Afterthoughts on Afterlife
WE DO NOT KNOW when or how or by whom the notion of a life after death was invented. All mammals instinctively fear death, but if they escape their natural enemies and survive to senility, they seem to acquiesce in a quiet extinction of their enfeebled consciousness. We cannot suppose that the Australopithecus or any species of Homo erectus imagined a possible prolongation of life, and, despite some very recent claims, it is highly improbable that the Neanderthals did. The remote ancestors of our own race, the Cro-Magnons, must have had the capacity for such imagination, but we have no means of knowing what they believed.
We are often told that burials are evidence of some belief in an afterlife, but they may be no more than a manifestation of an instinctive respect or affection for the dead man and an unwillingness to see his corpse devoured by beasts. When a man’s possessions are buried with him, there may have been some notion (as is attested in Egypt, for example) that the equipment would be useful to him in a post-mortem existence, but it is equally possible that some or many instances of this custom may indicate the emergence of a strong sense of private property: the spear or the beads or the golden drinking-horn were the dead man’s, and no one should steal from him when he dies.
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My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead.
When men imagined ghosts, shadowy and tenuous, but not absolutely immaterial, simulacra of the dead in which their consciousness persisted, at least for a time, the phantoms, now detached from the grave, were given a realm of their own in an underworld, far beneath the ground, or, more poetically, in a misty land beyond the sunset. There the dead man, whether hero or peasant, was automatically and inexorably doomed to a miserable life-in-death, a helpless and almost voiceless shade, whose umbratile consciousness is embittered (as in the Homeric Nekyia) by the knowledge that it is better to be a dog among the living than a monarch of all the dead.
It is hard to account for the origin of the really revolutionary idea of a divine discrimination between ghosts, so that the afterlife of the ghosts will correspond in some way to the degree of moral excellence attained during life or, what is only slightly different, the special favor of some god. In his play, Critias (Plato’s uncle) explained it as a device to enforce the doctrine that the gods sustain human society by rewarding right conduct and/or punishing the reverse: when experience had made it only too obvious that Hesiod’s Zeus does not act on the reports of the invisible spirits he sends to observe even the most secret acts of men, i.e., that just men do suffer unjustly while scoundrels flourish throughout long lives, it became necessary for lawgivers to invent the notion of a life after death in which Zeus will at last give effect to his judgement of men’s morality.
What is certain is that if a large populace really believes in the inevitability of justice after death, fear of condign punishment will to some extent inhibit crimes against society, and that the social utility of the myth commended it to many thoughtful men who did not themselves believe it.
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If there is a divine justice, it must do more than discriminate among ghosts and allocate post-mortem residence according to moral criteria. Although the dead in Hades are usually in the form they had at the time of their death (e.g., Deiphobus and others in Vergil), the favored dwellers in Elysium or the Beatae Insulae seem always to have the bodily form that was theirs at the time of their greatest excellence: the warrior is in the prime of his physical prowess, regardless of when or how he died; the sage has the maturity of his wisdom, but is exempt from the effects of old age; and a woman who has earned such immortality reverts to the age at which she was most beautiful.
One of the Christian apocalypses composed under the name of John has Jesus promise that, come the resurrection, all the Christians, whether they died as infants or of old age, will pop out of their graves exactly thirty years old. I think there was a comparable doctrine in the gospel of Zoroaster, although it is hard to elicit anything specific from the gathas or to be sure of their respective dates. Immortality must be at the prime of life.
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The concept of a perpetual deathlessness created difficulties even when applied to gods. In some mythologies, diuturnal life suffices even for them: the Norse gods themselves die, at least in the Ragnarök, some (Balder) earlier. When Cronus was overthrown by Zeus, he really perished from this world, but since the di immortales were, by definition, immortal, it was necessary to suppose that he was either imprisoned in the darkest depths of the underworld or transported to the Isles of the Blest. One of the quirks of the inconsistent religion of the Egyptians was the provision of a heaven for dead gods, Duat. And in the mystery religions, chiefly Oriental, some gods (Tammuz, Osiris, Mithras, Christ) are slain but are resurrected, being thus both mortal and immortal! And in every religion, all gods (except a first one, for whom it is impossible to suggest a parentage without embarking on an endless regression) are born, so they are not really eternal, and their existence is assumed for only a few thousand years at most, leaving their future indefinite.
No one really believes in an eternal existence after death. The mind staggers before the concept of infinity in either time or space. Even the Hindus, who have calculated that the present age will end precisely, in terms of our calendar, on 17 February 428,898, when the universe (with all its gods except the Trinity) will perish in a cosmic conflagration, believe that the senior member of the Trinity, Brahman, will create another universe and yet another in a process that will continue for another 311,035,680,000,000 years, after which, they modestly admit, they do not know exactly what will happen, except that the creative force itself cannot perish with the total destruction of all things, including the supreme gods. Even they draw back before the horror of infinity!
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We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never . . .
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The Aryan mind is natively aristocratic: if life after death is a reward, it must be won by some kind of personal excellence, some achievement, not by the merely passive virtues of a timorous slave. The Classical mind could not conceive of Elysium or the Isles of the Blest as a refuge for a multitude of merely harmless wights: they were reserved for the few who had risen above the herd to make themselves illustrious for courage or wisdom. The Norse Valhalla admitted warriors who had proven themselves in battle under the eyes of the gods, with whom they would dwell until all went forth, foredoomed, to fight the good fight in the last battle and perish in the Götterdämmerung. What happened after death to the villains and knaves, no one cared.
This racial sentiment led naturally to a concept of a selective and limited immortality, most familiar to us from its statement by many of the Stoics (Chrysippus et al., but not Panaetius): the souls of ordinary men evaporate at death, but the souls of men who have attained distinction as heroes or sages endure in some celestial region (most clearly portrayed in the Somnium Scipionis) until the ecpyrosis, the universal conflagration. Thus, in a sense, a man who is highly endowed genetically may create his own limited immortality, i.e., a diuturnal but not eternal existence. One need not remark on the social advantages of a belief that inspires great men to serve their nation and race.
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Christianity was basically a religion for the proletariat, standing in sharp contrast, for example, to the Norse religion, which was frankly aristocratic: Valhalla was reserved for heroes, and it was only an afterthought that provided for women, even if well-born, the rarely-mentioned Freyja’s Bower. And we must never underestimate the influence of women. In the last days of the decaying Empire, Christianity’s principal competitor was the Mithraic cult, another derivative of Zoroastrianism. That cult, which was no more plausible but was more virile, simply excluded women; and although females could have a cult of their own, that of the Magna Mater Idaea (whose shrine was sometimes conveniently located just across the street), they probably felt themselves the victims of “discrimination” and worked zealously for the cult that, as Anatole France remarked, exalted women by making them a sin.
After the collapse of the Empire in the west, Christianity became useful to ambitious kings in the northern nations. Very few Norse kings were as honorable as Hakon the Good (note the appreciative epithet) of Norway, who, although a Christian in his youth, renounced the alien cult rather than impose it on his subjects. During the critical period, few Norse kings overlooked the advantages of a religion that provided a specious pretext for extending their own power by destroying the independence of the aristocracy. It is also noteworthy that the Christianizing kings introduced the practice of torture, which was and is so repugnant to our racial instincts. There is a long and bloody record of men who were forced by physical torture to become “converted” or who obstinately refused that humiliation and honorably perished amid abominable torments inflicted on them by the monarch’s real or assumed piety: even more moving are the records of men who became Christians to save their sons from being blinded, mutilated, or killed. When one remembers that the pagan hero kills, but never tortures, one has a certain measure of the corruption of morality wrought by the Oriental superstition.
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We regard immortality as a superstition because there is no cogent evidence of life after death, and what we know of organic processes and of the power of the human imagination makes any hypothesis that the individual can survive the disintegration of his body extremely improbable. But, at the limit, we cannot conclusively refute the sophistic analogy that just as there are invisible and normally impalpable forces, such as radio waves and subatomic radiation, perceptible only by their effects, so consciousness may be produced by an invisible force that is separable from the biological organism on which it impinges under certain conditions. We may think that highly improbable, but we cannot prove that it is flatly impossible. Like Aristotle, we cannot prove that the psyche or some part of it, such as the power of ratiocination, cannot be more than the functioning of organic life. We can never disprove an hypothesis that is, by its very terms, not subject to empirical verification. But we can be prudent enough not to mistake an unverifiable conjecture for a fact.
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The Nordic peoples accepted Christianity for several reasons, of which the most important, in my estimation, was the Bible, which, unlike other mythologies, so simulates an historical record that it seems to be an account of events that actually happened; and if its tales are historical truth, they prove the existence and power of a capricious and ferocious god whom mortals must dread and strive to placate. This god, furthermore, offered to his votaries, under conditions that it was painful but not impossible to meet, an assured and comfortable life after death. Our ancestors naturally desired an afterlife, if it was to be had: who (except a world-weary and over-civilized décadent) would not long to extend his existence far into the future? And the new religion, distasteful as it was in many ways, offered what seemed to be a certain way of attaining what all men desire.
A theory of metempsychosis was not unknown to the Nordics, but it was unsystematic and seems to have provided that a man would be reborn as his own grandson or great-grandson, as obviously did not happen in some observable instances. For this or some other reason, there is no trace of a real faith in reincarnation in our earliest sources. Valhalla was accessible only to heroes who died in battle, and it was no paradise: it was a military encampment of an army that intends to die honorably, fighting for a lost cause. And, for that matter, no man, however valorous, can be certain that he will die in battle. If Norse ladies heard the faint rumor that their souls would dwell in the halls of the Vannic goddess, Freyja, the prospect cannot have pleased them. Everyone knew, furthermore, that the myths were myths, based on no authentic information and subject to alteration, within very wide limits, by the fancy of the skalds, whose songs were poetry, not revelations. Some of the Norse quite frankly admitted they were atheists; the majority believed or thought it likely that Odin, Thor, and the other gods existed, but no one could claim to have any certain and definite knowledge of them, let alone of what might happen to their worshippers after death. There is no evidence of a confidence in any kind of afterlife among the Nordic peoples when the Christian salesmen arrived with what they claimed to be an historical record and a guarantee of immortality — to be had at a price, to be sure, but what would not a man pay not only to survive death but to enter on a life free of the striving, the toil, the sorrow, and the eventual failure of a life on earth? For many, the temptation must have been irresistible.
So much, we may take for granted. The price to be paid for this immortality, however, was conduct that was in many ways unnatural, even inhuman. As the writer in Instauration perspicaciously observes, the alien cult’s doctrine of “original sin” had a certain plausibility in that men are always tempted to violate the code of their society, whatever that may be, and not infrequently do so. But it was enforced by the Aryans’ subconscious sense that, for the sake of obtaining the immortality promised by a god whose existence seemed to be an historical fact, they were betraying and violating their own inner nature by imposing on themselves conduct that their instincts rejected. They thus had a sense of guilt without understanding why. By not sinning in the eyes of the god, they were sinning against themselves. They were biologically guilty.
From this inner discord, the author of the article concludes, — from the subconscious mind’s reaction to the perpetual conflict between the innate nature of a healthy Aryan and the conduct that his superstition requires of him, — comes the maddening sense of guilt that has been for fifteen centuries, and is today, a black and monstrous incubus on the minds of our race.
This explanation seems to me psychologically sound and cogent. The feeling of guilt would have increased proportionally as the new religion began to affect the conduct, as distinct from the superstitions, of the Norse, as it did only gradually. The holy men who sold immortality to the Norse shrewdly concealed from their customers the price that would eventually be demanded. They not only did not try to change the established norms of social conduct, but they even invented miracles to sanction those Nordic standards, e.g., Jesus restored the sight of a blind man so that he could split the skull of the enemy who had insulted him. It was only when Christianity had been firmly established, by fire and sword where necessary, that the religion began gradually and progressively to tighten its noose about our throats, as its dervishes discovered that more and more of the natural conduct of healthy men had been forbidden us by the Jewish god. The Christian concessions to the Aryan ethos were gradually eliminated — some only quite recently — and the subconscious perception of biological guilt was proportionately exacerbated. And the menticidal poison was the more deadly in that its virulence lay below the level of cognition.
This explains much that was puzzling in the history of Europe — and much that is puzzling today. It explains, for example, the frenzy of “Liberals” and “Democrats” as they try, ever more furiously, to impose on their race the Christian myths about “all mankind,” the equality of races, and “one world,” — as they impose on themselves the Christians’ maudlin or malicious doting on whatever is lowly, inferior, debased, deformed, and degenerate. The modern “Liberal” cannot even promise himself that Jesus has reserved for him a spacious condominium in a heavenly metropolis, but as he phrenetically tries to impose Christian superstitions on the world, he knows, at least subconsciously, that he is a member of a superior race that he is betraying in violation of his racial instincts. Hence his frantic sense of guilt; hence the subconscious death-wish of our Christian-dominated people today.
Vicisti, Galilaee?
– August 1980
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/news/2012/06/afterthoughts-on-afterlife/
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