The Funeral Rite is performed after the death of a werewolf. Its intent is threefold. First, it provides proper honor to the spirit of the valiant dead. Second, the rite
gives packmates, allies and friends of the deceased an opportunity to make their peace with his demise. Third, the ritual speeds the spirit of the dead werewolf on its way to the ancestor realms or into its next life.
This rite is said to have been first performed by the ancestors of the Pure Tribes upon the death of Father Wolf, and it’s rumored that performance laid waste to the
spirit world, wracking the very Earth with the agony of Father Wolf’s death. The modern form of the ritual has no such effect.
Performing the Rite
This ritual usually takes roughly an hour to perform. The ritualist and all participants smear a small amount of their own blood onto both the corpse of the subject and the location of the body’s final resting place (whether a grave or funeral pyre, or into the ocean’s water). Specifics of the ritual vary from region to region, but it always includes a howl of mourning. The ritual ends with the interring of the corpse — again, whether underground, in a cairn, on a pyre or into the water varies.
