I first turned fascinated by dying once I was 8 and my mummy took me to the British Museum to have a look at the mummies. When, at a barely older age, I started to check dying and the traditional world what struck me most, regardless of many desirable cultural variants, was the uniformity, and limitation of the human creativeness over the millennia vis-à-vis what to anticipate once we’re gone.
The COVID pandemic and its aftermath have killed greater than 1,220,000 people within the U.S. alone, and this has made everybody more aware of dying’s omnipresence. However within the historic world, you wanted no such wake-up name. Your probabilities of celebrating your first birthday weren’t a lot better than two in three. In case you survived and had been male, you can maybe anticipate to achieve your mid-40s. In case you had been feminine, your life expectancy dropped to your mid- to late 30s. A birthing mom’s odds of surviving labor had been grim. “I’d reasonably struggle in battle 3 times than give beginning as soon as,” says Medea, within the play by Euripides.
Large killers of the traditional world had been bronchitis, gastroenteritis, tuberculosis, malaria and cholera, which affected folks of all social standing. Plague was an everyday seasonal customer, typically carrying off as a lot as a 3rd of the inhabitants. Floods washed away total settlements, and fireplace was an ever-present hazard. Earthquakes, too, took a really heavy toll. The Roman poet Horace’s recommendation to “seize the day” — carpe diem —couldn’t have been extra becoming.
As we speak, folks have the choice of dying in a hospital or in a hospice . However there was nothing remotely corresponding to skilled, institution-based palliative care in antiquity. In case you didn’t die in conflict or at sea, you breathed your final within the bosom of your loved ones.
And besides in Egypt and Rome, the place the dying business was full of life, undertakers had been just about unknown. As a substitute, the household, girls particularly, took care of the lifeless, washing and clothes the corpse in a shroud and getting ready it for viewing within the dwelling. Maybe due to these intimacies, the funeral itself was something however the solemn and muted affair it tends to be in our tradition. Women and men beat their heads and breasts, poured mud on their hair, tore their clothes, rolled on the bottom and bewailed their loss in a paroxysm of grief. Polytheistic faith had little to supply by the use of consolation or comfort. How may it? The Olympian gods knew nothing of dying and performed themselves with none regard for mortality.
And but, the ancients did have their share of concepts in regards to the afterlife. Most believed that the lifeless not solely continued to exist elsewhere but additionally, paradoxically, relied on sustenance deposited beside their stays. The fashionable observe of laying flowers on a grave is fueled by the identical obscure concept that the lifeless are contactable on the place the place they’re interred.
In Homer’s “Odyssey” everybody leads to the identical dank, darkish, dreary area known as Hades, no matter what lives they’ve led. Solely a tiny minority — three folks in complete — get punished for being very dangerous. Tantalus, as an illustration, who cooked his son in a casserole and served him as much as the gods, is “tantalized” for eternity by food and drinks that’s all the time simply out of his attain.
The thought of a dualistic afterlife with some form of heaven for the blessed derives from the traditional Egyptians. Based on them, earlier than being admitted to the Subject of Reeds, the place you’ll have the ability to hunt and social gathering like there’s no tomorrow, it’s a must to seem earlier than the underworld decide Osiris, who will cross-examine you to see in case you’ve led a virtuous life. Your coronary heart will probably be weighed on a scale, towards a feather of fact. If it’s heavier than the feather, a monster will devour you, however after that you simply’ll merely stop to exist. No hell, in different phrases.
Over time, quite a lot of Greeks got here to imagine {that a} blessed afterlife was accessible for many who had been initiated into the so-called thriller cults, although what precisely this blessedness amounted to is unclear. Over time, too, the idea that Hades was a spot of punishment gained traction. Aeneas, making a pit cease on his method to meet up with his father in Hades, learns that quite a few classes of criminals expertise ugly punishments. This anticipates the everlasting fires that each Christianity and Islam counsel will devour the ungodly.
The late Pope Francis’ remark relayed by a journalist again in 2018 — “Hell doesn’t exist; there may be the disappearance of sinful souls” — was a welcome signal for sinners like myself, despite the fact that the Vatican rapidly asserted that he wasn’t talking ex cathedra. In contrast, the Hebrew Bible exhibits little curiosity within the plight of people after dying. Good and dangerous find yourself in Sheol, a area similar to Hades.
As we speak, according to Pew Research Center data, some 80% of People imagine in an afterlife. Their ideas about what to anticipate there stay considerably confused, however maybe it’s telling that essentially the most generally held concept is that they are going to be reunited with family members and — in the event that they’re fortunate — with pets. That view, absent the pets, additionally prevailed in antiquity. Greek funerary monuments often present the lifeless, or the residing and the lifeless, shaking arms. The identical theme is evinced most movingly in Etruscan sarcophagi that depict husband and spouse mendacity in mattress collectively for all eternity. Not even the Egyptians got here up with a greater method of conveying the hope that the life awaiting us will probably be as sensual and as pleasurable as our greatest moments right here on Earth.
If there’s one factor I’ve realized finding out all of this, it’s that inconsistency and illogicality lie on the coronary heart of the human effort to think about what to anticipate once we’re lifeless. Even some hardened atheists discover it tough to think about extinction. The idea that people will live on in a unique realm or on a unique aircraft and that they’ll face a reckoning are concepts which were round for hundreds of years. So, too, has the idea that nothing survives dying. “I didn’t exist. I existed. I don’t exist. I don’t care,” reads an epitaph usually discovered on Roman gravestones.
Mark Twain put it equally memorably: “I don’t worry dying. I had been lifeless for billions and billions of years earlier than I used to be born, and hadn’t suffered the slightest inconvenience.”
Robert Garland, professor emeritus of the classics at Colgate College, is the creator, most just lately, of “What to Anticipate When You’re Lifeless: An Historic Tour of Loss of life and the Afterlife.” This text was produced in partnership with Zocalo Public Square.
