Classes

Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life

Current dates and times here

Talking about death is often deemed morbid, or even taboo. But not long ago, contemplation of death was widely used as a powerful tool for countering fear, putting the difficulties of life in perspective, and helping one live according to their higher values. Now scientists, psychologists, and spiritual leaders agree - it’s key to living a life with meaning. 

This class--based on the the new book Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life—will lead you on a twelve-week program to befriend death in your own way. Filled with lessons learned across cultures and with the help of insightful prompts and questions, this class aims to help you both come to terms with what death means and to live alongside it without fear.

Over six sessions spread over twelve weeks we will explore—via illustrated lectures, readings, class discussion, exercises, and journal prompts—some of the ways people have approached, imagined and even celebrated death in many times and places. We will work on excavating—and clarifying—our own personal understanding of death, and uncovering our own authentic values that can serve as the basis of a full, rich live with the fewest deathbed regrets.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung asserted the importance of developing our own conscious myth about death, our own set of meaningful beliefs. As a final project, you will have the opportunity to formulate your own myth of death. You will also be invited to create your own personal memento mori—an object, artwork or practice meant, in a useful, life-enhancing way!—to remind you of the finitude of life, as a means of encouraging you to live the life you really want before its too late.

Whether you're currently experiencing grief or loss, facing your own mortality, or simply seeking a deeper understanding of the profound mysteries of existence, this class will offer useful insights to help you navigate your life with courage, resilience, and meaning. And even more: by learning to live with our fear of death, we also learn to live with our fear of that which we cannot control, to sit with the mystery at the heart of life and still appreciate, with joy, the life we have been given.

Make Your Own Memento Mori with Art, History and the Imagination: A Live, Online Zoom Class

Taught monthly since April, 2020. Current dates and times here
To see student work from previous iterations of this class, click here.

Testimonial:

I’ve worked with death imagery for fifty years and never, until now, found such a welcoming community with which to share my work and thoughts. The idea of contemplating one’s own death, or that of a loved one, is often considered cringe worthy in our culture. Given that, it is hard to convey how sweet, safe, and gratifying it is to make a momento mori in Joanna’s class. There’s a tenderness I rarely feel in art spaces. We share techniques, a little, but mostly we tell stories and develop our ideas. The momentos come out big-hearted and rich with meaning. And the most curious thing is that working with death in such a hands-on way makes everyone radiant with life. —Jill Littlewood

Death is the great mystery of human life. Each of us – barring some medical miracle – will die. Foreknowledge of our own death is a defining characteristic of humanity; the ancient Greeks reserved the word mortal – meaning ‘subject to death’ – for humans alone. Some people believe that it is foreknowledge of our own death that drives all human culture, from religion and philosophy to mythology and art.

With the current global pandemic, our awareness of death is closer to us in the industrialized West than it’s been in over a century This historical moment will, for most of us, pass. This class seeks to use this moment to look death in the eyes, to get to know it, to create a closer, less fearful relationship with it. To make friends with it. And to create art from that encounter.

To do so, we will explore the ways in which death has been understood and represented in different times and places. There will be a special focus on imaginings of death manifested in time of plague—such as Memento Mori, Ars Moriendi (literally, The Art of Death) and the Danse Macabre, or dance of death—or when death is an unpredictable part of every day life, such as Mexico’s Santa Muerte, literally saint or holy death. A PDF of the book Death a Graveside Companion will be provided to each student as reference.

The class will consist of slide-illustrated lectures, readings and reading discussions, journal prompts, guided image collecting, meditations, and, if technology allows, special guests. 

Students will draw on what they have learned for their final project: the creation of their own personal memento mori—an object intended to remind you of your own death to help you live your time on earth more fully. This can take the form of an image (painting, drawing), object (collage, mask, sculpture, talisman, icon, artist’s book, retablo, ex voto, graphic novel) short film, or even words (essay, creative writing). It will embody your unique vision of death, developed or clarified over the course of the class, be it a deity, a personal or impersonal force, a symbol, or something else entirely.

Students will leave this class not only with their own memento mori, but also with an enhanced understanding of the ways in which death has been understood and represented in different times and places, as well as a more nuanced and critical view of contemporary attitudes. It is also my hope that students will leave the class with less fear of death in these uncertain times.

Manifesting From the Beyond: Creativity as Collaboration and Mystery: An Eight Week Class led by Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein, with Guest Presenters

Current dates and times here

Paul McCartney heard the melody for Yesterday in a dream. Artist Hilma af Klint painted visionary works dictated by spirit guides. Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali woke themselves from hypnagogic states to move beyond the rational, everyday mind and discover unexpected ideas and images. And filmmaker David Lynch regularly uses meditation to, as he puts it, “catch the big fish.”

For our ancestors, creativity was a mysterious phenomenon, with links to the divine. They sought the support of The Muses when embarking on a new project, and the in-spiration they sought meant “influence of a god.”

Although many of us no longer believe in outer divinities, makers often report that their most vital, innovative and true work feels not like a product of their own individual consciousness, but rather like a collaboration with something outside of themselves, something other. This mysterious other has been called, at various times and by various cultures, daimons, the souls of the dead, the gods, the unconscious, the holy spirit, “flow state,” and alien intelligence. For centuries, relationships with them were cultivated via practices such as ritual, sacrifice, chanting, dreamwork, prayer, bodywork, meditation, hallucinogenic plants, and other altered states of consciousness. Psychologically, this approach allowed for a distancing of ego from creative product, decreasing the likelihood of personal inflation, and engendering a sense of humility, gratitude and appreciation of the mystery.

This class will take this concept of cultivating a relationship with a mysterious other for acts of ego-free co-creation as a point of departure. Over the course of eight weeks, we will meet guest speakers from a variety of traditions—including technological innovation, spiritualist mediumship, dreamwork, shamanism, meditation, Jungian active imagination, prayer, and yoga. Each will speak about—and lead us through—their own techniques for making contact.

Students are invited to bring an idea or image they wish to work with to class, or be open to one that emerges over the course of our exploration. In the final session, students will have an opportunity to share a creative work they produced utilizing some or all of these systems and speak about their experience.

The Anatomical Venus: Wax, Death, God and the Ecstatic: A Six Week Live, Online Zoom Class with Morbid Anatomy Founder Joanna Ebenstein,

Current dates and times here

Join Joanna Ebenstein—Morbid Anatomy founder and author of The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic—for a six week deep dive into the world of the uncannily lifelike wax anatomized women known as Anatomical Venuses.

Reclining on velvet cushions with Venetian glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hair, Anatomical Venuses were created in eighteenth-century Florence to teach the general public about the mysteries of the human body. The Venus also tacitly communicated the relationship between the human body and a divinely created cosmos; between art and science, nature and mankind. Today, she both intrigues and confounds, troubling our contemporary categorical divides between life and death, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, entertainment and education, kitsch and art.

Through richly illustrated lectures, readings, exercises, and class discussion, this class will explore some of the many paths that lead from these deeply complicated creations. We will look at the history of anatomical models and their roots in memento mori-themed artworks (and the first anatomical museum founded by a pope!); wax in funerary and death related arts; the cult of the beautiful corpse in art, theatre, at the fairground, and in popular museums; the through-line of the ecstatic from spirituality to sexuality; the study of human anatomy as a popular pursuit for artists and gentlemen; the uncanny as a product of the 18th century enlightenment’s attempt to eliminate superstition; the body on display at the crossroads of science and spectacle; sexual fetishism including necrophilia and agalmatophilia (or the attraction to dolls or statues); and men who created effigies of their beloved.

In so doing, we will see how any piece of material culture might, when looked at deeply, become an object lesson—something that tells us not only about the past, but also who we have become.

Students will be invited to synthesize what they have learned via a final project. This could take the form or an artwork, a written work, a presentation, or anything else of their choice. The content might be a deep dive into a similarly resonant piece of material culture, a reimagining of the Anatomical Venus, the creation of one’s own piece that unifies opposites in a similar way, or something else entirely.

The Mythologies of Death: Psychopomps, Liminal Spaces, and Underworld Realms

Current dates and times here

Death is the great mystery of human life. Today, we tend to view death through the lens of science and rationalism. Our ancestors, however, experienced death as part of a rich, invisible world with its own personalities and terrains, with eloquent myths explaining the origin of mortality and what happens to our souls when the body dies. These world views—or cosmovisions--were replete with their own dedicated gods and goddesses; psychopomps who oversaw the journey through liminal space from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead; rites of passage to contain and define the journey; and detailed descriptions of the places where the souls of the dead traveled to when the stage of embodiment came to an end.

In this six week class--comprised of lavishly illustrated lectures, suggested readings, homework prompts and class discussions and presentations--Morbid Anatomy founder Joanna Ebenstein will lead students in a deep dive into the fascinating ways our ancestors understood and imagined death and its personages and terrains, with an eye towards commonalities, and how these ideas live on today in religion, psychology, and a renewed interest in the occult and the invisible realms.

Along the way, we will examine the differing ways in which matriarchal and patriarchal cultures viewed death, the roots of “good” and “evil,” death in cultures of balanced complementary duality instead of binary opposition, the ways in which dominant Christian beliefs differs from most cosmologies around the world, and Jungian notions of symbols and mythologies of death and the dead.

For a final project, students will create their very own death deity, psychopomp, or map of geographies of life and death. Students will also have an opportunity to give a class presentation on a death cosmology or deity of their choice, perhaps one from their own ancestral heritage.

Current dates and times here

This intimate studio, limited to only 12 students, is designed for graduates of Make Your Own Memento Mori who wish to take a deeper dive into making. It will provide an opportunity to develop (and, if you wish, complete!) a death, mourning, mortally, or memento-mori-themed project over an eight-week ongoing discussion and critique and discussion with a group of like-minded creatives and makers.

Students are welcome to work in any medium they wish—from visual art to writing to puppetry to music to film, to anything else you can image.

This will be a loosely structured class, built around the themes that organically emerge from student work and inquiries. Based on this, the instructor will suggest readings and other media, and share artworks meant to inspire and expand ideas.

Opportunities will be available each week to show and discuss works in progress, allowing students to workshop their ideas drawing on the insights and comments of the Memento Mori Community and the instructor.

The Death and Resurrection Show: From Shaman to Superstar: A Reading Group

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In this six-week reading group, led by Morbid Anatomy Founder and Creative Director Joanna Ebenstein, we will read and discuss anthropologist Rogan Taylor’s seminal, provocative, and hugely influential 1985 book The Death and Resurrection Show: From Shaman to Superstar. As a final project, students will be invited to present a shamanistic interpretation—integrating all we have learned over the course of this class—to a performer or cultural producer of their choice. And, if we are lucky, the author will join us at some point to field questions and comments.

The book The Death and Resurrection Show traces the evolution of western show biz from its origins in the bizarre and spectacular performances of shamans -- the medicine men and women of nomadic tribes. Beginning with the ancient religion of shamanism, he describes a shaman's descent into the role of magical doctor -- his descent into the Underworld, his sufferings, eventual death, dismemberment and resurrection. Reborn, he subsequently flies to meet the spirits of the upper world before finally returning to earth as a shaman with full power.

The author finds that every single trick and stunt, song and dance, so familiar to us on the popular stage has its taproots in the shaman's re-enactment of these strange adventures. When the white rabbit emerges from the conjurer's top hat this is the last act; we no longer see the first, when the rabbit is dropped and dismembered. He concludes that show business still operates therapeutically in a way very similar to that of the shaman's ritual magic. Modern show biz, it appears, is anchored in the Underworld experience—in Hell itself.

This explains the established Church's long-standing opposition to all popular entertainment, maintained despite—or perhaps because of—the unmistakable similarity between the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that of the traditional shaman. ("Jesus descended into Hell. On the third day he rose again..." What did he do there?) It also explains the necessity for the disguising of show business and throws light upon the time of its emergence as a major cultural force in the modern age.

The author sees rock-and-roll particularly as the most obvious flowering of the ecstatic mystery inherent in the magic show. After tracing the development of show business from the shaman's healing performances through to the traveling show, pantomime, circus and popular music, and by examining the life stories of Houdini, Charlie Chaplin, Bessie Smith, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and David Bowie, he uncovers the direct line of descent from the shamans of the past to the superstars of today.