Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [209]
It follows that in investigating “the Undiscover’d Country” of the afterlife, we are actually investigating our own self-consciousness through the mirror of our culture. The words we use will be the words our culture gives to us for understanding these “peak experiences” in our consciousness. The journey to heaven is also a journey into the self. This conclusion becomes inescapable. Saying that, however, is saying a great deal more than that we build our afterlife out of our imaginations. It is saying that we then invest those imaginative constructions with the authority of reality through a very complicated social procedure. Whether we can say anything more about the afterlife and our conscious perception of it will have to wait until the conclusions of this book, if not the conclusion of our personal life!
Demonstrations of the Soul’s Separation from the Body and Immortality
WE HAVE NOTED that neither for the Greeks nor for the Hebrews was the soul exactly equivalent with self-consciousness. Technically the soul contained a plethora of other functions. For both Greeks and Jews, soul was originally a rather vague way of describing human identity, including emotions and appetites. The Greeks seemed more willing to posit that the soul could separate from the body, but both admitted the possibilities of separated souls.
With the Greek philosophers, specifically with the Platonists, the soul began to be considered “the unique” seat of identity, and demonstrating that it was immortal was also demonstrating that we were transcendent creatures. The notion of psyche was given strong support by unusual states of consciousness like dreams, visions, and ecstasy, where the soul’s presence could be more clearly studied, separated from the body and without the normal background of bodily processes like pain and proprioception. What needed to be proven was that the soul was immortal. Since part of the Platonic notion of immortality adhered to the notion that the soul was separable from the body, and every single heavenly ascent could be understood as the soul’s separation from the body, the experience of heavenly journey itself became an experiential proof and confirmation of the truth of Socrates’ (Plato’s) reasoning. The separation of the soul from the body in sleep and in mystical ascent was the demonstration of the immortality of the soul. This is true not only in the magical papyri and the hermetic writings but also in the philosophical writings of the classical world.
Nor do we have to look very far to find this demonstration in Hellenistic Jewish literature as well. Philo himself tells us quite emphatically that he experienced ecstasy (he calls it corybantic frenzy) while studying philosophy. In short, he claims that his exegesis is the product of divine revelation through meditation and study. He describes what happens to him in intellectual journeys to heaven, ascribing the experience to a special gift of God:
On other occasions, I have approached my work empty and suddenly become full, the ideas falling in a shower from above and being sown invisibly, so that under the influence of divine possession [hypo katochēs entheou], I have been filled with corbybantic frenzy [korbantian] and have been unconscious of anything, place, persons, present, myself, words spoken, lines written. For I obtained language, ideas, an enjoyment of light, keenist vision, pellucid distinctness of objects, such as might be received through the eyes as the result of clearest showing. (Migr. 35; see Cher. 27)
There was a time when I had leisure for philosophy and for the contemplation of the universe and its contents, when I made its spirit my own in all its beauty and loveliness and true blessedness, when my constant companions were divine themes and verities, wherein I rejoiced with a joy that never cloyed or sated. I had no base or abject thoughts nor grovelled in search of reputation or of wealth