The juice of those who have lived, and lived well, therefore, is able to be taken back up by life again to renew the vitality of manifestation. Manifestation, being a fixation process of determining possibilities (through the roulette of deed), has a tendency towards encrustation and rigidity, and would dry up like a husk if it were not forever renewed by the waters that flow as saps through the World-Tree. These waters run from Hel and replenish the manifest world.
The sap or mead is said to be a mead of "wisdom" because it literally holds the essences of those intelligences which have flowed into it. As souls come back into Hel, their experience, intelligence, and wisdom is taken up into the Well of Wisdom which nourishes the World-Tree's roots. Death involves the implication of all the soul experienced in its explicit manifestation into the matrix of the life-process itself.
When we give attention to the heirlooms left behind, we honor the givers, and that honor resonates into the heart of the interiority within the All.
The reabsorption and recycling of the soul has been compared by mystics to a drop of water re-entering the Ocean, and there is truth to this, on one level, yet the interior matrix, while richly interconnected in a way which might be described as "One" (numerals utilized from the manifest world imperfectly grasp the implicate order), is also highly differentiate in its plasmatic flow, so that within the divine communion of everything, as it were, the monads of essentiality still circulate, and thus when we envision ancestral life in kindred halls of the Underworld, while it is a translation, it is a translation that conveys and contributes towards our understanding of a truth much shrouded to manifest eyes.
The mystics emphasize One, the atheists Zero. The atheist says, they are not here anymore. They are nowhere. And relative to the manifest world, they are certainly right, to a degree. Yet even in this material realm, as the famous poem Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant asserts, there is a recycling into the world, not without its sense. The agnostic might say, well, the living have their memories, and the dead often appear in dreams. To the heathen, dreams are signs of another order of this living cosmos of ours, stained-glass windows onto the interiority of the cosmos. When I sing songs to my fallen dead, that part of the All congruent with my fallen resonates with implicate, crackling intelligence.
To say that someone is "dead" is literally with our language to say that they are "deeded". "I have done what I can" in this world, their death declares. Their deeds, for better or for worse, lay tracks of subtle legacy. The JudaeoChristian tradition speaks of being written into the Book of Life, a great image that we might translate as : being etched into the World-Tree, declared into permanent existence.
