Death and the Afterlife A Cultural Encyclopedia - By by Richard P. Taylor ( 2000 )

PREFACE
I confess I am much disposed to assert the existence of Immaterial natures in the world, and to place my own soul in the class of these beings. It will hereafter, I know not where, or when, yet be proved that the human soul stands even in this life in indissoluble connection with all immaterial natures in the spirit world, that it reciprocally acts upon these and receives impressions from them.

Immanuel Kant

For as God uses the help of our reason to illuminate us, so should we likewise turn it every way, that we may be more capable of understanding His mysteries; provided only that the mind be enlarged, according to its capacity, to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind.

Francis Bacon

What has really been preserved in folk and fairy tales and in popular peasant art is, then, by no means a body of merely childish or entertaining fables or of crude decorative art, but a series of what are really esoteric doctrines and symbols. . . . It is not at all shocking that this material should have been transmitted by peasants, for whom it forms a part of their lives, a nourishment of their very constitution, but who cannot explain it; it is not at all shocking that the folk material can be described as a body of “superstition,” since it is really a body of custom and belief that “stands over” (superstat) from a time when its meanings were understood.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Religion is, in general, extremely conservative; rituals related to death particularly so. Quite often specific funeral observances are maintained long after the origin and even the meaning of the practice are forgotten. Take, for instance, the modern Western practice of offering a eulogy to the dead: who today recognizes that this practice was in origin an attempt to pacify the soul of the dead in order to prevent him or her from harming the living? Likewise, the ritual funeral procession, common to many religious traditions, originated in the attempt to lead the soul of the dead to follow its body outside the city limits and convince it to stay there, bribed by pomp, circumstance, and above all offerings of food, drink, and money.

However, the purpose of this book is not merely to educate or even entertain the reader with information on the practices and beliefs of our allegedly naive ancestors and their “survivals” today. It may be the case that in many quarters the belief in the soul is out of fashion, but perhaps only temporarily. For all the marvelous gifts of technology, there is one thing physical science cannot provide; that is meaning.

Certainly, scientific scrutiny has unveiled in many cases how our physical universe works—how, for example, rain clouds form and how blooming flowers follow the path of the sun through the sky each day—but this does not tell us why they do so. In fact, the question “why?” is extremely difficult to answer and pausing on this question reveals to us fundamental gaps in our modern understanding of the universe. As the poet T. S. Eliot pointed out, our society tends to substitute knowledge for wisdom, and worse yet, in our technological age, information substitutes for knowledge. Our ancestors certainly had less information at their disposal, but through rituals, myths, and traditions they preserved the wisdom of their culture, a culture representing tens of thousands of generations of human experience, the vast majority of which escapes the current historical record. But the ancient human experience that has been lost is, in some degree, preserved in living tradition, if only it can be laid bare and its meaning penetrated.

Thus, this encyclopedia attempts to be more than a gathering of information, and its study will, it is hoped, produce something greater than just knowledge: the work attempts to draw out the underlying meaning of funeral and afterlife traditions. It makes available a variety of human responses to that most fundamental reality of life—death. Rather than recoiling from death in horror, the thoughtful reader will find that spending time with death is literally life-giving, just as the Underworld (whether the Greek Hades, the Hindu Patala, or the Chinese Yellow Springs) is not merely the repository of the dead but the source of tremendous fer-tility and wealth and—what is more—hidden wisdom bestowed only on the adventurous who have the fortitude to delve deeply.

I have attempted, in each article, to include the insights of thoughtful native authors and commentaries directly related to the cultural topic at hand. These are included out of respect in part for the subject and in part for the indigenous peoples whose experiences through history have gone to form these traditions. In making an effort to use local sources I also had in mind a wish to avoid the reductionism and objectification that can intrude when one group of people studies another. This kind of “cultural imperialism” can be observed when white people tried to study Native Americans even as they were slaughtering them, or when governments and corporations, even today, try to observe the foreign people whom they simultaneously proselytize or capitalize or both. Indeed, much of the current Western “knowledge” of world cultures was gathered during the not-so-distant colonial period, when 85 percent of the inhabited globe was held as property by a few European nations. This fact does not mean that traditional academic knowledge is useless, obviously: often it highlights information that is of interest to observers but overlooked or disregarded by native practitioners. In some cases, sadly, academic studies are all that remain of a vanished or vanishing people. For these reasons, then, in all cases where there was an option, I have chosen to use both academic sources and native informants, with the dual goal of describing the tradition or belief at hand as well as explaining its meaning as understood by practitioners.

Researching and writing this book have been a labor of love. The paramount design was to make available to the thinking public the tremendous variety of deeply interesting traditions around the world related to death and the hereafter. These traditions are often so obscure or so complicated or so little translated into English that they are appreciated by only a few scholars and specialists. An attempt has also been made to contextualize the topics presented, to show how they link up with other traditions in the same culture as well as to compare them with similar practices or beliefs in other cultures. For example, the articles on Heaven, Hell, and Resurrection focus on the Christian understanding of these themes but take pains to show the deep roots of these themes in other earlier traditions, like the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world, and relate Christian traditions to parallels in the other monotheistic religions, namely Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. Many articles are listed under the native term for the topic, in languages ranging from Chinese to Sanskrit to Hebrew to Celtic. To assist the reader in finding desired articles with foreign titles, a comprehensive index has been included at the back of the book. Although the material at times may seem daunting, my desire has been to provide maximum benefit for a reader who may have little or no background in comparative religion, folklore, history, archaeology, or linguistics. Likewise, I have used popular translations of classics rather than scholarly editions, so that readers may easily pursue further research on their own. Unless otherwise noted, the following were my sources for the Bible and the Koran: The New English Bible with the Apocrypha, general editor Samuel Sandmel, Oxford Study Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); and The Koran, translated by N. J. Dawood, fifth revised edition (New York: Penguin, 1993).

A number of people provided significant help in making this book the useful tool that it is. First of all, I with to thank Lionel Rothkrug for initiating the project and connecting me with ABC-CLIO. Profound thanks are also due to Professor Lewis Lancaster of the East Asian Languages Department of the University of California at Berkeley, for introducing me to Lionel and for invaluable guidance throughout my graduate career. I am also grateful to Professors Robert and Sally Goldman of the South Asian Studies Department at Berkeley for help with Hindu sources and for excellent instruction in various South Asian languages during my graduate study. I was blessed with an incredibly wise and generous acquisitions editor in the person of Todd Hallman, who trusted me with a massive project and without whose vision this encyclopedia never would have happened in the first place. I also wish to thank my project editor, Deborah Lynes, who patiently walked me through the editing and publishing process.

Many of my students at Berkeley also provided valuable assistance and insight. Ananda Sattwa gave excellent bibliographic help for navigating the overwhelming abundance of Native American sources. Josh Clifton and Matt Newton assisted me in finding sources for the article on Near-Death Experience and ventured to share their personal experiences as well. Chandan Narayan helped me keep track of the thousands of volumes I had checked out from various libraries. Ethan Shvartzman read portions of the manuscript and graciously allowed me to expostulate on it regularly. I wish to thank my wonderful Religious Studies class from the summer of 1999 (“Death and Afterlife in World Religion”), who proofread parts of the manuscript and asked critical and penetrating questions that required me to research more deeply in order to answer. I wish to especially thank Beth Glick, my teaching assistant for that class and several others, who helped me think out loud and gave excellent help and feedback in organizing that class.

Finally, I want to offer my profound gratitude to my parents, Dorothy Taylor and Richard A. Taylor, for their constant support and faith in me.