I first grew to become fascinated by loss of life after 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 review loss of life 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 after 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 loss of life’s omnipresence. However within the historical world, you wanted no such wake-up name. Your possibilities of celebrating your first birthday weren’t significantly better than two in three. In case you survived and had been male, you would maybe anticipate to succeed in 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 slightly 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 individuals 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 whole settlements, and hearth 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.
Right this moment, individuals have the choice of dying in a hospital or in a hospice . However there was nothing remotely akin 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 loss of life trade was energetic, undertakers had been nearly unknown. As an alternative, the household, ladies 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 means of consolation or comfort. How might it? The Olympian gods knew nothing of loss of life and performed themselves with none regard for mortality.
And but, the ancients did have their share of concepts concerning the afterlife. Most believed that the lifeless not solely continued to exist elsewhere but in addition, paradoxically, relied on sustenance deposited beside their stays. The trendy apply 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 results in the identical dank, darkish, dreary area referred to as Hades, no matter what lives they’ve led. Solely a tiny minority — three individuals in whole — get punished for being very unhealthy. Tantalus, as an example, 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. In line with them, earlier than being admitted to the Subject of Reeds, the place you’ll be capable of hunt and social gathering like there’s no tomorrow, you must seem earlier than the underworld decide Osiris, who will cross-examine you to see when you’ve led a virtuous life. Your coronary heart can be weighed on a scale, in opposition to a feather of reality. 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 consider {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 assumption that Hades was a spot of punishment gained traction. Aeneas, making a pit cease on his strategy 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, though the Vatican rapidly asserted that he wasn’t talking ex cathedra. Against this, the Hebrew Bible reveals little curiosity within the plight of people after loss of life. Good and unhealthy find yourself in Sheol, a area similar to Hades.
Right this moment, according to Pew Research Center data, some 80% of Individuals consider 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 palms. 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 can be as sensual and as pleasurable as our greatest moments right here on Earth.
If there’s one factor I’ve discovered learning all of this, it’s that inconsistency and illogicality lie on the coronary heart of the human effort to think about what to anticipate after we’re lifeless. Even some hardened atheists discover it tough to think about extinction. The idea that people will live on in a special realm or on a special airplane and that they are going to face a reckoning are concepts which were round for 1000’s of years. So, too, has the assumption that nothing survives loss of life. “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 loss of life. 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 writer, most lately, of “What to Anticipate When You’re Lifeless: An Historical Tour of Dying and the Afterlife.” This text was produced in partnership with Zocalo Public Square.
