Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [427]
To those who think the afterlife to be a simple delusion, the Western tradition offers an enormously complicated and socially determined answer to the question of what lies after death: It may be a delusion but there is nothing simple about it. Heaven is the best we can think of for ourselves at any historical time and hell is the worst we can imagine. They are all the rewards we want and punishments we fear (or the revenge we want our enemies to suffer) for the lives we lead. Imagining a heaven therefore also involves projecting our own hopes on heaven and then spending our lives trying to live up to them. But it is not only personal because Westerners have long-standing histories of what the afterlife is and how to attain a pleasurable one.
This book is a personal view. But it is not only a personal view; it is an attempt to deal with each culture of the West in a knowledgeable and respectful way, to sift through the myriad accounts that Western culture has to offer, and to look for enduring trends and similarities. The Western view of the afterlife is a complex of ideas and institutions that have had a long and very rich history. To understand the afterlife in the West, one must see beyond the explicit portraits and analyze how ideas functioned in the society of the living.
Review of the Previous Chapters
READING THE history of the afterlife is like reading through a great books course in the humanities. One needs to know not just the Bible but every important book in Western culture to understand why we envision our afterlife in heaven or on earth, as souls or as bodies, after death or at the end of time. One thing which becomes entirely clear is that the afterlife is not a single eternal truth that is an unchanging reward of the righteous or faithful. It is, instead, a mirror of the values of the society that produced it. Watching the afterlife change is watching a society’s hopes and fears change, with the attendant change in social institutions and values.
Ideas about the afterlife do not exist in a vacuum; they have no life of their own. They do not spread out of inexorable logic or good sense or superior doctrine. All notions of the afterlife have benefited a particular social class and served to distinguish the purveyors of the idea from their social opponents. Their fortunes are closely tied to the fortunes of their earthly believers. The fact that it takes a close historical analysis of texts that are usually studied by religious specialists has kept the secret from us. Our notions of the afterlife are just as much a history of the constant civil war between religious factions in society as they are the record of the genius of our greatest literary masterpieces. Let us look at the story in the West in its broadest outlines.
EGYPT
Notions of afterlife are universal in human experience; indeed, they are older than human life, if Neanderthal grave sites are taken as evidence. The nations that surrounded Biblical Israel all investigated the notion of life after death. But no culture more spectacularly affirmed an afterlife than Egypt. The identity of the person was symbolized in the very image of the person, represented sometimes by the corpse itself, first perfected into an artful representation