Psychostasis
How light will your soul be?
For creating my pieces, I begin with careful documentary research that gives me a clear and grounded understanding of the themes I’m working with. Alongside that, I explore fewer formal sources: personal observations, sketching, experience, … that help me widen the perspective and discover new ways of approaching the work.
“Psychostasis”. LiMiA crafts collection by Elara Elvira. 2025
One of the central themes I’ve been exploring lately is psychostasis—the weighing of souls. This symbolic moment, in which the soul is assessed after death, often depicted as being measured on a divine scale, has held a persistent place in religious and mythological imagery across cultures. It is a scene that appears frequently in Romanesque iconography, where Saint Michael, faces off against the devil, scale in hand, ready to settle the ultimate score. But this idea of a post-mortem judgment isn’t uniquely Christian, and we find it already in ancient Egyptian visual culture, with the heart weighed against the feather of Ma’at, and it pops up across civilizations like an event no one can cram for.
Page from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer, c. 1275 B.C.E. (19th Dynasty), painted papyrus, 40 x 87.5 cm (Thebes, Egypt, © The Trustees of the British Museum, London)
“Weighing of Souls” (psychostasis), Master of Soriguerola, altar side panel, late 13th century, tempera on panel. Episcopal Museum of Vic (MEV), inventory MEV 9694.
Since I visited the Episcopal Museum of Vic (Catalonia), I was obsessed with a 13th-century painted panel. This side panel painted by the Master of Soriguerola, belonged to an altar from the Vall de Ribes church and it is miraculously well preserved. In this scene, the message is striking and immediately evocative: we witness a moment of final judgment in which a devil and an angel weigh the destiny of a human soul. How do we position ourselves in relation to this idea? Could it evoke that enigmatic after death moment when each of us might be confronted with the full weight of our actions, invited to reckon with everything we have done throughout our lives?
I like to imagine, as the ancient Egyptians so vividly expressed in their iconography, that each of us will one day face a weighing of the soul.. This vision casts life as a profound training ground, a liminal space where the material and the ethereal are in perpetual tension, shaping the path of our existence. Rather than imagining a rigid, formal judgment, I am drawn to the image of the heart being measured, its weight will reflect the life we have lived and the choices we have made. Ultimately, the enduring question emerges: how light will our heart be as we cross into the unknown that lies beyond?