I became fascinated by death when I was 8 years old and my mummy took me to the British Museum to watch the mummies. When, at a slightly higher age, I started to study death and the ancient world which struck me the most, despite many fascinating cultural variants, uniformity was the uniformity and the limitation of human imagination during the millennia with what to expect when we left.
The cocovious pandemic and its consequences have killed more than 1,220,000 people in the United States alone, and it did Everyone more aware of the omnipresence of death. But in the ancient world, you didn't need such alarm clock. Your chances of celebrating your first birthday was not much better than two in three. If you have survived and were men, you might be expected to reach the mid-40 year old. If you were a woman, your life expectancy fell from the middle to the end of the 1930s. The chances of a surviving mother were dark. “I prefer to fight in combat three times to give birth once,” explains Médée, in the play by Euripides.
The great killers of the ancient world were bronchitis, gastroenteritis, tuberculosis, malaria and cholera, which affected people of any social status. The plague was a regular seasonal visitor, sometimes transporting up to a third of the population. The floods have won whole colonies and fire was a danger still present. Earthquakes have also made a very heavy number. The advice of the Roman poet Horace to “seize the day” – Carpe Diem –could not have been more appropriate.
Today, people have the opportunity to die in a hospital or in a hospice. But there was nothing comparable remotely to professional palliative care based on the institution in antiquity. If you are not dead at war or at sea, you have breathed your last in your family.
And except in Egypt and Rome, where the death industry was alive, the entrepreneurs were practically unknown. Instead, the family, women in particular, took care of the dead, washing and clothing in the corpse in a shroud and preparing it for visualization at home. Perhaps because of these intimacies, the funerals itself were anything but the solemn and silent affair that it tends to be in our culture. The men and women fight their heads and breasts, poured dust on their hair, torn their clothes, rolled on the ground and led their loss into a paroxysm of sorrow. Polytheistic religion had little to offer in comfort or consolation. How could he? The Olympian gods knew nothing about death and led without any regard to mortality.
And yet, the ancients had their share of ideas on the beyond. Most thought that the dead continued not only to exist elsewhere but also, paradoxically, depended on the subsistence deposited next to their remains. The modern practice of laying flowers on a tomb is fueled by the same vague idea that the dead are contactable where they are buried.
In Homer's “Odyssey”, everyone finds themselves in the same humid, dark and dreary region called Hades, regardless of the life they led. Only a small minority – three people in total – is punished to be very bad. Tetalus, for example, who cooked his son in a saucepan and served him for the gods, is “dealing” for eternity by food and drinks which is always just out of its reach.
The idea of a life after dualist death with a kind of paradise for blessed derives from ancient Egyptians. According to them, before being admitted to the reed field, where you can hunt and party as if there was not tomorrow, you must appear before the Osiris Underworld, who will contravene you to see if you have led a virtuous life. Your heart will be weighed on a scale, against a pen of truth. If it is heavier than the pen, a monster will devour you, but after that, you will simply stop existing. No hell, in other words.
Over time, a certain number of Greeks came to believe that a blessed life was available for those who had been initiated into the so-called mysteries, although this blessing was exactly not clear. Over time too, the belief that Hades was a place of punishment gained ground. Aeneas, making a stand at the stand on his way to make up for his father in Hades, learns that many categories of criminals are under horrible sanctions. This provides for the eternal fires suggested by Christianity and Islam will consume the impious.
The commentary of the late Pope Francis Relayed by a journalist In 2018 – “Hell does not exist; There is the disappearance of sinful souls ” – was a welcome sign for sinners like me, even if the Vatican quickly said that he did not speak chair. On the other hand, the Hebrew Bible shows little interest in the fate of individuals after death. Good and evil ends in Sheol, a region very similar to Hades.
Today, According to Pew Research Center DataSome 80% of Americans believe in a life after death. Their thoughts about what to expect are somewhat confused, but perhaps the most common idea is that they will be gathered with dear beings and – if they are lucky – with pets. This point of view, in the absence of pets, also prevailed in antiquity. Greek funeral monuments frequently show the dead, or the living and the dead, shaking hands. The same theme is manifested the most emotional in the Etruscan Sarcophagi who represent the husband and the woman lying together in bed for all eternity. Even the Egyptians did not find a better way to transmit the hope that the life that awaits us will be as sensual and as pleasant as our best moments here on earth.
If there is one thing that I have learned to study all this, it is that inconsistency and illogicality are at the heart of human effort to imagine what to expect when we are dead. Even some hardened atheists find it difficult to imagine extinction. The belief that humans will continue to exist in a different field or on a different level and that they will be confronted with a calculation are ideas that have existed for thousands of years. The same goes for the conviction that nothing survives for death. “I did not exist. I existed. I do not exist. I don't care, ”reads an epitaph often found on Roman tombstones.
Mark Twain said it just as memorable: “I am not afraid of death. I had died for billions and billions of years before my birth and I had not undergone the slightest drawback. ”
Robert Garland, professor emeritus of the classics of Colgate University, is the author, more recently, of “what to expect when you died: a former visit to death and life after death”. This article was produced in partnership with Zocalo public square.
