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Life after death: Mediterranean and Middle Eastern After-Life and Resurrection
The Spiritual Bookstore Online World Religion Library
AFTER-LIFE EXISTENCE - AN OCCULT ANALYSIS
The Middle Eastern And Mediterranean After-Life Conception
The cessation of the personality with bodily death.
"(Better) to serve as the hireling of another, of some portionless man
whose livelihood was but small, than to be lord over all the dead that
have perished."
Homeric Pessimism
In contrast to the optimism of the Egyptians, the majority of
civilisations that developed in and around the Mediterranean basin and
the Middle East in the centuries before Christ took a dim and
pessimistic view. The ancient Babylonians, Hebrews, and Homeric Greeks
(by "Homeric" is meant the viewpoint of the great poet Homer 8th century
B.C.E.) and his public), saw the after-life state - the Underworld,
Sheol, Hades - as a dark, miserable, quasi-existence; the dead being but
a pathetic shadow of their former living selves.
A graphic literary illustration of this is given in Homer's account of
the meeting of Odysseus with the shade of Achilles, the greatest and
most renowned of all the Greek heros. Odysseus, descending to Hades in
order to consult the dead seer Teiresias concerning the circumstances
that prevented him from returning home, encounters Achilles, and
congratulates him regarding the honors and fame he had won through his
part in the siege of Troy. Achilles rejects Odysseus' words with a
devastating reply:
"Nay, seek not to speak soothingly to me of death....I should choose, so
I might live on earth, to serve as the hireling of another, of some
portionless man whose livelihood was but small, rather than to be lord
over all the dead that have perished."
[S. G. F. Brandon, The Judgment of the Dead, p.82 (Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, London, 1967)]
In a society which saw martial glory and honours as the highest of all
values, even that is not compensation for the miserable state of
after-life existence. Better to be the most pathetic beggar alive than
the King of all the Underworld. What a contrast to the magnificent and
multi-faceted Egyptian afterlife!
The Conception Of The Soul As Breath
According to the Old Testament Hebrews, man was a kind of holistic unity
of body and soul; there was no conception of a soul separate from the
body, as the Egyptians and the Greek Platonists had. After death the
body returns to the earth, and the life - the ruah or breath breathed
into Adam's nostrils by God - returns to God. Thus the "soul" is
identified with the life of the body, and the life with the breath (nefesh,
ruah); an idea that survives in the modern expression "breath of life".
Nor was this belief confined to the people of the Old Testament. It
formed an essential part of the entire Middle Eastern and Meditteranean
religious and cultural milieu. G. A. Barton, in his article in Hasting's
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, tells us that
"Only gradually did (the ancient Semites) come to think of (the soul) as
an entity that could exist apart from the body. In all the Semitic
dialects the soul was designated by a noun derived from a root meaning
"breathe".
Thus in Akkadian-Assyrian, napasu = "be wide", "breathe"; napistu =
"breath", "life", "soul". In Hebrew naphash = "take breath"...; nephesh
= "breath", "soul", "life", "person". In Arabic... tannaffus = "to fetch
a deep breath"; nafs = "breath of life", "soul", "self". In Aramaic
naphsha = "soul"; ettapash = "breathe". In Ethiopian nephsa = "breathe";
nephes = "soul"."
[G. A. Barton, "Soul - Semitic" in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
ed by James Hastings; (T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1908, 2nd Impression
1925), p.749]
And we see this identification not only among the Semites of the Middle
East. Consider the Greek word pnuema ("air", "spirit") and the Latin
spiritus, from which latter we derive the English "spirit" and
"inspiration" (literally "to breath in"). Even that classical word for
the soul, psyche, can be related to psychein = to breath [Julian Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
p.270 (1976, Penguin Books)].
In the Indian and Tibetan traditions there can likewise be found
reference to Prana (breath or vital force) and Vayu (air or wind,
equated in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism with Prana), and the nature and
yogic activation of this life/breath principle was explained in great
detail. The Chinese also had a great deal to say regarding the Ch'i or
vital-force, its various modes and currents. But unlike their less
perceptive Mediterranean brethren, whose formulations of ruah, nefesh,
psyche, and spiritus all confuse (a) physical air or breath, (b) vital
force, and (c) mind or psyche or soul, the Far Eastern yogis and
occultists consistantly recognised Prana, Vayu, and Ch'i as constituting
a principle distinct from the mind or soul. It was only later that there
appeared in the West a similar recognition of the distinction between
life-principle and soul.
Man - A Holistic Being Dependent On The Physical Body
The common Mediterranean perspective therefore was that man is a
holistic unity of body and soul or life-principle, and death of the body
therefore meant death of the personality as well. For Homer and his
readers, man is regarded as being made up of three parts: the body, the
psyche (life-principle), and the thymos (conscious self). With the
dissolution of the body, the thymos was merged with the air, and the
psyche descended into Hades as a shade or ghost, the eidolon ("image").
Later, as with the Hebrew nefesh and ruah - both of which terms, as we
have seen, originally meant "breath", or "soul as the breath of life",
and later came to mean "(immortal) soul" - the psyche became the
conscious principle or "soul". As for the eidolon or "image", I will
have more to say concerning this later.
The post-Homeric Hellenic thinkers polarised into two distinct camps
when it came to explaining whether or not consciousness continued after
death.
On the one hand there were the sages and mystics, such as the Orphics,
Pythagoras and his students and followers (the Pythagoreans),
Empedocles, and Plato and his students and successors (the Platonists),
who all held that the conscious principle or soul (psyche) was an
immortal spiritual essence, and transmigrated from body to body.
On the other hand there were the more mundane and pragmatic,
this-worldly philosophers and thinkers, such as Aristotle and his
successors (the Peripatetics), Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, and
Epicurus and his followers (the Epicurians), who held with Homer that
consciousness or intellect is only possible whilst the physical body
continues to function. The Stoics For example were of the opinion, much
in the manner of the modern physicist, that fire (=energy) was the
fundamental principle of the universe. According to them, after death
the soul
"decomposes along with the physical body and returns to...the
ether....(The) higher elements in man, such as the Fire of
Reason,...also dissolves back into its universal source, leaving no
individuality to experience any posthumous state..."
[Jocyln Godwin, Mystery Religions, p.70]
Here we see of course a repeat of the Homeric and Hebraic position,
according to both of which bodily death means the return of the
component personality aspects to their respective sources.
Origin Of The Belief In Resurrection
For the most part, the Babylonians, Hebrews, Homeric Greeks, Stoics, and
Epicurians, like modern materialists and sceptics, nobly accepted their
lot. Indeed, we even have the expression "Stoic acceptance". But it is a
natural consequence of the strivings of the human spirit that it could
not be satisfied with a such a limited existence.
Consider the ancient Hebrews. Their henotheistic / monotheistic Yahweh
cult induced in them a strong sense of morals and justice, as indicated
by the Mosaic Ten Commandments. And their god was very much a god of
justice, even if this was originally and unfortunately only the crude
vengeance of a tribe of savage desert warriors. But under reformers like
the prophet Isaiah (8th century B.C.E.), this brutal Yahweh was replaced
by a more morally elevated Yahweh, perhaps the first expression of "God"
as the term is understood today. Yet all the while the problem remained:
how can one speak of righteousness and justice when we have all around
us the evidence that the wicked flourish and the good go to their graves
unrewarded? It was through pondering questions like this that the
problem of theodicy, the paradox between Divine Justice and the
existence of evil, came into human consciousness.
The Hebrews eventually solved this problem the only way they knew how.
If good and evil are not rewarded or punished by God during this life,
it follows that there must be a post-mortem existence where they are.
The shadowy existence in Sheol must therefore be replaced by something
fuller.
Thus the later Hebrews, who had come into contact with
Persian-Zoroastrian beliefs during their Babylonian Exile (6th Century
B.C.E.), adopted the Zoroastrian idea of bodily resurrection. In the
Judeo-Christian tradition, this first clearly appears in the Book of
Daniel (173 B.C.E.). The reason for the popular appeal of the
Resurrection belief is obvious: granted that the personality or
consciousness depends for its existence on the body, if there was some
miraculous way the body could be restored, the personality and
individual existence would also be restored. The hope of a supernatural
resurrection provided this.
Thus we can see that the entire Judeo-Christian emphasis on the
"resurrection", and the Christian idea of Christ's resurrection as the
guarantee for "eternal life", is based in very large measure on the
inability to comprehend any after-life existence apart from the physical
body.
The Zoroastrians and Jews therefore, and following the latter the
Christians and Moslems, got around the problem of personality
disintegration with bodily death by constructing a myth, a sort of fairy
tale, which said, "Yes, it is true that your body will die and your
consciousness cease. But if you believe in our religion there will come
eventually a miraculous moment when your physical body and therefore
your consciousness and personality as well, will be restored, and you
will live in a paradise on Earth."
But this is, after all, only a fairy tale. For if the body has decayed
and long since become dust, how can all the scattered elements possibly
come together again? There comes a time, when faith becomes too absurd,
when one must take a more realistic look at things. And here we can
consider once again those extraordinary Egyptians.
Unlike the believers in the bodily resurrection myth, the Egyptians had
valid occult knowledge; knowledge which the Babylonians, Hebrews,
Greeks, Christians and modern materialists lacked or lack.
The Egyptians had the idea that it is society (the religious community,
family, etc) that should safeguard the deceased's continued personal
afterlife existence. Hence the great emphasis they placed on
mummification, funerary rites, providing for the welfare the deceased,
and so on. Along with this there were presumably also various initiation
rites, whereby the individual while still living was put in touch with
the spiritual-Divine realities that would guide him or her to the heaven
worlds or the enlightened state after death. Such initiation was also a
central part of Mithraism, Tantric Buddhism, and the Anthroposophy of
Rudolph Steiner.
from: http://www.kheper.net/topics/bardo/mideast-medit.htm
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