The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [457]
The orthodox Christian answer to this question was that, following Christ's death and resurrection, everything was now different. According to the Christian creed, dating back to the year after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, after Christ's crucifixion he had `descended into hell' to confront the power of death. But on `the third day he had risen again, having conquered death, as a result of which every Christian could look forward to sharing in his resurrection to enjoy eternal life. Based on various of the reported teachings of Jesus himself, this belief had then been further refined. As each person died, their `soul' - the non-physical essence of their personality - would face a divine judgement as to how they had lived on earth. If they were found to have lived well, according to the Christian way, they could look forward to being received into heaven, to enjoy eternal happiness with God. If they were found to have failed, or to have `missed the mark, they faced `damnation, doomed to be sent down to hell to face the horror of eternal punishment with the devil.
In fact there was nothing uniquely Christian about this idea. Behind it lay an archetypal model which went back into the mists of history. In ancient China, well over 1000 years earlier, there had already been a belief that when individuals died they faced a judgement as to how well they had lived in accordance with the `Mandate of Heaven. If approved, they could live in the heavenly garden surrounding the palace of the gods, eating from the Peach Tree of Immortality. If they failed, they faced appropriate punishment in the underworld. The ancient Greeks envisaged a similar form of judgement, whereby those who had lived particularly heroically could share eternity in the Elysian Fields, while those who had been particularly wicked, like Sisyphus, faced eternal punishment in the kingdom of Hades. For the majority there was nothing but limbo, where the shades of the dead lived in an insubstantial twilight, only able to speak if some earthly visitor, such as Odysseus, was able to animate them by giving them human blood to drink (as if the dead can only be brought back briefly to a semblance of life when they are remembered by those still alive on earth). Very rarely there were also mortals, such as Hercules, whose performance on earth was so exceptionally heroic that, when they died, they were allowed to join the gods, to be numbered among the `immortals.
According to the religious tradition of India, another form of `judgement' awaited the dead in that, according to how they had lived, they could expect to be reincarnated in some other physical existence, either as a human being, higher or lower in status than their previous existence, or as some form of animal.20 Only those exceptional spirits who had reached complete `enlightenment, that nirvana which marked the transcending of all earthly attachments, could hope for release from mortal existence altogether, in merging back into indivisible union with the World Soul.
In terms of the fundamental archetype underlying these various mind-pictures, we can see how they were constantly trying to reconcile two very different perspectives. On one hand it was only when mankind became separated from all other animals in emerging from unconscious unity with nature that this problem had arisen in the first place. Only then had individual human beings begun to develop that sense of their own separate existence, centred on the ego, which made them aware that one day this existence must come to an end. Yet the fundamental drive behind men's religious impulse was to resolve that split between ego-consciousness and the selfless level of their psyche which still identified with the `One'. What the