Psychopomp: Crossing Over Passage in Ancient Ghostlore

An angel leading a soul into hell. Oil painting by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch Source: CC BY 4.0 

Modern science has, for the last two centuries, replaced most of the spirits, entities, demons and ghosts of the ancient world with logical explanations demonstrated through scientific experimentation, but there is no arguing that people in the ancient world mostly believed the human soul existed somewhere else after death, in an afterlife, and that the quality of the soul’s next life depended greatly on how their bodily remains were disposed of after death, evident in preservation methods such as mummification. A psychopomp refers to an entity that guides the soul to cross over the realm of the afterlife. 

According to Ancient Encyclopedia, ghosts appear in the cultures of Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Mesoamerica and all over the Celtic world, and while descriptions of afterlives differ from culture to culture, often from village to village, ghosts of the dead seen at their mortal lands and properties were intercepted as omens of things in this reality being ‘out of alignment,’ or anomalies in the spiritual world, and great steps were taken to assist tormented souls on their way to the other side and to clear these perceived blockages in the flow of crossing over to the other world. 

According to a 2009 study by the Pew Research Center, 18% of modern Americans believe they have seen a ghost.

Today these apparitions are most often called: spirits, phantoms, wraiths, poltergeists and specters, and they are generally believed to be the restless souls or spirits of dead people. However, all modern ghostlore is founded upon the ancestor worship of ancient cultures who had an animated belief system and associated ghosts with specific locations, things and people that they had interacted with while alive. It is in the spirit sciences of past civilizations where one finds the ancient origins of the otherworldly agents who make things ‘go bump in the night’. 

Weighing The Soul In Ancient Egypt 

All sightings of ghosts in ancient Egypt were reported with haste to the high priests who deemed these occurrences as being of the greatest prophetic importance. All going according to plan, after death, souls were believed to have travelled to the Hall of Truth where they were judged by Osiris and his 42 divine judges.