Thanatos Eeros was conceived by the Melbourne Death Avenger’s Collective in 2025 as a wisdom commons for those of us seeking insight, inspiration or solace in connection with our end of life journey. Thanatos is one of the great psychopomps of Greek mythology, the guide of the human souls responsible for escorting the newly deceased from this life into the afterlife.

Sigmund Freud takes Thanatos to be the personification of death to explain what he believed to be an innate drive to annihilation in human beings, which was opposite to the human drive represented by Eros, the Greek god of love. In his essay, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he represents Eros as the life force that regulates the human libido in opposition to Thanatos. According to Freud, these opposing psychological drives are in constant struggle as creativity and harmony counterbalance the forces of self-destruction.

This digital space was seeded by the idea that life can be experienced as an oscillation between light and darkness, and that we are all moved by the yearning to unravel the mystery of life and death. This is not a morbid curiosity, but rather a universal human desire to make sense of this life, while not knowing when it is going to be taken away, or as Leonardo Da Vinci reflected, ‘While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die’.

Thanatos Eros welcomes all wisdom traditions, into the shining light of death’s eternal mysteries.