Now, most people would be inclined to believe that the shaman’s “traveling” to other realities is an inward occurrence, in dreams or feverish fantasies, and that whatever the shaman claims to experience takes place nowhere but in his or her mind. So: no underworld, no heaven, no dead souls, only artificially provoked hallucinations.
This, however, presupposes not only a clear and conspicuous division between internal and external, but also that everything in a human being, which is the human being, exists internally. This internal world may—indeed will—be imbued with impressions, images, thoughts and conceptions hailing from its interface with the world without, and the individual may themselves infuse the external world with elements from within, though only by severing themselves from them, without leaving the internal world themselves.
I am thinking, as I write these words, about a great oak tree that stands in the woods behind the house in which I sit. A remarkable number of birds inhabit it, and I commit this thought to the typewriter. The thought has now left my inner being and become manifest on the sheet of paper in front of me, though I myself remain here: no part of me any longer exists in it. I am, and will always be, enclosed within my mind and body. When I dream, it feels as if I am removed to other places, but this is not the case, for I lie in my bed and the dream is merely a series of random images released by my brain without my conscious self—the mirror referred to above—being present to tell me that what I am seeing is not reality, but images dislodged from the bark of my mind.
But what if the human entity is not stable? What if there is no clear and conspicuous division between what is inside a person and what is outside? What if the two domains exist in constant flux? What if the bear is like us, and the wolf, the fox, the lynx, the owl? What if the soul can pass in and out of the body, in dreams, in ecstasies, in death? Hamgjenga, hamhleypa, hamrammr are the Old Norse words for shape-shifters capable of taking on animal form, figures such as Kveldulf or Odin, who, while their bodies stayed put, flew as a bird or swam as a fish in other places.
To us, for whom “human” is such a definitive category and the boundaries of each individual are set so absolutely by the body, the container as it were of our personal existence, such a fluid conception and experience of reality can only be rejected. Any phenomenon that transcends the division between what is within a person and what is without—the vardøger of Scandinavian folklore, for instance, spirits delivering the sound or sight of a person before he or she actually arrives, or the glimpse we might have of a ghost, something that has left this life, but which yet remains in our world—is referred to under the heading of superstition. We see or hear something that is not found other than in the mind, and which, as the shaman, we confuse with some real phenomenon in the outside world.
That human beings have always seen ghosts, even in cultures and religions that reject such notions, does not of course mean that ghosts exist, only that belief in them exists, at least in folklore, and that such belief would seem to be unshakable.
If we see what we know, and if what we know colors or even determines what exists to us, then knowledge stands in our way, and, as the Fall narrative tells us, knowledge came into the world simultaneously with the awareness of death. If, further, knowledge must be dismissed in order for us to see death, then we must at the same time dismiss awareness of death, in which instance death is eliminated and there is no more to see.
This paradox is what occurs in the myth of Orpheus when he descends into the underworld to bring back Eurydice, and Hades tells him he may take her on one condition: that he should not look at her before coming out into the light of the overworld again. She is there only when he does not see her. If he sees her, she is not there.
In ancient Greece, death and sleep were related phenomena, in the mythology they were siblings, and in the Iliad even twins—Thanatos and Hypnos, charged with carrying the slain into the realm of the dead. Rationally, they are of course separated: sleep is the state into which we drift and drift out of again, whereas death is absolute. The question the Greek myths raise is whether the boundary between death and life too is fluid, a shifting state as between sleep and wakefulness, or whether it is, as we take it to be, absolute, a matter of either/or? Put differently: is the boundary between life and death a product of our limited senses, or is it real?
Another definitive category in our lives that raises the same question is time. Are the boundaries of time absolute? We live in the moment, and what we call the past and the future are found nowhere but in our minds, in the form of memories on the one hand and expectations on the other. The moment dissolves and is renewed with seeming constancy; we may sit quietly in a room and yet still be moving in time, in the sense that the moment at once is lost and replaced by another. Following Einstein, we know that time is relative, that it moves faster or slower according to where we are, and in what state, and that there is no such thing as simultaneity.
A British soldier, J. W. Dunne, who was also an outstanding aeronautical engineer, published in 1927 a book entitled An Experiment with Time, in which he proposed a theory to the effect that the past, the present and the future exist in parallel, but that limitations in our sensory apparatus and consciousness mean that we can exist only in the present. Linear time is an illusion. The source of Dunne’s interest in such matters was his realization, as a young man at the end of the nineteenth century, that he possessed precognitive abilities. On numerous occasions he dreamed things that later occurred. Dreams that took place in the future possessed the same characteristics as those that took place in the past, what happened in them was quite as distorted, and they were at once as clear as they were mysterious. Dunne’s theory was that our dreaming consciousness was not bound to the moment in the same way as our wakeful consciousness, which filtered time as linear progression, but instead was open toward actual time. His book and the theory it contained created a stir in its day, and even the normally sober-minded Vladimir Nabokov repeated its experiment, writing down his dreams and comparing them to subsequent events.
Dreams belong to the sphere of the irrational, and any claim that they are what give us access to reality is of course inadmissible to the rational mind.
Oddly, though, our conception of time has also been challenged on the rational side of the fence; the further science has penetrated into its mysteries, the less apparent its divisions have become, a physicist such as Carlo Rovelli even ending up in the same place as Dunne—albeit on the basis of wildly different premises—positing that time does not exist and that we experience it only by virtue of constraints on our sensory apparatus.
Time and death are of course not the same. But they are related phenomena—the moment that seamlessly dissolves and is renewed resembles to no small degree the life that expires and at the same time goes on, and time passes quite as irretrievably as life comes to an end: the boundaries are in both cases absolute. In his belief that time was nullified in dreams, Dunne was merely repeating what Aristotle had written in the lost work of his youth, On Philosophy, that “when the soul gets by itself in sleep, it then assumes its nature and foresees and foretells the future.” But where Dunne stopped at time, Aristotle continued toward death: “The soul is also in such a condition when it is severed from the body at death.”
Aristotle is saying three things here: sleep nullifies time, sleep and death are related states, and the soul lives on after the body is dead.
But how? And where? For if the dead live on, if only as unembodied souls, they must exist somewhere?
In a society where the human is as yet unestablished and no boundaries exist to enclose the soul, death will accordingly be but provisionally defined, its nature too, alongside life and all its metamorphoses, fleeting and changeable. In the same way, when that which is human becomes established—and this happens presumably when humans become sedentary, settle into communities and develop written languages—death, and the dead too, become quite as fixed
. All the great archaic civilizations, such as the Babylonian or the Egyptian, had richly developed conceptions as to the realm of the dead, its nature and geography.
The richest of these may undoubtedly be found in the ancient Egyptian culture, whose people thought more about death and exhibited greater solicitude for the dead than perhaps any other culture before or since, and this was so because to them the difference between the living and the dead was a matter of degree. Death did not entail the end of existence, but merely heralded another phase of life. An epitaph from the Fifth Dynasty contains the following phrase:
ba ár pet sat ár ta
where ba means soul, pet heaven, sat body, ta earth, thus: soul to heaven, body to earth. Straightforward enough, on the face of it, yet the relation between soul and body was infinitely complex in the Egyptian culture, and in ways quite mystifying to us, whose understanding of man is so grounded in the realms of biopsychology. Indeed, it may seem as if they were dealing with a completely different creature altogether. The physical body, referred to as khat, could attain new states subsequent to death, providing it underwent mummification so as to halt the processes of decomposition, at which stage it took on a physical/spiritual nature and was referred to as sahu. This was not the same as the soul, for the soul was termed ba, and sahu could communicate with ba. Both sahu and ba could ascend to heaven after death. Moreover, the physical/spiritual body and the soul were supplemented in each individual by a kind of abstract personality which existed freely and independently, able to move at will from place to place, removing itself from the body and rejoining it again as it pleased. This personality—which seems to have been perceived as a kind of doppelgänger—was referred to as ka, again distinct from the soul itself, ba. Ba was non-physical, spiritual, its hieroglyph a stork. In addition came an individual’s shadow, khaibit, likewise independent, though always in the vicinity of the soul. And then there was khu, which was a person’s spirit, sekhem, translatable as a person’s form or power, and finally ren, a person’s name, which lived also in heaven.
This, then, was what constituted a human in ancient Egypt, a composite of independent parts: a physical body, a spiritual body, a heart, a doppelgänger, a soul, a shadow, a spirit, a form, a name.
Apart from the body, all these components lived on after death. The living, the dead and the gods were closely connected, and the land of the dead was to be found in the Eastern firmament, though in other epochs (and we must remember that the culture stretched across several thousand years) the dead, like the sun, descended in the west, the land of the dead being referred to accordingly as “the West,” the dead as “Westerners.”
The ancient Egyptians did not fear death, but their souls were not necessarily immortal, for in the land of the dead, where they lived on, there existed something called “the other death,” which occurred when a person died in that place, and this was indeed a death to be feared: when it struck, existence was definitively brought to an end.
* * *
—
Although we have access to a large number of extant texts from the Egyptian high culture, as well as many artifacts and construction works, there remains something very alien about what they express, something so remote that one can barely relate to it other than intellectually, which is to say in ways that are non-intimate, abstract, non-emotional—it is as if their very dimensions are different from ours, that what they express is so great and at the same time so very far away from us as to appear almost un-human. Yet naturally they were humans—naturally they fell in love, naturally they hugged their children, naturally they spat out the milk if it had soured, naturally they enjoyed the hours when the sun had gone down after a hot day and shadows filled the streets around them. A shout, a smile, a warm twinkle of an eye: someone they know, and they stop and chat.
But no such things are represented in the texts they left behind, which contain only the sun and the gods, and a mechanics of the afterlife so detailed it brings to mind an instruction manual for some strange and intricate machine no longer to be found. What it all means remains unclear, at least to me, as too does the bearing it all had on those ancient lives.
Against this vague and cloudy background we have the first extant works of literature of the ancient Greeks, from around the eighth century BC—the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, the Works and Days—a veritable revelation of human life. They come as if sailing out of the darkness, not unlike the way the first humans stepped from the darkness of the animals some hundreds of thousands of years earlier, we can imagine, though the darkness from which these Greek figures emerge so clearly belonged to culture, not to nature.
They came with emotion. The Iliad begins with the anger of Achilles and continues with an argument between Achilles and Agamemnon. They are heroes, sons of gods or kings, and yet they allow themselves to be offended, they sulk and are incendiary and domineering. The gamut of their emotions is run in the shadow of death—not an Egyptian sun-death, which was merely an extension in another place of life itself, but physical death, the death of slaughter in battle, the death of plagues. The Iliad is all about bodies and the emotions that stream through them, and it ends where it begins, with the anger of Achilles. Hector, the great Trojan warrior, kills Achilles’ friend Patroclus, and in an act of vengeance Achilles kills Hector, though the deed is not enough for him: beside himself with grief and rage he drags Hector’s body behind his chariot, three times around Patroclus’ grave, and when he returns to his tent and lies down to sleep, he leaves the body in a heap on the ground. This he does every day for twelve days. The city to which Achilles’ soldiers have laid seige, Troy, resounds with wailing and lamentation at the loss of Hector. Hector’s father, King Priam, writhes with despair, we learn, filthy and unkempt. The impression we have is that the desecration of Hector’s body is perhaps even more terrible than his death itself. In a magnificent closing scene, the aging king, aided by the gods, sets out to the Achaean ships to retrieve the body of his son. Both Achilles and Priam weep, and Priam carries Hector’s body back to Troy. Having mourned Hector for nine days under the agreement of a truce, Priam cremates the body on the tenth day, and the fire is put out with wine. Hector’s bones are gathered up and Priam places them in a golden chest which is committed to the ground and covered over with a barrow of stones, before a funeral feast is held in Hector’s honor, and the epic poem thus concluded.
It is easy to think that with the Greeks everything was suddenly brought close to us, the Divine and the human, life and death, but this is so only because it was they who laid the foundation of the reality in which we live today. If the first humans left the animals gradually, turning their backs on them, then the Greeks established a space for the new human experience. Sciences and societal systems were founded, the physical world explored, and what lay between people was mapped. We can still identify with Achilles and with Priam; we can still follow the adventures of Odysseus and read our own times into the episodes involving Cyclopes or Sirens; we can peer into the depths of our own minds by viewing the Greek tragedies, which to this day continue to be staged by theaters across the globe, and if we wish to consider the nature of the world and our own circumstances in it, we begin with Plato or Aristotle, or perhaps even earlier, with the pre-Socratic philosophers. Even Christianity stems from the ancient Greek world, the old monotheistic Jewish religion first melding together with the extremely radical sect that had been established by Jesus, the resulting amalgamation subsequently being exploded into a system, first by neo-Platonism, then neo-Aristotelianism, to which large swathes of the world submitted.
But this Greek space with which we are so familiar has another side to it, one that has remained as if in shadow, closely connected with that age, though seen as irrelevant to our own, no longer referenced, barely mentioned at all other than as a curiosity, which is the relation between the classical world and death. To the ancient Greeks, life after death was not just an abstract fact, it was also a
part of their physical reality. The literature of ancient Greece is full of encounters between the living and the dead, not only in the epic works, the poems and the dramas, but also in the histories, biographies and accounts of journeys. Common to all these instances is that the dead are awoken or summoned, normally at the grave to which the body was committed.
The most usual way of making contact with the dead was to offer something to the deceased at the site of his or her grave: honey, for instance, or wine, oil, milk or blood (in the latter case there was a name for it, haimakouria, or the moistening by blood). On a grave discovered at Mycenae there was an altar through which ran a duct, allowing blood to be poured directly into the mouth of the corpse. After the offering, it was customary to lie down to sleep on the grave, and the dead would then appear in dreams. The Greeks consulted the dead because they could see into the future, presumably on account of their existing beyond time.
Many accounts exist of the dead being unable to find peace for not having received a proper funeral—this occurs in particular after military battles such as the one that took place at Troy, where slain warriors were seen in the night on the plains outside the city, in the full armor of war, such sightings occurring as late as in the second century after the birth of Christ, according to Philostratus. By then, Homer’s epic poem of that war, the Iliad, and his Odyssey, about the returning home of one of the Greek warriors, were already a thousand years old.
At the grave and on the battlefield, the dead came to meet the living. But the literature of the classical age is full also of descriptions of the reverse phenomenon, termed catabasis, in which the living descend into the realm of the dead. Such accounts belong to the myths, an example being the eleventh book of the Odyssey in which Odysseus travels to the land of the dead to consult Tiresias. They sail far to the south, to a land on the other side of the sea, barren and sunless, the sky there forever concealed by cloud and fog. On the shore, Odysseus digs a small trench in the ground, pouring into it first honey, then wine and water, and sprinkling white barley meal over the whole, before slaughtering a black sheep and letting the blood run down into the trench. At once, the dead come trooping up, wishing to drink of the blood. He holds them at bay, for the blood is for Tiresias. They pay him no heed, barely seeing him, their interest being only in the blood, and they are quite encapsulated in themselves. They are clad in the clothing they wore when they died. Odysseus sees teenagers, girls and boys, women who have perished in labor, warriors slain in battle. He sees also his mother, Anticlea, and realizes she has died while he has been away. She does not recognize him. Only when the dead drink of the blood are they able to see him and talk to him. Tiresias does so, and Anticlea does so, and a number of women, daughters or wives of famous warriors, and eventually Agamemnon and Achilles.
The Morning Star Page 65