Afterlife Realms and Cosmologies — Side Notes
Every culture draws a map of what comes next—and none of them agree on the borders. Some realms are neatly tiered, others are tangled thickets of tests and transformations. There are heavens built on reward, underworlds shaped by memory, faerie lands that run sideways to time, and crossroads where the living are warned not to linger too long. These cosmologies don’t exist to promise certainty. They exist to give shape to the unknown.
The Side Notes in this section approach the afterlife as a storytelling instinct rather than a theological claim. These pieces explore how humans imagine continuation, transition, and return—how death becomes geography, how morality turns into landscape, and how liminal spaces keep appearing wherever people feel the veil thin. You’ll find cultural comparisons, folklore commentary, and modern curiosity that treats these realms as symbolic systems with teeth.
This is not a guidebook for where you’re going. It’s an examination of why we keep drawing maps anyway.
Featured Side Notes
You can also find these articles—and many more—within the main Grimoire Blog.
Día de los Muertos: Celebrating Life Beyond the Veil — When the veil thins and marigolds blaze like captured suns, Mexico’s Día de los Muertos invites the dead to dance among the living. Altars bloom with offerings, candles flicker like whispers, and love defies the grave in this hauntingly beautiful celebration of life, death, and memory.
From Ancestor Veneration to Spirit Festivals: Death Beliefs Around the World — From lantern-lit rivers in Japan to drum-thundered funerals in Ghana and solemn ancestral rites in Korea, discover how cultures worldwide honor the dead. These rituals are more than tradition—they are conversations with the beyond, where memory, fear, and love blur the line between life and death.
Keys in Myth & Magic: Unlocking Doors Between Worlds — Unlock the mystery of keys in myth and magic. From crossroads spirits to talismanic charms, skeleton keys and symbolic designs act as portals, protective tools, and gateways between worlds, capturing the imagination of modern witches and social media-savvy mystics.
Night Visions and Omens: Ancient Dream Symbols for Today — From serpents and floods to flickering flames, dream symbols have guided humanity for millennia. In 2025, witches blend ancient interpretations with digital dream-sharing communities on Reddit, decoding omens that feel as timeless as they are urgent. The night remains a theater of prophecy, mystery, and transformation.
Rituals for the Departed: Funeral Practices That Bridge Worlds — Across continents, funeral rites do more than mourn—they bridge worlds. From sky burials to lantern-lit rivers, explore mystical ceremonies that honor the dead and invite their presence among the living.
The Bermuda Triangle: Navigating the Mystery Between Science and Legend — Explore the Bermuda Triangle, where legend and science collide. From vanishing ships to magnetic anomalies and methane eruptions, uncover chilling mysteries and natural explanations behind one of the world’s most infamous regions.
The Cry of the Banshee: Omens of Death in Folklore – How Different Societies Interpret Spirits That Forewarn Mortality — From the wailing banshees of Ireland to Mexico’s tragic La Llorona, spirits forewarn of death across cultures. Explore chilling folklore, omens, and the spectral cries that bridge the living and the dead.
The Hungry Ghost: China’s Scariest Festival Legend — Uncover the eerie tale of China’s Hungry Ghost Festival—an ancient tradition where restless spirits demand offerings and vengeance. Are you brave enough to learn more?
Afterlife realms persist because they answer questions logic refuses to settle. What happens to memory? Where does responsibility go? Can the dead still speak, and if so, from where? The Side Notes don’t try to unify these answers or declare one cosmology superior. They examine how each system reflects the values, fears, and hopes of the culture that imagined it.
Some entries here may feel mythic and distant. Others may feel uncomfortably familiar. That’s the nature of liminal thinking—it blurs edges and resists closure. These notes aren’t meant to reassure. They’re meant to contextualize why the unknown has always been given architecture.
The maps will never match. The borders will always shift. But the impulse to look beyond the threshold—and name what might be waiting—remains one of humanity’s most persistent acts of meaning-making.
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