Death Gods and Mediumship Without An Afterlife

I do not believe there is an afterlife. I do not pretend to know this for sure, but I imagine being dead is an identical state to being unborn.

However, a cosmology without an afterlife can still have mediumship of sorts and here's why: Plato wrote dialogues with Socrates that may never have occurred (as Socrates was dead by then). If these dialogues never did occur, Plato might have said he was describing what Socrates would have said. It is the same thing with mediumship. It is possible to give one's best guess of what someone would have said if they were alive even if they are not alive to say it.

Lacking a belief in the afterlife also calls into question how to integrate death gods into my system of pantheism. In this system, gods are archetypes representing certain aspects of the universe. However, death gods do not fit this system well, as they do not describe a part of the universe that I believe exists. Jung dealt with this by making them "gods of the unconscious" but this does not fit well with how they were originally conceived.

I have also "rewrote" the gods of death, but not in the same way. Rather I write that the "underworld" is a series of memories of people. The collective mind of humanity is always trying to gather data, and this data takes the form of an "afterlife" filled with ghosts that are, not having a brain to support them, presumed non-sentient. They are philosophical zombies, beings who behave as if they have a mind, but don't have a mind... probably.

This worldview leaves room for agnosticism where life after death is concerned, because of what's known as the "teleportation paradox", which questions whether a teleported person, having been broken down and re-constituted, is still the same person with the same consciousness. In this system, the death gods transport a being that appears outside the body to the underworld. This being is composed of everything that person was, but it is impossible to tell if they are truly conscious, or were just programmed to give that impression, particularly since they have a habit of not behaving like a conscious being unless being observed by a living consciousness.

Therefore, in my pantheistic system, mediumship is talking to one of these "memory ghosts". It probably isn't real mediumship, but could still be useful for calculating what someone "would have said if they were alive".

Even with this replacement for the afterlife, gods of death still lose some of their perceived power. That's why my system increases the importance of these gods' powers over dreams, making them gods of fiction as a consequence of such power (stories and dreams are after all, the same thing).