The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [52]
The core argument of Death in the Ancient World was that the early evolution of myth making and storytelling had been subject to a rigorous process of natural selection, by virtue of the fact that myth and narrative were vital weapons in the war against death. That war had still to be fought entirely in the mind of man because there was little yet to be accomplished by defiance of death’s claims upon the body. The great contribution of Hippocrates to the science of medicine—which I refused to despise or diminish for its apparent slightness—was that the wise doctor would usually do nothing at all, admitting that the vast majority of attempted treatments only made matters worse.
In the absence of an effective medical science—all the more so once that absence had been recognized and admitted—the war against death was essentially a war of propaganda. I insisted that the myths made by intelligent Greeks had to be judged in that light—not by their truthfulness, even in some allegorical or metaphorical sense, but by their usefulness in generating morale.
I admitted, of course, that the great insight of Hippocrates was fated to be refused and confused for a further two thousand years, while all kinds of witch doctors continued to employ all manner of poisons and tortures in the name of medicine, but I believe that I substantiated my claim that there had been a precious moment when the Hellenic Greeks actually knew what they were about and that this had informed their opposition to death more fruitfully than any previous culture or any of the immediately succeeding ones.
Elaborating and extrapolating the process of death in the way that the Egyptians and Greeks had done, I argued, had enabled a more secure moral order to be imported into social life. Those cultures had achieved a better sense of continuity with past and future generations than any before them, allotting every individual a part within a great enterprise that had extended and would extend, generation to generation, from the beginning to the end of time. I was careful, however, to give due credit to those less-celebrated tribesmen who worshiped their ancestors and thought them always close at hand, ready to deliver judgments upon the living. Such people, I felt, had fully mastered an elementary truth of human existence: that the dead are not entirely gone. Their afterlife continues to intrude upon the memories and dreams of the living, whether or not they were actually summoned. The argument became much more elaborate once I had properly accommodated the Far Eastern, Australasian, and Native American data within it, but its essence remained the same.
My commentary approved wholeheartedly of the idea that the dead should have a voice and must be entitled to speak—and that the living have a moral duty to listen. Because the vast majority of the tribal cultures of the ancient world were as direly short of history as they were of medicine, I argued, they were entirely justified in allowing their ancestors to live on in the minds of living people, where the culture those ancestors had forged similarly resided.
In saying this, of course, I was consciously trying to build imaginative bridges between the long-dead subjects of my analysis and its readers, the vast majority of whom still had their own dead freshly in mind.
I think I did strike a chord in some readers and that I triggered some useful word-of-mouth publicity. At any rate, the second part of my history attracted twice as many browsers in its first year within the Labyrinth, and the number of visitations registered thereafter climbed nearly three times as quickly. This additional attention was undoubtedly due to its timeliness and to the fact that it really did have a useful wisdom to offer the survivors of the Decimation.
TWENTY-NINE
The Decimation was undoubtedly the pivotal event in the early history of the New Human