The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [51]
The commentary I provided for Death in the Ancient World was far more extensive than the commentary I had superimposed on the first volume. It offered an unprecedentedly elaborate analysis of the mythologies of life after death developed by the cultures under consideration. Although I have revised the commentary several times over and extended it considerably, I think the original version offered valuable insights into the eschatology of the Egyptians, rendered with a certain eloquence. I spared no effort in my descriptions and discussions of tomb texts, the Book of the Dead, the Hall of Double Justice, Anubis and Osiris, the custom of mummification, and the building of pyramid tombs. I refused to consider such elaborate efforts made by the living on behalf of the dead to be foolish or unduly lavish.
Whereas some historians had insisted on seeing pyramid building as a wasteful expression of the appalling vanity of the world’s first tyrant-dictators, I saw it as an entirely appropriate recognition of the appalling impotence of all humans in the face of death. In my view, the building of the pyramids should not be explained away as a kind of gigantic folly or as a way to dispose of the energies of the peasants when they were not required in harvesting the bounty of the fertile Nile; such heroic endeavor could only be accounted for if one accepted that pyramid building was the most useful of all labors. It was work directed at the glorious imposition of human endeavor upon the natural landscape. The placing of a royal mummy, with all its accoutrements, in a fabulous geometric edifice of stone was a loud, confident, and entirely appropriate statement of humanity’s invasion of the empire of death.
I did not see the pharaohs as usurpers of misery, elevating the importance of their own extinction far above that of their subjects but rather as vessels for the horror of the entire community. I saw a pharaoh’s temporal power not as a successful example of the exercise of brute force but as a symbol of the fact that no privilege a human society could extend or create could insulate its beneficiaries from mortality and mortality’s faithful handmaidens, disease and pain. The pyramids, I contended, had not been built for the pharaohs alone but for everyone who toiled in their construction or in support of the constructors; what was interred within a pyramid was no mere bag of bones absurdly decked with useless possessions but the collective impotence of a race, properly attended by symbolic expressions of fear, anger, and hope.
I still think that there was much merit in the elaborate comparisons that I made between late Egyptian and late Greek accounts of the “death adventure,” measuring both the common and distinctive phases of cultural development in the narrative complication and anxiety that infected their burgeoning but crisis-ridden civilizations. I am still proud of my careful decoding of the conceptual geography of the Greek Underworld and the characters associated with it as judges, guardians, functionaries, and misfortunate victims of hubris.
I disagreed, of course, with those analysts who thought hubris a bad thing and argued for the inherent and conscious irony of its description as a sin. Those who disputed the rights of the immortal gods, and paid the price, were in my estimation the true heroes of myth, and it was in that context that I offered my own account of the meaning and significance of the crucial notion of tragedy. My accounts of the myth of Persephone,