out on. So I look forward to getting into some of those details. But why don't we start with. The death side. And we did an episode about this last year. Let's start with talking about death and the, the pagan approach to it, which is a little bit different than we see in mainstream culture.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I really appreciate about pagan culture in which was one of the things that attracted me early on to pig And, culture is that it was very unflinching about looking at the fact that we die. We're all going to die. and it has a time of the year to reflect on that fact and to.

Do whatever preparation we can in order for things to be better for those that survive us. And just to really reflect on people that have gone before us and have died and just to be aware of that whole very key pivotal section of the cycle of living.

Yucca: Yeah. And, and although it is fun to do this, you know, the spooky stuff and all of that, but to also just to honor death in as a, as a beautiful part of the whole cycle as part of life, that that life requires death. And it requires an awful lot of death for there to be any life.

Mark: It does. When, when you think about it, when you think about what you eat, and this is true, if you're a vegan or if you're a carnivore or if you're an omnivore, it's true. In all cases, what you eat involves a lot of death. The it's all made of living cells and those living cells die within you and are converted into energy and nutrients for us to survive on.

And that's a beautiful thing about the nature of the biosphere, actually, that it's able to produce this abundance of life.

that can then support more complexity. 

Yucca: Yeah. We are part of that process. Not only in that we are consumers who are eating other living things and things that could only live because this cycle has been happening for literally billions of years, but that we also are what gets consumed 

Mark: Yes. 

Yucca: already. Right? Eventually we're all going to die. Right?

Where. The, the person that is me, the person that is you, we will die. We will cease to function, but they're still all of the material that was part of us that already has died, which has already been consumed and eaten and incorporated into new life.

Mark: Yeah. One of the things about being a human is that we operate at a particular scale. And so we tend to be, we tend to think of ourselves as these very encapsulated sort of enclosed being. But if you look a little closer, we are radiating. I mean, I'm not only talking about, you know, direct excretion. We are radiating flakes of skin and hair and fingernails and toenails and just all of this stuff 

Yucca: Photons to 

Mark: Oh. And photons. 

Yucca: literally light.

Mark: That is coming off us all the time. And all of that stuff gets digested by decomposers. All of that stuff gets reabsorbed into the biosphere and incorporated into new stuff. And the key point that we were talking about before we started recording on that is to really get, these are the same atoms. They're exactly the same atoms. You know, your body is made up very like. Of atoms that were incorporated into other people right now. Not, not just animals and plants, but other people as well, because we've been around for a very