What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife
An exclusive excerpt from Prof. Robert Garland and Princeton University Press
PAC would like to extend their deepest thanks to Prof. Robert Garland and Princeton University Press for this exclusive excerpt from What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife.
What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife
Studies prove that everybody dies eventually, so I’m hoping that this beginner’s guide will appeal to a fairly large audience. Most people postpone thinking about what to expect when they die until shortly before they die. It’s not a very uplifting subject after all. But I think it proves helpful in the long run to take the proverbial bull by both horns, which is what I intend to do here. Forewarned, as the saying goes, is forearmed, especially if you happen to be in your 70s, as I am, or even in your eighties, nineties or beyond. Admittedly none of us knows when she or he is going to die – it could be tomorrow or it could be decades from now – but it’s worth noting that life expectancy in the US has been declining for two years in a row, both in 2020 (by 1.8 year) and in 2021 (by 0.9 year), i.e., from 77.0 to 76.1. It now stands at its lowest level since 1996.
Just sayin.’
‘In the midst of life, we are in death,’ says the Book of Common Prayer. Although we know that fact intellectually, we ignore it most of the time. Jessica Mitford in The American Way of Death (1963), an exposé of the abuses perpetrated by the undertaking industry, said that the Americans sublimate death, whereas the British ignore death. The Americans create the fiction that their dead are in a ‘home’ when the truth is that they’re being handled by professionals, whereas the British generally shun all contact with the body except at the funeral. I think that hits the nail in the coffin squarely on the head. Both societies fail to confront the existential phenomenon of death head-on.
Ancient societies, by contrast, looked death squarely in the eye, and for a number of reasons. First, life expectancy was so much lower than it is today; second, death was much more visible and present in the community, which meant that it was impossible to shield it from the public gaze; and third, the loss of a close family member, such as a parent or sibling, was the common lot of those who survived even to early adolescence. Until the advent of Christianity, the ancient world was largely unrelieved by the hope of salvation, and whatever ‘blessedness,’ as it was commonly called, the dead could hope for was the exclusive preserve of the privileged and the elite. It is my contention that the ancients have much to tell us about death and the dead, and about facing up to the challenges which they both pose.
None of us has the faintest idea what ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,’ as Shakespeare calls it, actually is, and even if we believe in Heaven and Hell, as most people do, these are still only indistinct ideas without any clear definition. Anyone who believes otherwise, who claims expert knowledge of the subject, is painfully deluded. Uncertainty about the afterlife is natural. According to a website called Happy Science, all the dead will be shepherded into a place called the Mirror of Truth, where their lives from beginning to end will be projected onto a screen. Once the screening is over, the dead will be sent ‘to the most suitable place for learning in the Spirit World.’ Perhaps. I hope I don’t sound too arrogant if I say that thinking about what lies ahead for each and every one of us in the fullness of time in a relaxed frame of mind through the sober lens of the ancients and in the company of a morbidly curious, thoroughly non-threatening author might even deepen one’s appreciation of life. To rightly understand death is to magnify life, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke argued.
Death’s heavy footprint in the historical record is dictated by wealth and prestige. Death itself may be the great leveler, but the poor and the downtrodden end up immeasurably lower down in the pecking order than the rich and the powerful. Whereas the mausolea constructed for the exceptional few have in many cases been sufficiently preserved to yield evidence of the lifestyle of their occupants and the elaborate style of interment, the humble burial pits of ordinary people have largely vanished. It’s also the case that most of the literary evidence relating to mortuary practice and belief was produced by the elite, which raises the question as to what extent the ideas of the elite were shared by the majority, let alone, by the vast slave population that supported every ancient society. The evidence is also skewed in favor of men over women. Archaeologists generally discover fewer burials of women in cemeteries, a fact which indicates that in death as in life their status and rank in society was lower than that of men.
The belief that the corpse is unclean, that the dead must undertake a journey to the next world, that they need assistance from the living to reach that world, that they will undergo a post mortem judgment, that this will include the weighing of the soul in a set of scales, good deeds being weighed against bad, that there exists a special place for the elect and an infernal region for the damned – all these ideas transcend religious as well as ethnic boundaries. They are also expressive of the difficulties faced by the human imagination when contemplating what happens after death. Equally universal are certain actions performed on behalf of the dead including the closing of the eyes, the washing of the corpse, clothing it in a special garment which leaves only the face exposed, the laying it out in a place where it can be viewed by relatives and friends, providing a meal for the mourners after the interment in which the dead are sometimes thought to participate, and so on. All this raises interesting questions of possible borrowing or mutual influence, a subject which for the most part I omit, as it would require a much more detailed and specialized treatment. Enough to say that the Jews borrowed from the Zoroastrians, the Romans from the Greeks, the Moslems from the Christians, and just about everybody ultimately from the Egyptians. But it also raises the no less interesting question as to what extent death evokes a universal response in humans which transcends ethnic and religious boundaries.
It is abundantly obvious, too, that inconsistency and illogicality also reign supreme. People are perfectly capable of holding two incompatible beliefs about death and the dead. The Egyptians, for instance, believed that a variety of spirit entities called the Ka, the Ba and the Akh somehow conferred immortality on their owners, but they also believed that the preservation of the body guaranteed survival. Perhaps the best way to explain such inconsistency is to say that it reflects a belt and suspenders approach to the afterlife. When in doubt, cover all your bases. After all, it can’t do any harm.
Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor Emeritus of the Classics at Colgate University. He is the author of many books, including The Greek Way of Death, Wandering Greeks, Athens Burning, and most recently What to Expect When You’re Dead (Princeton). He has also recorded six courses for the Great Courses, most recently God Against the Gods. He lives in Brooklyn and has a son and a daughter.