Death fascinated me for the first time when I was 8 years old and my mother took me to the British Museum to look at the mummies. When, at a slightly greater age, I began to study death and the ancient world, which surprised me the most, despite many fascinating cultural variants, it was the uniformity and limitation of human imagination during the millennia in the face of what to expect when we are going.
Covid pandemia and its consequences have killed more than 1,220,000 people only in the United States, and this has done All more aware of the omnipresence of death. But in the ancient world, you did not need such attention call. Your chances of celebrating your first birthday were not much better than two out of three. If you survived and you were a man, maybe I could expect to arrive in the mid -40s. If you were a woman, your life expectancy fell in the middle or end of 30 years. The chances of a surviving work delivery mother were gloomy. “I prefer to fight in battle three times than to give birth,” says Medea, in the Play by Euripides.
The great murderers of the ancient world were bronchitis, gastroenteritis, tuberculosis, malaria and cholera, which affected people around the social state. The plague was a regular seasonal visitor, sometimes it had been as much as a third of the population. The floods eliminated the entire settlements, and the fire was always present. The earthquakes also had a very heavy cost. The council of the Roman poet Horace to “take the day” – CARPE DIEM –It couldn't have been more appropriate.
Today, people have the option of dying in a hospital or in a hospice. But there was nothing remotely comparable to professional palliative care based on the institution in ancient times. If you did not die in the war or at sea, you breathed the last one in your family.
And except in Egypt and Rome, where the death industry was animated, the regrets were practically unknown. Instead, the family, especially the women, took care of the dead, washed and wears the body in a shroud and prepare to see at home. Perhaps due to these intimacies, the funeral itself was anything but the solemn and off matter that tends to be in our culture. Men and women hit their heads and breasts, poured dust on their hair, the clothes were torn, rolled on the ground and regretted their loss in a pain paroxysm. The polytheistic religion had little to offer as comfort or consolation. How could I? The Olympic gods knew anything about death and led themselves without taking into account mortality.
And yet, the ancients had their share of ideas about future life. Most believed that the dead not only continued to exist elsewhere but also, paradoxically, depended on the support deposited with their remains. The modern practice of placing flowers in a grave is fed by the same vague idea that the dead are contacted in the place where they are buried.
In Homer's “Odyssey”, everyone ends in the same wet, dark and sad region called Hades, regardless of the lives they have taken. Only a small minority, three people in total, is punished for being very bad. Tantalus, for example, who cooked his son in a saucepan and served the gods, is “so” for eternity for food and drink that is always out of reach.
The idea of a dualistic future life with some kind of sky for the blessed derives from the ancient Egyptians. According to them, before being admitted in the Reeds field, where you can hunt and celebrate as if there is no tomorrow, you must appear before the judge of the underworld Osiris, who will interrogate you to see if you have taken a virtuous life. Your heart will weigh on a scale, against a real pen. If it is heavier than the pen, a monster will devour it, but after that it will simply cease to exist. There is no hell, in other words.
Over time, several Greeks came to believe that a blessed beyond was available for those who had been initiated in the so -called mysterious cults, although it is not clear what is not clear exactly this blessing. Over time, also, the belief that Hades was a place of punishment won traction. Aeneas, who stops on his way to catch up with his father in Hades, learns that numerous categories of criminals experience horrible punishments. This anticipates the eternal fires suggested by both Christianity and Islam will consume the impious.
The comment of the late Pope Francis transmitted by a journalist in 2018 – “Hell does not exist; there is the disappearance of sinful souls”) was a welcome sign for sinners like me, despite the fact that the Vatican quickly said he was not speaking ex cathedra. On the contrary, the Hebrew Bible shows little interest in the difficult situation of individuals after death. The good and the bad ends in Sheol, a region very similar to Hades.
Today, According to the PEW Research Center dataAbout 80% of Americans believe in a future life. His thoughts about what to expect remain somewhat confused, but perhaps it is revealing that the most common idea is that they will meet with their loved ones and, if they are lucky, with pets. That opinion, in the absence of pets, also prevailed in ancient times. Greek funeral monuments frequently show the dead, or the living and the dead, trembling their hand. The same theme is more moving in Etruscan sarcophagi who represent husband and wife lying in bed together for all eternity. Not even the Egyptians came up with a better way to convey the hope that the life that awaits us is as sensual and pleasant as our best moments here on earth.
If there is one thing that I have learned studying all this, it is that inconsistency and illogical in 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 kingdom or on a different plane and that they will face a calculation are ideas that have existed for thousands of years. So, also, the belief that nothing survives death. “I did not exist. I existed. They do not exist. I don't care,” says an epitaph that is often found in Roman tombstones.
Mark Twain also expressed him memorably: “I did not fear death. He had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience.”
Robert Garland, Professor Emeritus of the classics of the University of Colgate, is the author, more recently, of “what to expect when you are dead: an ancient tour of Death and The Foorlife.” This article was produced in association with Zocalo Public Square.
