Inventing Afterlives: The Stories We Tell Ourselves about Life After Death

404 Pages·2018·2.8 MB·English

by  Regina M Janes

INVENTING AFTERLIVES
INVENTING AFTERLIVES
THE STORIES WE TELL
OURSELVES ABOUT LIFE
AFTER DEATH
REGINA M. JANES
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press “Gabriel” from Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch,
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All rights reserved E-ISBN 978-0-23154629-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Janes, Regina M., author.
Title: Inventing afterlives : the stories we tell ourselves about life after death / Regina M. Janes.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018000804 (print) | LCCN 2018009938 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231546294 (e-
book) | ISBN 9780231185707 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231185714 (paperback) Subjects:
LCSH: Future life.
Classification: LCC BL535 (e-book) | LCC BL535 .J35 2018 (print) | DDC 202/.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018000804
A Columbia University Press E-book.
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Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: Amy Weiss/Trevillion Images
IN MEMORIAM DALE E. WOOLLEY
AND FOR CHARLES, THE ONLY AFTERLIFE DALE
EVER TOOK AN INTEREST IN
CONTENTS
Preface
1. CONCERNING THE PRESENT STATE OF LIFE AFTER DEATH
2. IMPERMANENT ETERNITIES: EGYPT, SUMER, AND BABYLON,
ANCIENT ISRAEL, GREECE, AND ROME
3. TOURING ASIAN AFTERLIVES: ETERNAL IMPERMANENCE
4. PURSUING HAPPINESS: HOW THE ENLIGHTENMENT INVENTED
AN AFTERLIFE TO WISH FOR
5. WANDÂFURU RAIFU OR AFTERLIFE INVENTIONS AND
VARIATIONS
Notes
Index
PREFACE
LEO (July 23–Aug. 22)
The FBI will have to ask you some tough questions next
week, such as whether true love really exists and what
happens after we die.
HOROSCOPE, THE ONION, OCTOBER 13–19, 2011, 9.
David Hume had an answer for the FBI. The single most famous
event in that British philosopher’s life was a visit James Boswell,
Samuel Johnson’s biographer-to-be, paid him in 1776. “Nothing
endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death,” Hume had observed,1
yet it was not sorrow moving Boswell to Hume’s side, but curiosity. As
Hume lay dying, Boswell came to see how an atheist died. Serenely and
cheerfully, was the answer, with no itchy desire after eternal life, no fear
of roasting in flames, no apprehensions about annihilation, and no dread
of the gaping gap of vanished consciousness. Boswell had bad dreams
for a week.
To begin a book about afterlives with someone who did not believe in
one may seem perverse, but it has a purpose. Everyone has some belief,
or beliefs, about what happens after death, even if the belief is that
nothing at all happens or that nothing can be known about what happens
or that there is no point even thinking about it. Once death becomes a
phenomenon that human beings can think and talk about, we inevitably
ask, “So what comes next; what’s after that?” The question applies both
to the dead and to the survivors, and answers range from “nothing” to
“eternities.” Whatever the answer, it establishes our relationship to the
cosmos we live in: what it means, what it is for, and how we are to live
within it while we live.
Death, of course, has at once everything and nothing to do with the
afterlife. Afterlives are narratives made by the living in order to define the
relationship between the living and the dead, between the self and the
prospect of its own death, between survivors and those who have
disappeared from the social unit. Death is the limit that provokes those
fictions. Out of death’s blank wall, we want to make a gate, and then we
demand to know what is on the other side of the gate. Hume vanished
without fear. Boswell lived less happily, complaining of his melancholy
the year before Hume died, “[A]ll the doubts which have ever disturbed
thinking men, come upon me. I awake in the night, dreading annihilation
or being thrown into some horrible state of being.”2 Some of us know
exactly what and whom to expect—and may be praying that we’ve got it
wrong and there will be a loophole through which we can wriggle out of
our just deserts into paradise.3 Many presume on paradise.
The word afterlife presupposes some posthumous existence, pleasant
or unpleasant, but beliefs about what happens “after life” include the
denial of any such existence. Whether an afterlife is affirmed or denied,
the afterlife narrative overcomes death, dominates it, and reintegrates
death and the dead into the continuing self-conceptions of the living.
When blurb writers exclaim, “This book is not about death, it’s really
about how to live!” they are describing not a happy accident but a
necessary fact.
As a word denoting what happens after death, rather than in later life,
“after life” comes tardily to English. It is not used until 1598, in an
introduction to Christopher Marlowe’s posthumous works, where it refers
to the memory of the author and the man.4 Literary studies still use the
word most frequently to refer to authors’ reputations.5 Not until 1611 does
the term refer to the state of a soul after death, when it turns up in the
wondering words of a pagan, surprised by Christian missionaries who tell
“vs strange things, and giue vs faire promises of after life, when this life
shall be ended.”6 Christians, firmly possessed of “eternal life,” a phrase
first attested in 1479,7 had no need to meddle with any life that was
merely “after.” For seventeenth-century writers, “after life” designated the
speculations of heathens and the denials of Epicureans and Sadducees.8
The preferred generic term for their own afterlife expectations was “future
state,” a phrase that the OED gives to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man
(1733), but that already appears in 1588 in Gervase Babington’s
exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, sandwiched between one’s future state in
this life (1567) and the future state of England (1589), also very much in
this life.9 Christians start using the term afterlife to refer to their future and
eternal state only in the mid-eighteenth century.10 As the word changes,
so does the concept, less “state” and more “life.”
In religious studies, afterlives accompany the complex and nuanced
understanding of a religious tradition over time and in time. Scholars
maintain a careful professional agnosticism as to the reality of intrinsically
unverifiable afterlives and the claims of contending traditions. What a
tradition maintains as to immortality is accepted as given, while its chops
and changes, responses to political and intellectual ferment, differences
from itself from moment to moment, form the object of study. Creating
new knowledge through meticulous detail, religious-studies scholars are
rightly suspicious of grand historical narratives and ahistorical cognitive
arguments. This study proceeds otherwise.
It proposes a fable of origins in cognitive studies because the
irreligious, too, need to be accounted for. As unbelievers like Hume
demonstrate, there is no “hard wiring” of afterlife belief (or God), but
afterlife beliefs (like God) do originate in human sociality and cognition,
that is, language. Other primates recognize death and dislike it, but they
have nothing to say about it. Human afterlife talk weaves death into life’s
narrative, if only to write FINIS, as Walter Benjamin implies. Religious
traditions occasionally recount the origins of their afterlife beliefs, while
those outside those traditions (and outside of religious studies) commonly
explain away those beliefs in functional terms ranging from
condescending to paranoid: as compensatory or consoling or ethical or
controlling or imitative or stolen.
Yet the earliest attested afterlife beliefs (and some still current) are not
compensatory, consoling, ethical, or controlling. Nor can we know what
they may imitate or from whom they may have been stolen. They neither
satisfy human desires nor have anything to do with justice or morality.
Some other explanation is necessary, for people wanting explanations.
The human mind seems the place to look. But not just the mind: human
minds are always (already) social. Proposed is an ahistorical account that
accommodates both the cognitive quandary death poses and the social
injury it creates.
This ahistorical deep structure (a modern mythos) supports, but does
not determine, the variety afterlives display in changing socio-political