In Hesiod, who was writing at the same time as Homer penned his Odyssey, the land of the dead is underground and is called Tartarus. He writes thus:
For a brazen anvil falling down from heaven nine nights and days would reach the earth upon the tenth; and again, a brazen anvil falling from earth nine nights and days would reach Tartarus upon the tenth.
Tartarus is of course not an actual but a mythological place: down there, in a dungeon-like abyss in the underworld, behind an enormous wall of bronze, the first gods, the primordial Chaos deities, are held captive. There also, Night and Day cross each other’s paths—when one goes in, the other goes out, and never are they home at the same time, Hesiod writes—and the children of Night, who are Sleep and Death, live there too.
The Odyssey, naturally, does not describe an actual place either, but the ritual Odysseus performs is realistic, it was how the dead were summoned, and the obscurity with which the journey to Hades is described—as if they sail into an eternal night—is supplanted by clarity when considered from a different angle: the encounter between the dead and the living takes place in a borderland, neither here nor there, in a kind of non-place, at the very periphery of existence.
But these mythological descents into the land of the dead could in fact be traced back to existing places in the actual geography of reality. Orpheus, depicted in Greek tradition as a factual historical figure, was said to have descended into the land of the dead through a cave close to what was then Taenarum, now Cape Matapan, the southernmost tip of mainland Greece. Anyone so inclined can go there today and see the cave for themselves. I have done so, though without feeling able to connect the glittering sea and the crystal-clear waters of the cave, shimmering now blue, now green beneath the little boat in which we tourists were sailed into the grotto, with the darkness and eternal night I associate with the land of the dead.
There are many such places that were connected with the underworld, usually caves and other subterranean areas, some of which even emitted poisonous vapors, though four in particular were central, these being, besides Cape Matapan, the Acheron in Thesprotia, Lake Avernus in Campania and Heraclea Pontica on the southern shore of the Black Sea. These were real places, not mythological, often with incumbent oracles, and the dead would be summoned there too. Since the caves did not in fact open out to the underworld, there is no reason to think that the Greeks believed descent into the land of the dead to be a physical journey: the cave was the land of the dead. The dead were also invoked in crypt-like chambers where the oracles went into states of trance.
The question to which all this leads concerns not so much where the dead existed, where Hades and Tartarus were actually sited and what they looked like, nor how the dead souls could appear in the bodily forms from which they hailed, at the moment of death, at the same time as their physical bodies in fact lay on the battlefield or in the grave. No, the question is why we, who have adopted so much of ancient Greece, and who continue to look toward it, have ceased to believe in life after death.
From where we stand, more than two thousand years on, it would seem that the world of the Greeks, illuminated by all its Apollonian sun, contained a remnant of something very ancient of which it never quite managed to divest itself. The Greeks constructed a space for rational thought, but were unable to rationalize death, which remained as ancient and mysterious as the forest, a place of unceasing metamorphosis, where the living became dead and the dead became living, animals became men and men became animals. Pan was the figure of this, the god with the human torso and the legs and horns of a goat, the man-animal, wild and unpredictable, but the mythology teems with other half-human, half-animal creatures, among them the Centaurs with their equine bodies and human heads, Medusa with her snake hair, the winged Erinyes, the Minotaur with the head of a bull and the body of a man, and above them all was Dionysus, the god of trangression. Homer referred to Dionysus as mad, and Walter Otto, who called him the god of “ecstasy and terror,” believed madness was Dionysus’ very nature, while Nietzsche described him as follows: “Dionysus is the frenzy which circles round wherever there is conception and birth and which in its wildness is always ready to thrust forward into destruction and death. It is life.”
In one of the Dionysian rituals, reminiscent of cult orgies in which wine would be poured from the heads of animals and all boundaries were upheaved, the maenads according to tradition set about Orpheus, tearing him apart, limb from limb, as if he were an animal, his head then being tossed into the river. Yet the head lived on, carried to the sea as it sang, to be washed ashore on an island where it was found and buried, though remained articulate, for as Philostratus writes, the head “took up residence in a cleft in Lesbos and gave out oracles from a hollow in the earth.” The Orphic oracle continued its prophesying there until Apollo bade it stop.
Mircea Eliade places the myth of Orpheus in a shamanistic tradition on account of the descent into the underworld as well as the dismemberment and the singing head (as noted above, the head of the shaman was often placed on a stake during the initiation rituals in the underworld, from which vantage point it could look on as its own body was taken apart). But the head of Orpheus was not the only one to give out oracles in the classical age—the head of Trophonius too lay in a hole in the ground, delivering prophecies of its own, visitors climbing down a ladder to ask the head whatever they wished to know, while Cleomenes I of Sparta cut off the head of his friend Archonides, keeping it thereafter in a honey pot and regularly asking its advice. Aristotle writes that when a priest of Zeus, Hoplosmios in Arcadia, had been decapitated by a person unknown, the head would sing, “Cercidas killed man upon man”—a local man answering to the name was subsequently arrested and tried. And the Greek magical papyri cite several methods by which heads detached from their bodies may be made articulate.
Alongside the naissance of natural science and philosophy, then, we find severed heads predicting the future, corpses receiving fresh blood and coming to life again, dead souls unable to find rest, descending to the land of the dead, some (including one reported by Plato in his Republic) returning to tell of what they had seen there, oracles in caves, man-animals, animal-men, transformations, metamorphoses, transgression. There was something great and unfathomably ancient that could not be put to rest by the New. Or at least not at first, for they existed side by side, in the darkness of the cave and in the light outside it. But gradually, immeasurably slowly, albeit not as slowly as man had left the animals, it was indeed put to rest, and those ancient beliefs lie now inert and fossilized in our present day.
The animals were taken from the forest, some to industrial meat and milk factories to become producers of consumer goods, consigned to their designated places in the biological systems which define them, to be seen only in the highest definition and without ambiguity on the screens of our TVs, laptops and mobile devices, much as the lion and the web-footed bird, for instance. They may still be found in the wild (though the forest shrinks by the day) but what they have become to us are images, finally and totally disconnected from the human.
Death similarly was taken from the cave and out into the forest, out of the darkness and into the light, where it appears to us as it is: a slight fissure in a blood vessel in the brain, a few microscopic bacteria in the bloodstream, a tiny cell beginning to multiply in the pancreas.
What is happening here is death is becoming smaller and smaller, and so compelling has this development been that it is no longer inconceivable that death at some point will reach its nadir and vanish.
In this vision, science and religion strangely come together. Not only because medical science is now able to open our bodies, remove our inner organs—heart, lungs, kidneys—and replace them with new ones, the way shamans down the ages have described their initiation rites, but also because this, coupled with all our efforts in the field of genetics, where the cultivation of body parts and the manipulation of cells is no longer a Utopi
an notion but reality, allows our lives to be prolonged, and one might speculate, to the extent that aging and all its processes are genetically determined, given to us at birth, that they might one day not only be delayed, but halted, and what we shall have then, eternal life, is, and always has been of course, principally a religious conception, as such connected with mysticism, transgression, transformation and the irrational—and until now accordingly deemed to be claptrap.
Christ emerged from the ancient world, and the story of his life contains a number of shamanistic elements, both his driving out of demons and his bringing the dead to life, but first and foremost his descending into the realm of the dead, like the shamans, like Hector, Orpheus, Odysseus and Aeneas, from where he returned and ascended into heaven. But oddly the sense of the irrational seems not to have stuck as strongly to the narrative of Jesus rousing the dead as it has to the myriad tales we know from classical antiquity that concern the same phenomenon. The madness and derangement surrounding Dionysus is completely absent when it comes to Jesus. And it is absent too in the case of the man who, from the depths of the ancient past and its reality of visions and prophecies from grottos and caves, wrote one of the most important books of the New Testament, the Revelation to John. In a grotto on the Greek island of Patmos he lay in a deep, hallucinatory sleep or trance, artificially induced or perhaps merely frothing forth from within him, and stared into the future.
John was one of many oracles of the time, but whereas the heathen visions of his peers have been lost, his own Christian ones remain: he saw the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, he saw the sea colored red with blood, he saw the fire out of heaven—and he saw death be gone, writing: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”
This is not the same as the idea of eternal life, which came with Christianity and is related to Plato’s theory of the soul; it is something different, concerning not a promised paradise, but reality. They shall seek death, he wrote, and death shall flee from them.
I believe “those days” to be near. I believe “them” to be us. But if it is the case that death one day will be gone, what then of the already dead?
* * *
Only a few weeks ago, I took the sleeper train across the country from Oslo. Excited about my impending journey, I arrived early at the station. There are few things I like better than traveling, and best of all is to go by train. The atmosphere of the station before the night train leaves, that childhood feeling of forbidden adventure that I always get from a late-evening departure. The passengers arriving late and scampering along the platform with their trolley suitcases trundling behind them, past those who came in good time and have already found their compartments, who are now making their farewells to people or who stand on their own and rather at a loss, heads bowed to gaze at their mobile phones. Old and young, men and women. The beautiful and the not-so-beautiful, the well dressed and the scruffy. Coarse hands ingrained with building dust, dainty unblemished hands that have only pattered the keyboard of a computer. A swish of hair and overcoat: a mother bends down to kiss the cheek of a child; next to them a man in a suit, his hands hanging awkwardly at his side as he watches. Three young men and two young women standing in a circle; one wears a backpack, a holdall clamped between her feet. A tall man with long white hair and a long nose, in a long coat, comes striding in a hurry; a musician, I think to myself, jazz, perhaps, or left-behind indie.
I had booked a double compartment and been allocated the top bunk. It was empty when I went in, and I turned on the light, put my suitcase down on the floor, took off my jacket and hung it on the hook behind the door. Although I don’t usually care to install myself when I know someone else will be coming, especially a stranger, I nonetheless climbed the little ladder into my bunk and lay down to read as the sounds outside gradually seemed to converge toward departure.
Two minutes before the train was due to leave, my fellow passenger entered the compartment. He was holding his ticket in one hand, a small suitcase in the other, and stared, first at the ticket, then at the bunk number. Satisfied that they tallied, he looked up at me.
“Hello there,” he said.
“Hello,” I said.
His fleshy, suntanned face glistened in the ceiling light, while his frame was short and rather slight. He was formally dressed for the journey, I considered, in a dark suit and white shirt.
“Are you going all the way?”
“Yes,” I said. “And you?”
He nodded and sat down on his bunk, bent forward and opened his suitcase.
“Beer?” he said.
“No, thanks,” I said. “It’s very kind of you, all the same.”
He produced a bottle from the suitcase. I did quite fancy one, but I didn’t want to get too friendly with him and perhaps be compelled to talk for hours. I wanted to read for a bit, and then sleep.
“Are you scared of flying?” he said.
“No,” I said as he levered the top off with a bottle opener he apparently kept on his key ring. “Why do you ask?”
“Not so many our age who take the sleeper across,” he said.
I turned onto my side to face the wall, making it plain that I perhaps wasn’t that interested in chatting.
A whistle sounded outside and the train gradually pulled away, into the tunnel that would take us underground and lead us through the city.
He remained silent as he sat reading a magazine that lay open on his lap, taking a swig now and again from the bottle he held in his hand.
After a time, when we had left the city far behind and my book had begun slowly to slip from my hands, he spoke to me again.
“Academic, are you?” he said.
“Me? No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Perpetual student, then?” he said.
“I’m not sure about that,” I said.
“That book you’re reading,” he said. “It’s not for the casual reader, more for people working in the field. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Come on!” he said. “I’m trying to start a conversation here!”
Why hadn’t I paid the extra few hundred for a single compartment?
I’d have preferred to ignore him completely, but something in me was averse to it, and I closed my book and sat up. I’d have to climb down to brush my teeth anyway.
“No need to stop reading on my account,” he said. “Sorry to have bothered you. Go on with your book, by all means. It’s late.”
“How come you know Lucius Accius?” I said.
He glanced up at me with a smile on his face.
“You sure you don’t want that beer?”
“I suppose it won’t do any harm,” I said.
He put his empty down on the floor, produced two more bottles, opened them and handed me one.
“I’ve read him,” he said. “Only not in translation like you.”
“So you read Latin?” I said obligingly, before taking a good swig of the delicious golden-brown, bitter ale.
He nodded, clearly pleased with himself.
For some time, the only light outside had been the gray-white evening sky that was so typical of summer, the landscape occasionally opening out to accommodate a wide and gently flowing river, but now the lights of houses and buildings began flashing by.
“How come?” I said.
“My studies required so much Latin, I thought I might as well learn it properly. So I did a course in it at the same time. Has it been any use to me? No. Has it given me great pleasure? Yes.”
“So you’re a doctor, then?” I said.
He nodded deliberately, scrutinizing me like a teacher who had posed a difficult question and received a clever answer.
“And you are . . . ?”
“I make documentary films,” I said.
“Really,” he said. “Any I might have seen?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” I said.
“No need to be modest,” he said. “Give me some titles.”
I’d oblige him as far as that went, I decided, then make my apologies, brush my teeth, turn the light off and sleep all the way across the fells.
“One’s called Friends for Life,” I said.
“Oh?” he said. “What’s it about?”
“Have you heard of Smith’s Friends?”
“The sect, you mean? Of course I have.”
He picked up his phone from where it lay on the bunk beside him. I realized he was googling. A moment later he looked up at me.
“Cheers, Egil,” he said, and raised his bottle. “I’m Frank.”
The train slowed down and drew into a station. A few figures moved toward the door of our carriage. The sounds of railway travel—footsteps in the corridor, doors opening and banging shut, the rumble of the engine, muffled voices—amplified the stillness of impending night that had settled over the town and the fells that were visible beyond it.
The Morning Star Page 66