Psychopomp, from the Greek psychopompos, guide of souls, names a figure whose religious job is not to cause death or to judge the dead but to conduct a soul from the world of the living into whatever lies beyond. The role recurs with striking consistency across unrelated traditions. Hermes carries this title in Greek religion, leading shades down to the underworld and delivering them to Charon's boat; Anubis performs an equivalent function in Egyptian funerary religion, escorting the deceased to the hall of judgment.
Azrael, the angel of death in Islamic tradition, and the Valkyries who choose the slain for Odin's hall in Norse belief, both carry souls onward even where killing and guiding are entangled in the same figure. Yama, lord of the dead in Vedic and later Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, dispatches messengers to fetch the dying.
Shamanic traditions across Siberia, the Americas and Southeast Asia give the role to an animal spirit, a bird or a dog, who leads the shaman's own soul on journeys the dead will later take unaided. The consistency of the figure across traditions with no historical contact suggests the role answers a structural need in funerary religion: someone or something must make the passage make sense, standing at the boundary and walking it with the dying.