by Sarah Murray
For the Chinese, money is critical—their journey to the netherworld is an expensive one. Burning those paper Hell Bank notes and credit cards gives the dead the cash needed to bribe the officials they’ll encounter on their passage to the spirit world, and with the rest they can make a down payment on a decent place for themselves once they arrive.
Meanwhile, those left behind devise elaborate schemes to prevent the spirit returning by accident. In Balinese funerals, the cremation tower is carried back and forth and spun around so the spirit loses its sense of direction. In the Buddhist death rites of Roi Et Province, in northwest Thailand, all kinds of things are done to stop the spirit returning to earth. The deceased’s hair is parted down the middle, from the brow to the back of the neck (believed to help the dead forget the past). Tossing the shroud three times back and forth over the coffin adds to the confusion, as does reversing the ladder leading up to the family home. Much as we hate saying good-bye, we don’t always want our dead to come back too soon.
Once the dead person’s spirit has successfully left the earth, the next bit of the journey can be long and complex. Bridges must be crossed, gates entered, all manner of monsters battled. In their classic book Celebrations of Death, anthropologists Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington describe how, at the climax of their death rites, Berawan communities in Borneo sing special songs giving the deceased detailed instructions on how to get to the land of the dead. The songs can last eight hours.
Here’s what a Berawan soul needs to do: first it must bathe in the river. Then it should dress appropriately and, without looking back, climb into a canoe at the edge of the river and paddle upstream with a vigor that sends spray flying up from the oar. Speeding past longhouses, the soul eventually reaches a branch of the river that leads to a mountain range. Here it must disembark and find some of the betel nut leaves used for chewing in this part of the world. That’s when the emissaries from the land of the dead show up. At this point, the Berawan funeral recital ends. The soul is now in good hands.
Of course, long before the funeral, good behavior in life is considered a reliable way of improving the soul’s chances of reaching a happy afterlife. Achievements and sacrifices made on earth are investments whose dividends can be spent in heaven. In seventeenth-century America, the private prayers and public devotions of the Puritans of New England reflected this belief, focusing on the approach of death, the salvation of the soul, and the preparation for eternity. Primers and prayer books exhorted readers to be in a state of constant preparation for mortality. Earthly suffering, they explained, was a prelude to the afterlife; death was the final barrier—a glorious gateway to endless unity with Christ.
My father’s lifelong view was that there was no afterlife, no heavenly gates to enter, no happy reunion with loved ones. “I have no future,” he told me calmly one day, after it had become clear his cancer was terminal. “I have a past—and it’s all been marvelous—and a present [which wasn’t so great at that point, but he avoided stating the obvious]. But I have no future.”
He was right. The only thing that lay ahead for him, as it turned out, was relentless discomfort and a painfully slow decline. Yet even Fa seems in the end to have modified his view of what lay ahead of him. His request to be scattered near his friends’ graves in the Dorset countryside was surely an acknowledgment of some form of continued existence, if not for his soul then at least for his biological remains. And perhaps, as mortality approached, picturing his ashes in a beautiful corner of West Dorset gave someone with no belief in an afterlife a delicate but continuing thread with the world he’d loved.
* * *
So powerful is our attachment to the idea of an afterlife that we’ve often sought out hard evidence for it. In her entertaining account of the subject, Spook, Mary Roach tells us that during spiritualism’s nineteenth-century heyday, mediums appeared to extrude through their orifices a physical manifestation of the spirits. This ectoplasm, says Roach, provided “a link between life and afterlife, a mixture of matter and ether, physical and yet spiritual, a ‘swirling, shining substance’ that unfortunately photographed very much like cheesecloth.”
The quirky exploits of spiritualists and mediums reveal a powerful desire by humans to establish a connection with the dead—a faint voice from the other side, a barely perceptible twitch of the planchette on the Ouija board, a flutter in the wind that tells us Granny’s calling. We crave the scantest evidence of this connection, for confirmation from those who’ve made it over there will assure us of the afterlife’s existence. Then, O Death, where is thy sting?
For the Chinese, the wall dividing the living from the ancestors in the afterlife is a porous one. After death, the soul flits in and out of its owner’s body, so relatives wave its clothes over the corpse to tempt it back into it. Only when it appears finally to have left the building do mourners pronounce the individual dead and proceed with the funeral. Ancestors are treated as a part of the family long after they’ve died, with the home shrine stocked with joss sticks and offerings.
In Chinese culture (where doctrines often blend Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism), the dead have the power to intervene in the affairs of the living—for good or ill. So rather than pondering the fate of the soul, as Christians and others do, the spiritual question of greatest concern to the Chinese is how to encourage the ancestors to bring health and success to their descendents. The magnificent bronze vessels created by the Shang and Zhou dynasties were designed for regular banquets in which food and wine were offered to the ancestors in the belief that they would in turn look after the living.
Providing nourishment is one way to solicit a caring attitude from the dead. Another is to find a decent spot for their tomb. Where space permits, geomancy or feng shui can establish an optimum site for the grave. A view of water (representing money) is always desirable. And hillsides are best for neutral feng shui—and neutral is good, for energy that’s too powerful can, like high-voltage electricity, cause no end of trouble.
At times, living and dead come together in a head-on collision. During the Hungry Ghosts Festival in the seventh month of the lunar year (usually late August), the doors are flung open between the three realms—heaven, hell, and the domain of the living—and the restless ghosts return to earth to wander about looking for food and wreaking vengeance on those who wronged them during their lives. To appease them, families burn joss sticks and lay out chicken, pork, rice, fruit, and sweets. The wandering spirits are longing for a bit of entertainment, so throughout the month, communities stage lavish Chinese operas.
In Taiwan, a rather unusual method was used to prevent dead spirits from bothering the living—by marrying them off. In traditional Chinese society, women only acquire ancestors through marriage, so a daughter who dies before reaching marriageable age cannot be honored on the family altar. To provide that line of ancestry, a husband must be found for her—and the matchmaking is done by bald-faced entrapment.
The “bait” is laid by placing money on a road in a small red envelope (used by the Chinese for cash gifts at occasions such as birthdays and weddings). When an unsuspecting male picks up the money envelope, the dead girl’s relatives leap out from behind a bush and announce that he must now be the groom in the posthumous marriage of their daughter. Fear of being haunted by the girl’s ghost usually encourages the young man to comply, but the offer of a generous dowry provides an added incentive.
The ceremony is much like a real wedding, except that standing in for the bride is a small effigy, which is placed by her ancestral tablet (the wooden representation of her soul on the family altar). With the effigy bride and her real-life groom united, banquets are held at the homes of both families. Then the ancestral tablet is separated from the effigy, the clothing returned to the company that rents accoutrements for such occasions, and the remains of the effigy bride are burned. Thereafter, the groom’s only responsibility is to place his spirit bride’s ancestral tablet on his family altar and supply it with regular
offerings, as he would if he’d married the girl in real life. And yes, he can still marry a live woman.
Anthropologist David K. Jordan, who documented this practice while living in a Taiwanese village in the 1960s, found the bride effigies a little unsettling. In his book, Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors, he describes one. With a narrow strip of wood forming her backbone, “arms were made from padded newspaper and were jointed at the shoulders to allow them to be lifted in dressing her. She wore a pair of trousers and a skirt of white, then a red dress [red being the traditional color for Chinese bridal outfits], covered over with a white lace outer dress that was considered part of the red dress.” The spirit bride also wore red children’s shoes. Her hands—white gloves stuffed with newspaper—bore fake gold bracelets and rings, and around her neck was a gold pendant.
Most disturbingly, however, her head was a photograph of the smiling face of a woman cut out of a wall calendar. “A Chinese bride even at that time would not be smiling—she’d be looking rather demure and weeping at leaving her family,” Jordan explains. “The smiling bride was not how you did it, and the fact that she was dead made it even creepier.” Strange, too, were the effigy’s three layers of clothing, the traditional burial attire. So while she was being paired off as a bride, the daughter’s effigy was also being honored as a corpse.
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Our relationship with death is a schizophrenic one. On one hand, we hide mortality behind a curtain of medical procedures, materialism, and euphemism. On the other, we parade it across cinema and TV screens in its goriest incarnations, in what British writer Geoffrey Gorer once called “the pornography of death.” For if real death has been buried, the entertainment industry has stepped in to resurrect the body. Crime shows invariably open with corpses—a mutilated cadaver stretched out on a morgue slab or a body in the woods, half eaten by wild animals. Hollywood’s menu is replete with foul murders, vengeance killings, and battlefield slaughters, not to mention the armies of ghosts and zombies that parade across its screens. Meanwhile, real death has a poor showing.
Thomas Lynch, the American undertaker-poet, likens the modernization of death to the introduction of the flushable toilet, which by quickly removing evidence of the “corruptibility of flesh” has stripped us of the ability to deal with this evidence. “It’s the same with our dead,” writes Lynch. “We are embarrassed by them in the way that we are embarrassed by a toilet that overflows the night that company comes. It is an emergency. We call the plumber.”
It’s also tempting to brush death off as something that happens to other people. Not so, as the Onion reveals. World Health Organization officials, it once reported, expressed disappointment that “despite the enormous efforts of doctors, rescue workers, and other medical professionals worldwide, the global death rate remains constant at 100 percent.”
In our technological age this is, to put it mildly, frustrating. We put men on the moon, extract living organs from one human and transplant them into another, talk to each other via devices that communicate wirelessly. But we’ve made no headway in combating what the Onion identifies as humanity’s top health concern: “A metabolic affliction causing total shutdown of all life functions.” Modern death is a failure.
What’s also perplexing is the fact that death is at once certain and uncertain. We know we’re going to die but we mostly don’t know how or when. We can live the healthy life, cut back on drinking, increase our intake of broccoli, and stick to the yoga program, but one day—we’ve no idea when—we may be felled by cancer or flattened by a bus.
Death has a double anxiety, then, since it’s certain we’ll die and it can happen at any time. “This means that death is always with us,” writes philosopher Todd May in his concisely titled book Death. “It haunts us. It accompanies every moment of our lives. We are never far from death, because it will inevitably happen and we cannot control the moment when it will.”
And while we try to push it from our thoughts, death is always lurking beneath the surface of our consciousness. “Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting,” wrote psychologist and philosopher William James in 1902. “Still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.”
It’s scary stuff. And the more we try to block out death, the more terrifying becomes its shadow. But we humans are practical beings. When we need shelter, we build a house. When we’re hungry, we hunt, farm, and cook. So when confronted with the terrifying vision of our impending mortality, we get really creative. After all, there’s perhaps no human condition to which more attention has been devoted than death. We’ve formulated elaborate ceremonies to manage it, erected great architectural and intellectual edifices to honor it. Death inspires music, literature, and poetry. Some say the afterlife is just part of this—a human invention designed to assuage our horror of annihilation.
But there’s more. One theory claims that the fear of death (“mortality salience,” as it’s known) shapes not just our visions of an afterlife, but our entire world. The pillars propping up our culture—religion, education, materialism, capitalism, nationalism, the arts, philanthropy—are also cushions that keep us from bumping up against the prickly reality of our ultimate termination.
There’s even a name for this hypothesis. With the alarming title Terror Management Theory, a group of academics posits that mortality salience has provided the seeds from which the whole of civilization has sprouted. Death, so the theory goes, is not just something that happens to us—it’s central to our very being, shaping much of what we do, what we believe in, and the way we behave.
Developed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski, Terror Management Theory has its roots in the work of Ernest Becker, a cultural and scientific anthropologist born in 1924. In his 1973 Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death (a copy of which Woody Allen’s character gives to his girlfriend in Annie Hall), Becker argues that death awareness is a dynamic force, driving a great proportion of human activity.
Building on his work, the TMT theorists argue that, confronted with unavoidable annihilation, we respond in two ways. First, we construct a “cultural worldview” about the nature of our reality, one offering reassurance that the world is orderly and meaningful and that we’re not wasting our time in it. Second, we build self-esteem, which reassures us that we’re living up to the values of our particular cultural worldview. So we run the New York City Marathon or run for office, help at the local bake sale or help the starving—because we want to be part of something bigger.
Possession of mortality salience is also thought to be one of the ways in which we differ from other creatures. Of course, there’s no way of knowing whether animals perceive death in the way we do (and on encountering their dead, elephants fall silent and fondle the remains ceremoniously as if grieving for a loss). But perhaps it’s why cows haven’t built their equivalent of the Empire State Building and mice haven’t put a fellow rodent on the moon.
While all this may be true, Terror Management Theory seems a little bleak. After all, the academics don’t mention the possibility that we’re doing all these things because we want to enjoy life and meet new people, help our fellow humans—or simply because we’re looking for something fun to do on the weekend.
Yet, for me, TMT and similar theories make a lot of sense. It seems highly plausible that philanthropic legacies, religious beliefs, and artistic and sporting achievements are partly motivated by our wish to cheat death of its finality. Mortality salience theories also go a long way toward explaining why we make our exits in certain ways. Nowhere is awareness of our own death expressed more clearly than in the manner in which we choose to leave the terrestrial world. We fear death’s definitive ending, so we do whatever we can to turn that ending into a new beginning.
For Ghanaians, that means going off in a coffin in the shape of a plane or a favorite car. For an ancient Chinese emperor, it meant taki
ng along an army of terra-cotta soldiers. For the Egyptians, it meant consulting a guidebook to the afterlife. Today, it might mean being buried with your cell phone. In short, the ways in which we leave this world speak volumes about the uneasy relationship we have with our own transience.
* * *
On the face of it, eternity sounds like a good thing—an escape from the grim clutches of death. Isn’t that what we all secretly hope for, whether we’re religious or not? In fact, part of me still thinks my death might never happen—that I may against the odds manage to escape alive. What then? Eternal life would stretch out before me. Yet eternity comes with looming uncertainties that, when you start to consider them, make death actually look like an agreeable alternative.
Many have mulled over this in the past, Shakespearean characters among them. Hamlet fears the “undiscover’d country from whose bourne / No traveller returns,” as he speculates on the dreams that may come after we’ve “shuffled off this mortal coil.”
Second-century Roman emperor Hadrian, the energetic conqueror and empire builder, also seems to have had misgivings about what awaited him. Shortly before his death, he wrote an intriguing poem musing on his post-mortal fate:
Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer,
Body’s guest and companion,
To what places will you set out for now?
To darkling, cold and gloomy ones—
And you won’t make your usual jokes.
So if an elixir guaranteeing an eternal afterlife were available, would we really drink it? I’m not sure I would. The prospect of eternity throws up all kinds of tricky questions—what age do you want to be, for example? Assuming you aren’t left with your age and physical state at the time of your death (which for most of us would not be how we’d want to spend perpetuity), would you choose the beauty of youth, with its uncertainty and emotional angst, or an older, more confident you, but one that’s tired, frail, and sagging in places?