What Does Paganism Say About Pets in the Afterlife

Your pet is probably in the next room right now, slower on the stairs than they were, and you’ve started doing the arithmetic you promised yourself you wouldn’t do. Here’s the short answer you came for. Most pagan paths do place animals in whatever comes next, and not one of them treats your pet as a soulless thing or your grief as a mistake.

What paganism says about pets in the afterlife depends on which pagan path you’re standing on, because paganism is not one religion. The word covers Wicca and witchcraft, Heathenry, Druidry, Hellenic and Kemetic reconstruction, animist practice, and a great many solitary paths that draw on several of those at once.

Some of these traditions name an afterlife and put animals in it. Some are deliberately quiet about what comes after. None has a catechism, and nobody speaks for all of them.

That sounds like a non-answer until you notice what sits underneath. These traditions disagree about the destination and agree almost completely about the animal. Across all of them, and across the archaeology beneath them, animals are participants in death rather than property left at the door.

A few of the most repeated claims about pagan afterlife beliefs don’t hold up to scrutiny, and we’ll say which ones and why. The correcting isn’t the point, though. These traditions are warmer than their internet versions and much older.

Key Takeaways

• Paganism has no single position here. Wicca’s Summerland, Heathenry’s mound-dwelling dead, and Druidry’s Otherworld are different answers, and many practitioners hold several loosely.
• No major pagan tradition holds that your pet is soulless, or treats grief for an animal as a category error. That’s usually the real question underneath the question.
• The Summerland is a Spiritualist idea from 1845 that Wicca later adopted, and the belief that animals wait there came from the same source, not modern pet culture.
• The strongest evidence that people on these paths grieved animals as you’re grieving is not doctrine. It’s the graves, which have held humans and their animals together for twelve thousand years.

Why Paganism Has No Single Answer About Pets in the Afterlife

Paganism is an umbrella term, not a denomination, so no central authority rules on where animals go. Wiccans, Heathens, Druids, Hellenic and Kemetic polytheists, and eclectic solitary practitioners all sit under one word while holding genuinely different ideas about death. What they share is narrower, and it still matters here.

That shared ground is a general orientation toward nature, and a flat refusal of the idea that only humans matter spiritually. Having no central answer is a feature, not a gap. Most pagan paths put the work of deciding what you believe on you, which is generous on an ordinary Tuesday and very hard at eleven at night, when the food bowl hasn’t been touched since morning.

You’re in more company than the numbers suggest. The Pagan Federation reports that the 2021 census for England and Wales recorded about 74,000 people identifying as Pagan, alongside roughly 13,000 Wiccans, 4,722 Heathens, and 2,489 Druids. The Federation adds a caveat: many Pagans feel more comfortable selecting “No Religion.” The count is a floor, not a ceiling.

What we hear from pet parents on pagan paths is usually a version of the same worry. The tradition they built a life around turns out to have nothing specific to say about the one death they can’t face.

That worry is real, and it deserves a straight answer, not a pat on the arm. The quiet in some of these traditions isn’t indifference to animals. Look at where these paths do speak, and at what their people actually did with their dead, and the animal is there every time.

The paths converge on the status of your pet. No major pagan tradition holds that they are a soulless mechanism, and none of them treats grief for an animal as a category error. That’s not nothing, when the wider culture still hands people the word “just” before the word “pet.” Our pet loss spirituality and beliefs section gathers what other traditions hold if you want to read across them.

Wicca, the Summerland, and Where That Idea Actually Came From

Most Wiccans who name an afterlife name the Summerland, a place of rest and reunion where the soul recovers before returning to a new life. Pets are widely understood to be there. The tradition is real, the comfort is real, and the idea’s origin is older and stranger than most online sources suggest.

The Summerland Began in Spiritualism, Not in Wicca

The term comes from the American seer Andrew Jackson Davis. The Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology records that Davis, known as the Poughkeepsie Seer, introduced the Summerland in 1845 through his published automatic writings, and that he credited Emanuel Swedenborg with dictating material to him while he was entranced.

From there it traveled through Spiritualism and Theosophy and into Wicca in the middle of the twentieth century. Gerald Gardner didn’t coin it, and the Summerland doesn’t originate in Wicca at all.

None of that makes the Summerland less yours. Borrowed is how religions work, and Christmas trees are borrowed. The lineage is traceable and interesting, and knowing it means you never have to defend an ancient pedigree the idea doesn’t need.

What Wiccan and Spiritualist Sources Say About Pets in the Afterlife

The belief that your animals wait in the Summerland belongs to Spiritualism at least as much as to Wicca, which makes it much older than the pet-loss industry that usually gets blamed for it.

Britain’s main Spiritualist body, the Spiritualists’ National Union, still publishes Harold Sharp’s Animals in the Spirit World, which teaches that death can never sever that bond and that reunion with beloved animals is inevitable. That’s a religious position with a long paper trail, not a sentiment invented to sell keepsakes.

There’s also genuine pagan pet-loss literature, and almost nobody cites it. Eleanor L. Harris published Pet Loss: A Spiritual Guide with Llewellyn, the major Wiccan and Pagan press, in the late 1990s. She writes there about reincarnation and about uniting again with beloved pets in the Summerland.

A named practitioner, on a pagan press, nearly thirty years ago, writing about exactly what you’re facing tonight. That book is worth knowing about if anyone ever suggests this is a new idea.

What you won’t find is a Wiccan doctrinal statement on animal souls, because Wicca doesn’t produce those. The Scott Cunningham line that circulates, about the soul continuing across all living beings, doesn’t appear to trace back to a specific book or page, so it’s worth holding loosely rather than leaning on. You don’t need it, because the Spiritualist material says the same thing and can be pointed at.

Heathenry, Norse Sources, and Animals in the Afterlife

Heathenry is the umbrella term most scholars and large organizations now use for modern Norse and Germanic polytheism, with Ásatrú still common in Iceland. On where animals go, Heathen bodies publish almost nothing, and honest reporting means saying so. What Norse tradition offers instead is stronger than doctrine, and it comes out of the ground.

The Four-Part Soul, and What It Does and Doesn’t Cover

Modern Heathen writing often describes a soul in four parts: hugr, hamr, hamingja and fylgja. That enumeration is worth understanding and worth holding loosely, because scholars don’t agree that the Norse held any single tidy model.

The archaeologist Neil Price uses a fourfold division in Children of Ash and Elm, glossing hamr as body or shape, hugr as personality, hamingja as fortune, and fylgja as a protector spirit. Claude Lecouteux, working on the same material, identifies three rather than four.

Rudolf Simek and Andy Orchard both treat hamingja primarily as personified luck rather than as a soul-part. The exact four-part list that circulates in Heathenry today was popularized by the occult author Edred Thorsson in 1984 and carried forward by Kveldulf Gundarsson. That’s a real lineage, just a recent one.

One claim is worth setting aside. You will read that these soul-concepts applied to animals as well as humans, and the attested sources don’t support it. The confusion almost certainly comes from the fylgja, which very often appears in animal form, most commonly as a dog.

But that’s a human being’s fylgja wearing an animal shape, which is a different claim. If you’ve been holding onto the four-part soul as your reason for hoping, you can let it go without losing anything. What comes next is firmer ground.

Where the Norse Dead Were Said to Go

The neat split between Valhalla for warriors and Hel for everyone else comes mostly from one source. Snorri Sturluson, writing in Christian Iceland two centuries after conversion, records in Gylfaginning that Odin cast Hel into Niflheim and gave her power to apportion abodes among those sent to her, naming them the dead of sickness or old age.

Most people die of sickness or old age, so on Snorri’s account most people go to Hel. The realm is Hel, incidentally, not Helheim, which is a modern convenience form.

Against tidying any of this up stands The Road to Hel, published in 1943 by the scholar now usually called Hilda Ellis Davidson. She found the sources full of conflicting and contradictory evidence, with Valhalla only one of many conflicting pictures of the realm of the dead.

She singled out Snorri’s own literary reconstruction as perhaps the most misleading path of all for anyone trying to recover Norse heathen thought. Even the battle-dead are split, since Snorri gives Freyja half the slain at Fólkvangr. There was never one Norse answer to hold you to.

The Dead Who Stay in the Mound

Where the Norse dead most persistently stay is the mound. The Troth, one of the largest inclusive Heathen organizations in the United States, says honoring the dead is one of the oldest practices documented in the tradition, going back to the Stone Age with grave goods.

The same page notes that in Old Norse sources and Scandinavian folklore, the dead are sometimes called álfar, especially those still dwelling in their mounds. The dead stay near. They stay on the land, in the place they were laid, close to the people who tend them.

For some, that’s the better consolation, and it’s the one that asks least of you. It doesn’t require believing in a country you can’t picture. It asks you to keep a place. If that idea lands, our piece on whether pets’ spirits stay with us after they pass away sits right beside it.

You may also encounter the claim that modern Ásatrú practitioners believe pets accompany their humans to Hel. No Heathen organization publishes that. The Troth writes at length about the dead without mentioning animals, Iceland’s Ásatrúarfélagið publishes no English-language statement on it, and Sweden’s Nordiska Asa-samfundet has a dedicated page on the afterlife covering Hel and Valhalla with no mention of animals.

Modern Heathen writing generally leans toward conduct and reputation in this life rather than mapping the next one. The silence is a habit of the tradition, not a judgment about your pet.

What Norse Graves Show About Animals

Norse sources are quiet about animal afterlives. Norse burials are not.

The Oseberg ship burial in Norway, dated by tree rings to 834, held two women, fifteen horses, four dogs, and one ox. The museum’s own reading is that in Norse mythology the horse carries the dead to the next world, and that sacrificing the animals must have been an important and dramatic part of the funeral. Gokstad, from around 900, held at least twelve horses and six dogs.

Ordinary cemeteries tell the same story, far beyond the famous ship burials. The archaeologist Anne-Sofie Gräslund surveyed dogs in Scandinavian burials and found dog bones in most of roughly 700 graves at Lindholm Høje, in almost half of the cremation graves at Tuna i Badelunda, and in 28 of the 31 osteologically identified women’s graves at Valsgärde.

One seventh-century cremation at Rickeby held four dogs of at least three types. A grave at Arninge held eleven. The people buried with dogs are not only warriors. Women as often as men, in ordinary ground, for centuries.

Gräslund’s conclusion is more interesting than sentiment. She writes that the dog may well have been a beloved companion, but may also have carried a deeper symbolic meaning, and that the mythical dog seems to be a medium on the border between the living and the dead. The dog is not luggage. The dog is the one who goes across with you.

Horses in Icelandic Viking Age Graves

Iceland says something similar with horses. Ancient DNA work on Viking Age burials there tested nineteen horses from graves and found eighteen of them male, and reported that of 355 Icelandic Viking Age burials studied, 148 contained horse remains. These were selected animals, not spare meat.

One of the study’s authors, Sanne Boessenkool, framed it carefully when the work was published, saying that if these people believed in a life after death, they may have thought the horse had a function there. The literature agrees with the trowel in one line. At the greatest funeral in Norse myth, the burning of Baldr, the gods put his horse on the pyre with him.

Does the Rainbow Bridge Come From Norse Mythology?

No. The Rainbow Bridge poem was written in 1959 by Edna Clyne-Rekhy, a nineteen-year-old in Scotland, after her Labrador Major died in her arms. Her authorship was confirmed only in 2023. The poem has no connection to Bifröst or to any Norse source.

National Geographic reported the discovery in February 2023. Art historian Paul Koudounaris kept coming across the poem while working on a book about pet cemeteries, and eventually reviewed about 25 candidate authors before reaching Clyne-Rekhy in January 2023, who still had her handwritten original.

She wrote it near Inverness because her mother suggested she put her grief on paper. She had no idea the world had been reading it for more than sixty years.

The Norse connection is a resemblance that hardened into a claim as the poem was passed along. The image does look like Bifröst, and somewhere in the retelling “looks like” quietly became “comes from.” No transmission path connects thirteenth-century Iceland to a Scottish teenager writing privately about her dog.

Keep the resemblance if you like it. Two people about seven hundred years apart both reached for a rainbow to describe a crossing, which says something quiet about human beings. What the poem does for people doesn’t depend on where it came from, and our piece on finding comfort in the Rainbow Bridge when a pet dies stays with that part.

Druidry, the Celtic Otherworld, and What Happens to Animals

Modern Druidry teaches an Otherworld that souls travel to at death and a cycle of rebirth that can include animal forms. Ancient testimony about the Celts supports the immortality of the soul and says nothing whatsoever about animals. Both statements are true. The gap between them is worth seeing clearly, not papering it over.

What the Oldest Sources Say, and What They Leave Out

Everything Rome recorded about druidic afterlife belief fits on one page. Caesar wrote in De Bello Gallico that souls don’t perish but pass from one person to another. Diodorus Siculus and Strabo say souls are immortal. Where they go is not specified.

Pomponius Mela calls them eternal and describes a second life among the dead. Lucan calls death the middle of a long life. Not one of the five mentions animals, and that absence is where much confident internet writing about Celtic pet afterlives has nothing underneath it.

Living Druidry says something different, and openly. The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids teaches that the soul undergoes successive reincarnations, either always in human form or in a variety of forms that might include trees and even rocks as well as animals.

OBOD also describes the Otherworld as the place we travel to when we die, reachable in life through dream, meditation and journeying. It reports a second-century idea from Philostratus: to be born into this world, we have to die in the Otherworld, and when we die here, we’re born into the Otherworld.

That last line is worth sitting with if your animal is close to the end. It reframes the direction of travel entirely. Somewhere, on that account, there’s an arrival, and somebody is being met.

Practitioners and classicists genuinely diverge here, and neither side is simply wrong. Caesar was a general describing foreign priests he had every reason to misunderstand, while OBOD is describing a living theology of interconnection that has been developing for centuries. If the rebirth side is where your hope sits, our piece on pet reincarnation beliefs and the signs people look for goes further into it.

Samhain, the Veil, and Setting a Place for Your Animal

Samhain is where most people expect to find the pagan festival of the dead, and the history is messier than the festival’s reputation. Ronald Hutton, first in The Stations of the Sun and again in a 2024 article in Folklore on the Celtic new year and the feast of the dead, traces the orthodoxy that the pagan Celts held Samhain as their new year and their great commemoration of the dead to two Victorian and Edwardian scholars, Sir John Rhys and Sir James Frazer, rather than to medieval evidence.

Early Irish tales treat Samhain as a night when the boundaries go strange, with the sídhe standing open. They don’t describe pagan religious observance.

“The thinning of the veil” is a modern devotional phrase. It appears nowhere in the medieval Irish sources, and the printed attestations that can be traced sit in modern devotional writing about Samhain rather than in anything Irish and medieval.

The practice is genuinely old. Irish and Scottish households put food and drink out for returning dead on November Eve, a custom recorded in collections like Kevin Danaher’s The Year in Ireland. People set a place. People left the door on the latch.

Extending that to a dog or a cat is a modern addition, and there’s no historical attestation for it. Set the bowl down anyway. Traditions are not artifacts under glass, and they grow because living people add to them.

A custom of feeding your returning dead that excluded the member of the household who most reliably turned up at dinner would be a strange custom indeed.

Animism and Whether Your Pet Has a Soul

Animism is the position that the world is full of persons, most of whom are not human, and that the right response to them is relationship rather than classification. Applied to your pet, the animist answer isn’t a smaller version of yes. The question itself is slightly off.

Victorian anthropology gave us the word. E. B. Tylor, in Primitive Culture in 1871, defined religion minimally as belief in spiritual beings and built animism on a doctrine of souls extending to animals, plants, and objects. Tylor meant it as an evolutionary theory, with animism as the earliest and most primitive stage of religion.

Anthropology has since turned that on its head. Nurit Bird-David’s 1999 paper in Current Anthropology reframed animism as a relational epistemology rather than a failure of reasoning, describing a world understood as a community of related humans and nonhumans.

On that account, knowing something comes through being in relationship with it rather than standing back and observing. Graham Harvey’s Animism: Respecting the Living World carried the idea forward, drawing on A. Irving Hallowell’s Ojibwe fieldwork and the category of other-than-human persons.

So the animist answer to your question is this. Your pet is a person. You’re in relationship with a person, and that relationship is the real thing, not a projection you laid over an animal.

Harvey’s operative word is respecting, not believing, which matters when you’re too tired to believe much of anything. For someone anticipating a loss, that reframing does specific work. What you’re carrying isn’t out of proportion to a pet. It’s in proportion to a person, which is exactly what it feels like from inside.

Hellenic and Kemetic Paths on Animal Souls

Reconstructionist paths that rebuild ancient Greek and Egyptian practice inherit two of the most generous ancient positions on animals, and one of the least. Neither movement publishes a formal position on where pets go, so what follows is the ancient material and what living organizations actually say.

The oldest surviving story about Pythagoras is about a dog. Xenophanes, a contemporary and a hostile one, records that Pythagoras once told a man to stop beating a puppy, saying he recognized the soul of a friend in the animal’s yelping.

Xenophanes told the story to mock him. Twenty-five centuries later, it reads as tenderness. The fourth-century BCE writer Dicaearchus gives the most secure early account of what Pythagoras taught, listing the soul’s immortality and its transmigration into other kinds of animals as his best-known doctrines.

Aristotle went the other way. In De Anima, he grants animals a perceptive soul that plants lack, along with nutrition and movement. Still, he holds that the soul is not separable from the body, with a possible exception for intellect. On that account, an animal’s soul doesn’t survive death.

If that one stings, notice what it costs him. On most readings, Aristotle says the same thing about you. It’s a claim about souls in general, not a verdict on your pet’s.

Modern Hellenic polytheists hold a range of positions. The Pagan Federation sets out the common ones: the dead descend into Hades as shades of their former selves; the more deserving reach the Asphodel Meadows; and for some, Hades is a resting place before the soul drinks the waters of forgetfulness and is reincarnated.

Sallustius describes the body as a vessel the soul operates, like a driver operating a vehicle. Egypt is where animals appear most explicitly in the funerary record, and Kemetic practice today keeps household shrines for the Akhu, the blessed dead. The Egyptian evidence for animals isn’t doctrine at all. It’s objects, and the objects say more than a doctrine would.

What Ancient Graves Show About Grieving an Animal

The most persuasive evidence that people on pre-Christian paths grieved animals the way you’re grieving isn’t written down. It was dug up. Across twelve thousand years and several continents, humans kept burying their animals beside them, often with the same care and goods they gave their own dead.

The Oldest Grave of a Human and a Dog

At Eynan, also called ʿAin Mallaha, in northern Israel, a Natufian burial holds an adult, probably a woman though the pelvis is too damaged to be certain, laid on the right side in a tight fetal position. The museum that holds the material describes the right hand resting on the remains of a puppy, curled up near the head. The animal was between three and five months old.

Simon Davis and François Valla published the find in Nature in 1978 as evidence for dog domestication roughly 12,000 years ago. The earliest solid archaeological evidence that dogs and humans belonged to each other is also a burial in which someone arranged a dead person’s hand to rest on a puppy.

Nobody has done anything meaningfully different since. Whatever you end up doing when the time comes, some version of it is twelve thousand years old.

Mesolithic Scandinavia went further. At Skateholm in southern Sweden, dogs were given grave goods and strewn with red ochre, reflecting a symbolism that appears to have applied to humans and dogs alike. The same rite, for both kinds of dead, in the same ground.

Egyptian Burials That Record a Pet by Name

Egypt put it in writing. A dog named Abuwtiyuw, styled “the guard of His Majesty,” was buried at Giza with a state funeral, and George Reisner’s translation of the inscription records the king ordering a coffin from the royal treasury, fine linen in great quantity, incense and perfumed ointment, and a tomb built by the gangs of masons.

Reisner’s reading of the purpose is explicit. The king had the dog buried this way so that, like a human buried this way, their ka might enter the afterlife as an honored spirit. A god-king spent state resources so a dog would be comfortable after death, and had the name carved so it would last. It has lasted more than four thousand years.

Cats too. Crown Prince Thutmose, heir to Amenhotep III, gave his cat Ta-Miu a carved limestone sarcophagus, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo as JE 30172. She stands before a table heaped with offerings, beside a lotus, with Isis kneeling and Bastet attending. The heir to the throne of Egypt commissioned the same funerary program for his cat as he expected for himself.

The Oldest Known Pet Cemetery

The detail that undoes most people comes from a Roman-era port. At Berenike on the Red Sea, excavation of a first- and second-century animal cemetery recovered 585 animals, around 90 percent of them cats, wearing iron collars and necklaces of glass and shell. One cat was laid on a large bird’s wing. A monkey was wrapped in a woolen blanket.

Several of the dogs were elderly, with tooth loss, gum disease, and worn joints, and some had recovered from earlier injuries. The lead researcher, Marta Osypińska, put it in one sentence: “Such animals had to be fed to survive, sometimes with special foods in the case of the almost-toothless animals.”

Somebody at the edge of the Roman Empire hand-fed an old dog with no teeth, for years, and then buried them wrapped in cloth. Archaeologists are careful here, and rightly so, because the record doesn’t always separate a companion from a working animal. What it does show is years of feeding an animal who could no longer earn their keep.

If you’re currently syringe-feeding, or carrying someone up the back step, or getting up twice a night, that’s the oldest job there is. Other traditions have kept it up too, and our piece on Native American pet memorial traditions takes a close look at one of them.

Pagan Rituals and Practices for a Pet Who’s Dying or Gone

Pagan paths are light on doctrine and heavy on practice, and the practice is the part we’d point you to tonight, because you can do it while you’re frightened. Belief can wait. Nothing below asks you to have settled what you think happens next.

Build somewhere to put the attention. An altar can be a shelf with their collar, a photograph, a candle, and their old water bowl. The bowl matters more than people expect, because it gives the caretaking somewhere to go once the feeding and the pills stop.

Make the offerings ordinary. Heathen ancestor practice, as The Troth describes it, runs on favorite foods and drinks, family recipes, tended graves, and pictures kept where you’ll see them.

Applied to an animal, that means their food, not something symbolic. A biscuit. The specific treat that got them off the couch.

Marking the Days and Saying the Name

Mark Samhain if the calendar and your tradition suit it. Set a place, leave food out overnight, say their name aloud in a house where everyone else has stopped saying it.

Speaking the name is doing more work than it looks like. The silence that closes over an animal’s name is one of the specific cruelties of this kind of grief, and you can break it deliberately, on a set date, every year.

Some people find their way to an animal communicator or medium, and pagan practice tends to be comfortable with that in a way mainstream grief culture is not. If that’s a direction you’re considering, the animal communicators and mediums in our directory are a place to start. Keep the standards you’d use for any practitioner, and treat a session as one part of your support, not the whole.

Write. Alan U. Dalul, writing in The Wild Hunt after the death of his miniature schnauzer Cucho, describes finding solace in writing his way through the grief rather than around it, and says of the loss that “it is not the end of the road, but a turn in a different direction.”

He also began working with a goddess he hadn’t approached before, which captures how grief shifts people’s practice. For more structure, our collection of healing rituals for honoring a pet after loss gathers fifteen more, most of which adapt to any path or to none.

Deciding Aftercare Before You Have To

The one practical thing worth doing early is choosing what happens to the body, because that decision is far harder in the first hour after. There are two routes, cremation and burial, and then a separate decision about a memorial. Our pet aftercare and memorials section covers all three in detail.

Private cremation returns your pet’s ashes to you, and nobody else’s. Communal cremation doesn’t return ashes. Ask which option you’re being quoted for, because the wording varies between providers and that difference is the whole point. Our pet cremation directory lists providers by area.

Home burial is legal in many places and prohibited in others, so check your local rules before you plan. Ask your vet directly whether burial is safe after euthanasia, because the answer affects where and how deep. Pet cemeteries are the alternative where home burial isn’t allowed.

A memorial tree suits these paths better than a stone does. You can plant it over ashes or entirely separately, and the memorial trees in our shop are set up for either.

Whichever route you choose, ask for an itemized quote up front. Prices vary widely by region and by weight, and grief is a bad time to discover what was and wasn’t included.

Facing a Pet’s Death on a Pagan Path

You may have come here to find out whether your tradition promises you’ll see your pet again. Some pagan paths say yes. Some say the dead stay near the places and the people they loved. Some hold that everything returns in another form, and some decline to speculate.

You’re allowed to hold more than one at once, and most practitioners do. What the record is unambiguous about isn’t the destination. It’s the seriousness.

Twelve thousand years of graves say that people who lived on these paths, or paths like them, put their animals in the ground with grave goods and ochre and linen and incense, deliberately, and at cost. Whatever you’re feeling about the pet asleep in the next room, it isn’t a modern indulgence, and it isn’t out of proportion.

Two more practical things, because paganism tends to be practical. Ask at the vet’s office what the last stage is likely to look like for this specific condition, and what a quality-of-life scale would say about this week, so the night itself and the drive there hold fewer surprises. And let somebody know, ideally somebody who won’t put the word “just” in front of the word “pet.” If nobody in your life fits that description, our pet loss grief counselors and support groups and communities exist for exactly that gap.

Some people also use tarot as a way to reflect, and our guide to tarot cards after pet loss looks at how it can fit into grieving.

The grief that starts before the death is its own documented thing, and our pet anticipatory grief resources are built for the stage you may be in right now. Whatever you believe about paganism and pets in the afterlife, you don’t have to have it settled tonight. The candle works either way.

On this topic

Keep reading

• Rainbow Bridge vs. Religious Afterlife: Pet Loss Beliefs Compared →
• Talking to Your Pet After They Pass Away: Is It Healthy? →
• What Does Hinduism Say About Pets in the Afterlife? →
• Do Pets’ Spirits Stay With Us After They Pass Away? →