Inventing Afterlives the Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death

Inventing Afterlives The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death 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, copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. I Am a Cat, by Natsume Sōseki, copyright © 2002 by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson. Used by permission of Tuttle Publishing, a division of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd. All rights reserved 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 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America. 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 ix 1. CONCERNING THE PRESENT STATE OF LIFE AFTER DEATH1 2. IMPERMANENT ETERNITIES: EGYPT, SUMER, AND BABYLON, ANCIENT ISRAEL, GREECE, AND ROME28 3. TOURING ASIAN AFTERLIVES: ETERNAL IMPERMANENCE132 4. PURSUING HAPPINESS: HOW THE ENLIGHTENMENT INVENTED AN AFTERLIFE TO WISH FOR197 5. WANDÂFURU RAIFU OR AFTERLIFE INVENTIONS AND VARIATIONS256 Notes 291 Index 353 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. avid Hume had an answer for the FBI. The single most famous Devent 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 XPREFACE 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 disap- peared 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 intro- duction 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 PREFACEXI 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 irreli- gious, too, need to be accounted for. As unbelievers like Hume demon- strate, 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 condescend- ing 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 XIIPREFACE (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 and economic circumstances. That morality and the afterlife originate independently is not immediately obvious. The misery of some early afterlives we have never known, and we have forgotten the horrors of ear- lier iterations of our own. Only very lately—and still not universally—do justice and morality attach themselves to afterlife beliefs, and only in the enlightenment does human happiness come to dominate afterlife expectations. These claims require demonstration that only a narrative travers- ing many places and times can supply, if they are to persuade. Applying the cognitive and collective insights of the first chapter to pre-Christian western afterlives, we see how western afterlife beliefs develop moralistic immortality and contend with empirical skepti- cism up to the advent of Christianity. The parallel but far more complex processes on the other half of the globe are briefly charted, with Hume’s tribute to “the Metempsychosis.” Once western moralistic immortality is in place, afterlife imaginings proliferate without fulfilling all human wishes.

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