Cultural responses to death anxiety
‘Sorrow has entered my heart! I am afraid of death.’
— The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2100 BC
‘The great leveller, Death: Not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last’
—The Odyssey, 8th Century BC
The dread of death is a problem nearly as old as time itself. From the ancient laments about death immortalised in the epic poems of Babylon and Greece to the desperate attempts at bodily preservation in the Egyptian mummification rituals, fears of death are hardly a modern invention. In fact, themes of mortality and our efforts to cope with death can be perceived as the common thread underlying much of human history and culture. Our awareness of our own mortality, arguably a cognitive capacity unique to our species, has been famously referred to by William James as ‘the worm at the core’ of human existence, lingering in the shadows of our daily lives. Unsurprisingly, then, human societies have employed an array of cultural tools in order to combat this fear of death across the ages, including using art, ritual, literature, religion poetry, philosophy, music and theatre to deal with the ever-present dread of death.
Myth and Ritual
Many ancient myths reveal a fixation on themes of death. For instance, when one reviews the mythology of ancient Greece, for which extensive written evidence is available, themes of mortality and ageing can be seen to riddle this ancient belief system. On the surface, much of Greek myth appears to emphasise the inevitability of death, despite the desperate attempts of individuals to escape it. For example, the goddess responsible for choosing the timing and manner of each individual’s death was known as Atropos, ‘the inevitable’. It is also the immortality of ‘the deathless gods’ that is their defining feature, and it is this immortality which separates them from humankind. Although the Greek gods famously fall in love with many unsuspecting (and often unwilling) mortals, even they cannot prevent the eventual death of their beloved humans. The goddess Aphrodite herself is said to grieve the mortality of one of her mortal lovers, lamenting: ‘Old age will soon enfold you, remorseless, the same for everyone, for it stands one day at the side of all human beings, deadly, dispiriting – even the gods abhor it’ (Homer, Cashford, 2003, p. 95). The mythology of ancient Greece is also teeming with examples of mortals who have tried and yet failed to cheat death. Most notably, the mythical musician Orpheus was famously unsuccessful in his quest to rescue his beloved wife Eurydice from the underworld after her death.
While these and other ancient myths emphasised the inescapable nature of death, many rituals appear to offer the hope of immortality. One such ritual is that of Egyptian burial rites, or mummification, which serves as a vivid example of the attempt to cheat death. The process of mummification was incredibly lengthy and intricate, centering on elaborate mortuary procedures. Spanning 70 days, the process involved removing organs, casting spells to prevent decay, and various techniques to ensure the corpse remained lifelike in appearance, such as filling the body cavity with sawdust or inserting artificial eyes. These Egyptian mummification rituals represent a desperate and ambitious attempt to prevent any decay of the body and thus ensure the successful revival of the individual in the afterlife. The Egyptian belief in the immortality of their pharaoh, such that each pharaoh is viewed as a literal incarnation of their predecessor, highlights a similar desire to elude the inevitable.
Of course, the Egyptians were not the only early society to deny their mortality. Despite the emphasis on the inescapable nature of death in the ancient Greek myths, a closer examination of their rituals reveals some interesting loopholes in this supposed inevitability. While exploring ancient burial sites across the Mediterranean, archaeologists have unearthed numerous golden tablets, inscribed with guides to the afterlife. These tablets were given to devotees of the mythical figure of Orpheus — who, as mentioned above, famously tried to cheat death — and act as a form of ‘golden ticket’ to paradise. By being armed in death with crucial passwords required for entry (such as ‘I am the son of Earth and Starry Heaven. But my race is heavenly’) and being equipped with this engraved GPS of the underworld (‘You will find to the left of the house of Hades a spring, and standing by it a white cypress. Do not even approach this spring!’), the wearer may access the most elite spaces in the underworld.
The Eleusinian mystery festival serves as a similarly intriguing example of the ancient attempts to secure immortality. Although breaching the code of secrecy surrounding the festival carried the penalty of death, historians have fortunately extracted several key features of the rites. The festival attracted thousands of attendants each year from across the Mediterranean, and was devoted to celebrating Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. Initiates who participated in these rites did so with the guarantee of a better lot in the afterlife and were promised access to a privileged position in the dreary land of the dead. Participating in the Eleusinian mystery also allowed initiates a form of practice for their own death, as the rituals also involved an enactment of one’s moment of death and journey to the afterlife. These significant benefits in the afterlife made the festival so popular across the ancient world that Cicero, the famous Roman politician, considered the Eleusinian mysteries to be the greatest contribution to society that Athens ever produced. Despite the endless list of innovations to emerge from Athens, including the Olympic Games, theatre, and democracy itself, what could be better than eternal life?
Religion
In addition to myth and ritual, religion offers yet another clear method by which humans have attempted to deal with the dread of death across history. This strong focus on allaying death anxiety across centuries of religious texts and ideologies has led some theological theorists to argue that fears of death lie at the heart of most, if not all, of religion. Many of the earliest religious cults, emerging from 4th Century BC, were based on heroes who were said to have cheated death, with the promise of eternal life for their followers. The Abrahamic religions, including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, emerged alongside such cults and similarly offer literal immortality to devout adherents. Although these three religions address fears of death through this promise of eternal life, other religions are not always so black and white in their perspectives on death. For instance, Buddhism places a heavy emphasis on accepting one’s own impermanence and the inevitability of death. Buddhist scriptures repeatedly encourage adherents to contemplate their transient nature, and even to meditate for long periods on the image of their own corpse, or that of a loved one, decomposing. In fact, some Buddhist practitioners choose to meditate in front of human remains in order to drive home the inevitability of their own death. It is not uncommon for meditation halls to feature human skulls or skeletons.
Despite this clear emphasis on death acceptance in Buddhism, some lesser known practices highlight the universal human striving to conquer death, even in the face of religious scriptures which are emphatically advising the opposite approach. In Japan, the unusual and ambitious practice of ‘self-mummification’, a deliberate method of dying with the aim of living forever, is one such example of this. Self-mummification involves the monk limiting their diet to berries, twigs, and bark for at least five years, in order to reduce their body fat. For the next thousand days, the individual consumes a tea made from a poisonous substance to protect the body from being defiled by insects after death. Finally, they are buried alive and remain in a seated meditative position until their eventual death. Years later, the tomb is re-opened. Monks whose bodies were successfully preserved after death are honoured as a ‘sokushinbutsu’, or ‘living Buddha’. In the majority of cases, however, the desperate efforts at self-mummification failed, and followers would be greeted with the sight of their leader’s decayed corpse. In fact, only around 20 individuals have been able to achieve this difficult feat. Kōbō-Daishi, a famous Japanese monk and poet is one such example of a successfully-mummified sokushinbutsu. Despite being buried alive in a cave in 835, Kōbō-Daishi’s followers continue to prepare daily meals for him today, which are brought into his cave by the high priest, in the belief that their leader still resides inside, alive and well.
Ironically,