Day of Death: Facing Mortality, Mourning, and the Strife of Endings

What if we stopped treating death as the thing we’re not supposed to talk about? Day of Death is an Alembic gathering for turning toward mortality with curiosity, irreverence, reverence, and even defiance, exploring death as a force that shapes how we live, love, grieve, and make meaning.

The day is hosted by Mariavittoria Mangini, PhD, and includes three presentations. In Facing the Wave: Ecological Grief as an Act of Reverence, ecologist, animist healer, and initiated Völva Kirra Swenerton shares stories from the wild world on living with biodiversity loss, honoring what is dying while staying in relationship with what is still alive. In Mourning Dress: Making Grief Visible, Mangini offers an illustrated history of bereavement customs from the Middle Ages to the present, from dress and etiquette to sumptuary laws, and why making grief visible can matter. In Gliomancy: Acknowledging and Resisting the Proximity of Thanatos, artist, writer, and occultural prankster Tom Banger leads a participatory session, part lecture and part spell, on the practice he developed after a 2023 brain cancer diagnosis, asking how we might meet our own impermanence without surrendering our sense of agency.

We recommend arriving 15 minutes early to allow time for check-in and settling in.