Inventing Afterlives: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death

“The psychic next door said that my sister is a new soul, but I am an old soul, so I’m really my own great-grandmother,” reports a skeptical modern-day undergraduate, otherwise quite certain that life ends at death.⁴ A recent Ipsos/Reuters poll finds that 51 percent of the world’s citizens say they believe in some form of afterlife. Claiming ignorance are 26 percent. The remaining 23 percent are sure “you simply cease to exist.” Among the believers, 23 percent believe in an afterlife “but not specifically in a heaven or hell”; 19 percent believe “you go to heaven or hell” (41 percent in the United States say they believe this); 7 percent believe “you are ultimately reincarnated,” and a surprisingly low 2 percent believe in “heaven but not hell” (here the United States ranks highest, at 4 percent). In 2014, more Americans believed in heaven (80 percent) than in life after death (73 percent). Polls differ, but Americans are more religious and more certain of their afterlife prospects than citizens of any other developed country.⁵

As belief prospers, disbelief surfaces, and representations of afterlives diversify. From the pulpit, clergy still assure their congregants that the dead shall again see each other in God, and Southern billboards promise eternal life, John 6:47: “He that believeth on me hath everlasting life.” From these familiar traditions, afterlives have broken free. Now they course through movies (Defending Your Life, Wristcutters: A Love Story, What Dreams May Come, A Ghost Story, Coco), TV series (Six Feet Under, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dead Like Me, The Good Place), young adult novels (Sabriel), popular and serious fiction (Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven; Julian Barnes, History of the World in 10½ Chapters; George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo; Nadine Gordimer’s essay “Afterlife” and John Updike’s short story collection The Afterlife and Other Stories), plays (Conor McPherson, Seafarer; Michael Frayn, Afterlife; Daniel Alexander Jones, Duat), graphic novels (Anders Brekhus Nilsen, Big Questions, Or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand Is It Anyway?), nonfiction (Mary Roach, Spook), comic nonfiction (Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates), memoirs (Don Piper, 90 Minutes in Heaven; Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of), scientific accounts of near-death experiences, or NDEs (Raymond Moody, Life After Life; Kenneth Ring, Life at Death; Lee Bailey and Jenny Yates, eds., The Near-Death Experience; Bruce Greyson and C. P. Flynn, eds., The Near-Death Experience), or incidental accounts of NDEs (Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia). Thanks to Dante, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Peg Boyers, Billy Collins, and others, poems still outnumber internet sites. Orpheus’s descent has long been an operatic subgenre while musical comedies such as Carousel share stages with chamber operas, such as Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.

To make the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, a positive report from the afterlife helps. September 2011 saw at number one Heaven Is for Real: “A boy’s encounter with Jesus and the angels”; at number eight The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: “A boy who awoke from a coma two months after a car accident had an incredible story to share”; and at number nineteen bringing up the rear but on the list for 209 weeks, 90 Minutes in Heaven: “A Baptist minister describes the otherworldly experience he had after a car accident.”6 By April 2013, Heaven Is for Real had sunk to number sixteen (on the list for ninety-six weeks), the boy and the minister had disappeared, but a neurologist was making a strong showing at number two, on the list for twenty-three weeks, with his return from death in Proof of Heaven.⁷

An afterlife ex machina wraps up the mysterious, long-running, obsession-creating TV series Lost.⁸ In Sum: Tales from the Afterlives, David Eagleman invents forty fascinating new afterlives, forty thieves of time. Like Orpheus pursuing Eurydice into the underworld (Monteverdi, Gluck, Offenbach, Glass), Sum is soon to be an opera. Equally orphic, Eagleman has generated a new religious orientation, “possibilianism,” with at least one convert and a website.⁹ Economic theorists ponder the role of scarcity in heaven (Scott Gordon, “Economics of the Afterlife”) or question the invention of hell (Brooks B. Hull and Frederick Bold, “Hell, Religion and Cultural Change”). Moral philosophers debate the desirability of immortality (Bernard Williams, “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”) or affirm that we need an afterlife for our species more than we need personal immortality (Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife). Vampires and zombies, ghosts and ancestors stalk through subgenres of immortality. It was once said that in the midst of life we are in death; we are now certainly in the midst of afterlives.

What are afterlives that we should be surrounded and invaded by them? As narratives that adjust an individual’s and a society’s relationship to death, afterlives are as inescapable as death itself, but—also like death—they need not take up very much attention. “O Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind!” The medieval Everyman was healthily oblivious to death’s certainty, and that obliviousness does him no harm in his play (Everyman, c. 1500): his Good Deed saves him handily. Jesus himself commented testily on men’s preferring to plan great new barns as they lie down on the last night of their lives, indifferent to storehouses in heaven or anywhere other than here (Luke 12:16–21). Memento mori would be unnecessary if people were not inclined to forget death in the midst of life. Death always comes as a surprise, being in equal parts inevitable and astonishing. As these examples suggest, if we are inclined to forget about death, some spoilsport will leap forward to remind us or someone will die.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, death intrudes in new ways as a public-policy issue. The demographic bulge of the postwar period, its members now entering old age, approaches death, puzzles over the unconscionable survival rate of their parents, and dooms younger cohorts to monotonous meditations on mortality. The numbers, political slant, and discursive freedom are new; the process is ancient. Durable traditions deliver afterlives to us, but their hegemony has collapsed while the questions they addressed persist. As a society, we are engaged in renegotiating our contract with death, individually, collectively, and globally. Remembering death may terrify or depress, but, as we will see below, it also invigorates. It jolts the system into attention and activity.

Afterlives are neither as eternal nor as universal as they seem. For the last two thousand years, today’s major religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, have endorsed various forms of life’s continuing after death. Christianity and Islam are specifically predicated on promises of eternal life and personal immortality. Hinduism and Buddhism are premised on the impersonal immortality of rebirth; some variants (Vaishnavism, Pure Land) accommodate continuing personal identity in a heaven. Two thousand years is as close to eternity as most of us can imagine. Thus we tend to assume that afterlives are universal and all cultures at all times have had them.10 Folded into that assumption are desire and the democratic criterion of truth: the more people who believe something, the more likely it is to be true. So, if belief in an afterlife is as universal as, say, the belief that the sun rises every day in the east and sets in the west, then it must be as true.

Since the seventeenth century, however, explorers and anthropologists have turned up cultures in which nothing happens after death. Seventeenth-century Sami (Laplanders) infuriated European explorers by declining to know anything of an afterlife. They hold that “men and beasts go the same way, and will not be persuaded that there is any life after this.”¹¹ Today’s A’rna of Nigeria mock their Muslim neighbors’ afterlife certainties and wonder how they can know what happens beyond death: “If one of our ancestors would come back and tell us, we could tell you; but if one has never seen an ancestor, how can he know that his ancestors are yet alive somewhere, much less what lies on the other side of death?”¹² One eighteenth-century response was that the general views of mankind should not be called into question by a handful of obscure savages.

More recently, Human Relations Area Files anthropological data from nonindustrial cultures, past and present, report only 2 percent of cultures fail to elaborate an afterlife. Another 18 percent propose a simple afterlife of sleep or joining the spirits that is the same for everyone (as in ancient Israel and Shinto); another 30 percent propose an afterlife that is uniformly pleasant or unpleasant for everyone. Gilgamesh and Homer fall into this category, on the unpleasant side, Australian aborigines on the pleasant. Another 29 percent propose pleasant and unpleasant alternatives, with sometimes a third possibility (Christian, Muslim, Platonic, and Virgilian afterlives), and the final 21 percent elaborate complex systems with multiple stages and souls.13 Early and late Egyptian mortuary practices fall here, as well as Hindu and Buddhist systems. That 80 percent of human cultures elaborate afterlives of ever increasing complexity suggests that once people start thinking about afterlives, they find it difficult to stop. Most recently, the moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler has traded in the familiar personal immortality of an individual or transmigration’s discontinuous but ongoing existence, for “afterlife” defined as the continuing life of the human species.¹⁴

Even within cultures that have afterlife beliefs, not everyone believes them. Disbelief was so common in ancient Rome as to have, like RIP, its own epitaphic abbreviation, NF NS NC: Non fui, non sum, non curo, or “I was not, I am not, I care not” (in other words, “I did not exist before I was born, I no longer exist, and I don’t care one way or the other”). Modern accounts usually attribute belief to individuals’ emotional needs, whether to console themselves for loss, to fend off terror of death (their own and others’), or to give meaning to an otherwise meaningless life. Or they chalk up belief to wider social purposes: to heal the social rupture caused by death, to reinforce morality and acquiescence in the social status quo. Jay Olshansky and Bruce Carnes tell us that afterlives are “idealized worlds, created to soften the reality of life in a world filled with pain and suffering.”¹⁵ For Sigmund Freud, belief counters infantile human helplessness before “pitiless…nature.”¹⁶ For Karl Marx, religion is “the halo” of life’s “vale of woe”; life after death must then be the twelve stars in the virgin’s crown.¹⁷ If the afterlife makes people feel better, it has also been thought to make them act better.

“No afterlife, no morality” is a slogan defending the afterlife that twists to undermine it. In Dostoyevsky’s uneasy world, everything is permitted in the absence of immortality (and God).18 As in Dostoyevsky’s subordination of God to immortality, atheist long meant someone who denied the afterlife, no matter the gods. Lucretius might dedicate De Rerum Natura to Venus as passionately as he pleased; he was still called atheist for denying providence and a future state. Modern classicists who smugly affirm that Lucretius was no atheist forget the wider early meanings of the term.¹⁹ Atheists, it was clear, were immoralists who disbelieved in order to commit the nefarious acts believers virtuously denied themselves.

Dostoyevsky’s view still has adherents as well as antecedents. “Who would not commit all the excesses to which he is prompted by his natural inclinations, if he may do them with security while he is alive, and be incapable of punishment after he is dead?…[N]o man will be contain’d within the bounds of duty, when he may safely transgress them.”²⁰ So John Dryden in 1685 anticipated Dostoyevsky’s terrifying desire. Freud echoed the expectation in Future of an Illusion (1929). Social constraints chafe; men long to shrug them off; only fear keeps them from gratifying every forbidden desire. Moralizing the afterlife supplements the neighbor’s watchful eye with God’s. He will punish or reward no matter what society does or fails to do or to see. We now know to put pictured eyes near a coffee machine to persuade more people to contribute to the payment pot.²¹ Michel Foucault would cover those eyes (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison [Paris: Gallimard, 1975]), but large-scale societies without effective police early added the watchful eyes of high gods to monitor behavior.

Arguments for a moralized afterlife come from both sides of the aisle—from religious who deplore atheism, and atheists who deplore religion. Christopher Marlowe scoffed that the first origin of religion was “to keep men in awe.”²² Rejecting the community’s commonly held beliefs on a point as tender as death incurs suspicion about solidarity and reliability. Should disbelief itself be a prohibited category, affirming disbelief enacts alienation from the community, and the community reciprocates that hostility. Rarely among eighteenth-century thinkers even after Pierre Bayle, Catherine Trotter Cockburn argued that an atheist might be virtuous. Now a minor sociological cottage industry undertakes to prove that atheists are rather more moral than less so.²³ Yet skeptics confident of their own virtue are not always sure of that of others, especially if the others are poor.

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, a mid-eighteenth-century deist, thought the common people should be left their afterlife for the sake of their behavior.24 Henry Fielding, a borderline Christian-deist, saw social revolution as the consequence of persuading the poor that they had no compensatory afterlife to look forward to.²⁵ When urban agglomerations lacked effective police, and industrialization had not yet disciplined bodies, Christianity for the masses was, says Simon Dickie, “almost a mainstream Enlightenment position.”²⁶ The moral argument turns the afterlife into a plot to keep the disadvantaged obedient and to control minds. Why should the afterlife differ from other ideologies? Yet afterlife denial fulfills all the ends attributed to belief, except policing morality.

Thus Freud, at the end of The Future of an Illusion, urges mankind to give up acres in heaven in favor of cultivating Candide’s garden plot here. Let us liberate this world from oppression and declare “without regret,” quoting Heinrich Heine, “We leave Heaven to the Angels and the Sparrows.” Vigorously denying an afterlife, Freud appropriates all the illusory benefits he attributes to afterlife belief. Heaven renounced, the survivor is consoled and reconciled to that loss in the affirmation of his garden. Turning from imaginary heavens to the real earth, he fulfills his wishes through social action, enforces morality in the world’s liberation (farewell, police), strengthens the social order by human solidarity, and affirms meaning that extends beyond the self through the human world, defining contours for the cosmos. Heaven is for angels and sparrows, earth for the rest and the real. Contemplating an afterlife, or denying one, we look after our psycho-socio-moral needs. Afterlife denial is as energizing, invigorating, and life-affirming as any afterlife belief. But if the same psycho-social-moral needs are met by both belief and denial, those needs cannot be the source of belief. An origin is called for that comprehends both believers and deniers, as well as the generous variety of developed afterlife beliefs.

Afterlives perform multiple functions in contemporary and earlier societies, but their primary, original role is cognitive—to explain what happens at and after death. That cognition is not isolated, but socialized. The afterlife narrative adjusts how to behave at death’s approach for the dying and for the surviving community, and it defines the relationship existing between the living and the dead. In this sense, societies without afterlife beliefs still have them. They know that they do not know, and they deny, when asked, the possibility of knowing. Freud did not believe in an afterlife, but he had firm beliefs about the afterlife. There is no distressing uncertainty about the matter. Other people’s certainties may even become, as for the A’rna and the Sami (and Epicureans and New Yorker cartoons), a source of mirth.27 It is vital for individuals and cultures to know “what’s next” because death reminders are powerful. It is easy to ignore death—we do so most of the time—but when we are reminded, we experience a little life-enhancing jolt. Freud recognized as much when he elaborated his theory of a death instinct. Thoughts of death, like thoughts of sex, stimulate. But unlike sex they bind the individual to the community and the self rather than to an immediate object of desire.

Across cultures, being reminded of death (“mortality salience”) strengthens ideological biases, cognitive psychologists have shown.²⁸ Drop a word associated with death during a psychology experiment and participants adhere more fiercely to their own core values and those of their group. Lexical association performs, on its own, the community-strengthening socio-political ends attributed to afterlives. Death, when evoked, brings the tribe together; group solidarity is its own reward, isolation its own punishment. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has explored “whether death awareness affects people at work.”²⁹ Deadlines, anyone? It certainly affects almost everything else.

Death awareness makes religious fundamentalists more fundamentalist.³⁰ It inclines people to conform to the opinions of others in their group—but not to the opinions of those outside their group.³¹ It makes men more hostile to women’s studies and women more supportive.³² It increases one’s preference for allocating scarce resources to members of one’s own group.³³ It makes one adhere more firmly to cultural norms, whatever they may be.³⁴ Thus afterlife denial offends deeply when belief is normative. It explains the preference given tragedy over comedy that puzzled Hume.³⁵ Death awareness also, paradoxically, explains why skeptics embrace ending life, their own or others’, with dignity, while many religious Christians, clinging to comatose loved ones, fend off Jesus’s welcome to eternal life.

Happy afterlife beliefs do not correlate with any hurry to get there. In a seeming paradox, pro-life militants do not imagine a loving Jesus welcoming to his presence aborted fetuses, terminal sufferers, and comatose patients, or restoring the vegetative to their conscious souls. If they did, their opposition to abortion, euthanasia, end-of-life consultations (“death panels”), and shutting down artificial life-support systems should be far less vehement. They would not resist heaven with such fervor and at such expense. If there ought to be “no atheists in foxholes,” there should equally be “no Christians in intensive-care units.” Yet studies of terminally ill patients confirm that the religious seek more aggressive, life-prolonging care than the less religious. Intent on staving off death through the very last week of life, they are also less likely to have living wills and end-of-life directives.36 From Dinesh D’Souza to the Baptist preachers and their young children who keep returning from heaven, a firm grip on the next life carries over into the demand for the continuation of this one. While skeptics fit their own fantasied or assisted deaths into natural, cosmic cycles, ideologues of life cling religiously to life here or there, but especially now.

The conventionally religious have no monopoly on afterlife cravings. Some nontheists are as determined to live forever as those who believe in someone who has already arranged an eternity for them. Scientific analogies serve as well as any other. If the mind or soul is information and not matter, quantum theory forbids its destruction. In The Physics of Immortality (1994), Frank J. Tipler proposes that we will be resurrected as computer simulations, our quantum states reactivated, though our being has dispersed. Resurrection will occur when computers can “store all possible human simulations [as] an insignificant fraction of the entire capacity,” shortly before “the final Omega Point singularity.” Much depends on what the Omega Point wants: what age our emulated body is, where our emulated brain is placed, whether we come with ancestors and descendants, whether our emulation is real or a fantasy, and whether the Omega Point decides to let us continue running eternally. Tipler expects the Omega Point to love us. Hans Moravec, in Mind Children, thinks the resurrection will occur sooner, since simulations need not emulate the quantum state. John Leslie, in Immortality Defended, argues that “our life patterns are but an aspect of an ‘existentially unified’ cosmos that will persist after our death.” Radio waves persist after the radio has been smashed; light from the Big Bang is still arriving. Although nothing new emanates from the smashed radio, traces continue, so brain product endures when we, the union of brain and body, do not.³⁷

In sum, death awareness makes people come together with others of their kind, erasing their differences, enlarging their generosity, and enhancing alienation from those not of our kind. The evolutionary utility to groups of such attitudes seems patent: hunting and warfare and childbirth are risky businesses that require enhanced collaboration for success. The individual, fleeing in terror, bent on saving his own skin, is easily picked off by a coordinated group intent on attack or by the bear pursuing one of five scattering friends in New York in 2014.38 Enhanced identification with others when one is under threat serves both the self and the group. It would indeed be astonishing if the brain did not react to life-threatening stress, but it is highly instructive that the changes that do occur link not to self-preservation (the individual) but to group solidarity (the other, but not Other).³⁹ Terror Management Theory initiated these inquiries and discovered the phenomenon, but it attributed the effects to existential anxiety at the prospect of one’s own death, an individualist account. Fear of death varies among individuals. In a survey of the fears of modern undergraduates, fear of speaking in front of a group beat out fear of death.⁴⁰ Nor had it yet been discovered that in addition to enhancing group identification, death reminders generate happy thoughts. Death reminds us what we value about life, irresistibly.

One Terror Management theorist works hard to drum up anxiety in the otherwise calm reader in this engaging account of the losses death incurs. Fear of death is different from other aversive events, like not finding a mate

because there is nothing one can do to reduce the probability of death to less than 100 percent certain. Humans know that this is one thing that will definitely happen and this one thing might well be the end of their existence, a disconnection from every thing and person they care about and love, a final thwarting of all of their desires and favorites: belonging, sex, pleasure, control, love, aesthetic enjoyment, learning, exploration, sports, travel, theater, music, significance, reading Psychological Inquiry, ad infinitum.⁴¹

Anyone not made a little existentially anxious by that account either has strong nerves or is snacking while reading. Death-awareness effects diminish if one is given something good to eat at the same time.42 More surprisingly, death awareness also cheers us up: those happy thoughts come irresistibly to mind, unsought. Some unconscious mechanism provokes those reminded of death to produce ideas associated with happiness, filling a blank third letter after jo with y rather than with b.⁴³ The sting of imagined loss elicits its antithesis. So, in spite of his scary intentions, the Terror Management theorist ends his screed with “belonging, sex, pleasure…ad infinitum,” travel and theater, world without end. Instead of ending on the loss with which he threatened us, he fills our imaginations with all the things we love and want to possess forever. If we cannot possess them forever, those who live after us will. And if all human life is doomed, plants and animals will flourish anew, and the planets spin on.⁴⁴ There is a reason, or at least a psychological mechanism, that explains the assault of the mantra “Live every day as if it were your last.” Thinking on the last day cheers this one. There is a minority among us whom thoughts of death paralyze, but even they draw near to what terrifies them. Mortality salience animates, but it does not produce any afterlife concepts.

Actual mortality raises its own cognitive questions: What has happened? Where did the person who animated this body go? Edward Hirsch catches that moment in Gabriel, his elegy on the death of his son, when he records the moment he sees his twenty-two-year-old son’s body:

Afterlife concepts derive from the coincidence of how the mind works and what happens at others’ deaths. That seemingly dead bodies occasionally recover is the clincher. Most simply put, when someone dies, something goes missing that has been the medium of interaction with that person. When something goes missing, we ask where it is, we look for it, and failing to find it, we wait for it to reappear.46 Things, we know, do not disappear into thin air. They must be somewhere, and we often find them. The logic of human experience requires that whatever it is that vanishes when someone dies, soul, consciousness, breath, heartbeat, response, has gone to some other place. On this principle, we declare laws of conservation of matter and energy, and quantum physics claims that information never vanishes. If death puts out the candle’s flame, the soul must be the smoke drifting up from the snuffed wick. Reincarnation or metempsychosis becomes entirely plausible, for soul or life force disappearing here must reappear over there—or perhaps over there. Even David Hume thought metempsychosis a logical possibility, “the only system of this kind, that philosophy can so much as hearken to.”⁴⁷ When someone seemingly dead recovers, a rare and therefore remarkable occurrence, whatever went away has come back.

In Emmanuel Levinas’s terms, in death the face of the other has ceased to respond. “Death is the no-response.”⁴⁸ What remains is an untoward and uncanny presence, a socialized body without sociality. Vanished is that aspect of the other that responds to the self, that defines the self through its responses, and, distributed through many bodies, creates the self within society. The face that no longer responds is both a face and not a face; it is no longer the face we looked into to find ourselves. But we know ourselves only in the face of the other, the earliest mirrors of mankind, and if the face does not respond, we are not there. Death for Levinas is not possible, but “an ever open possibility.”⁴⁹ Our own deaths, to the anxiety over which Terror Management Theory attributes so much, transfer to ourselves the non-knowledge of death given by the death of the other, a transference “not mechanical [une mécanique] but [that] rather belongs to the intrigue or the intrication [sic] of My-self [Moi-même] and comes to cut the thread of my own duration, or ties a knot in this thread, as though the time in which the ‘I’ [moi] endures dragged out its length.”⁵⁰ It is a moment that can always and only be imagined, but the nonresponse of others is all too visible.

The primacy of Levinas’s responsive face is also neurological. The brain allocates the fusiform gyrus area to recognizing faces, especially eyes, mouths, and their movements. At five months, infants’ brains light up when a face flashes in front of them in the same two-phase recognition process as adults.51 Babies are slower: they take 1.3 seconds to complete a reaction that adults finish in 0.3 seconds. Faces are the first abstraction an infant recognizes, and in the bonding of infant and mother, eye to eye and mouth to breast are equally important. The blind touch each other’s faces. In prosopagnosia, the afflicted cannot recognize faces. Relying on other cues to identify persons they know, they helplessly offend people to whom they have been often introduced but can never recognize. When the face no longer responds, the open eyes no longer see, the mouth no longer closes. A change has occurred that must be accounted for.

For this accounting, cognitive psychology currently provides a stripped-down model of the mind’s processes in causal agency, agent detection, and, for primates, theory of mind. Like cows and crows and chimps, we need these processes to act in the world, and without them our world would be both unworkable and unrecognizable. Causal agency means that events have causes; agent detection assumes an agent exists and refers to the search for whatever caused the event. Absent in cows and crows but common to people and chimps, theory of mind attributes mental states like our own to others and recognizes that the contents of others’ minds may be different from our own. This fundamental aspect of human sociality and cognition develops around age four and suffers impairment in autism. Empathy, which Frans de Waal identifies as “the original, prelinguistic form of inter-individual linkage,”⁵² the capacity to feel what another is feeling, underpins all social interaction. Making it happen, mirror neurons ensure that we mime internally the actions we observe others performing. In death, theory of mind does a double take.

Causal agency and agent detection are closely linked, and theory of mind imposes sociability and community on causation, humanizing it. When we bump into a table and bruise our shin, we look for a cause for our pain—the bumping—and an agent—the table. Animating the agent, we often blame the table for putting itself in the way: “Where did that wretched table come from?” Some people even impose eternal suffering on the table in question: “Where did that [God-] damned table come from?” Activating theory of mind, we attribute malevolence to the traveling table, and people have been known to kick the table in retaliation. More benignly, we realize some person moved the table because guests are coming.

In death, an agent has vanished. I wait for the reply, and it does not come. An entity to which I attributed consciousness like my own has absconded.53 So, faced with the disappearance of the animating principle, our ancestors wondered where it had gone. Who had taken it? What was become of it? Where was it? What was it doing? It could not just be gone. Or perhaps it is just gone, poured out like water. In the answers to such questions, and in a society’s need, as Robert Hertz argues, to prevent its own diminution by loss, afterlife narratives originate.⁵⁴ Michael Shermer calls people “natural-born immortalists,” but that is not quite right.⁵⁵ We are natural-born questioners of mortality, and a substantial minority persist in doubting the immortality solution.

Our speechless primate cousins can neither pose nor answer such questions, but they recognize death and do not like it. In their silences, our feelings are visible without our words. Chimpanzees wait for life to reappear in dead conspecifics; they act aggressively to provoke signs of life; they touch the dead gently, hoot softly, leave them lingeringly.⁵⁶ They lick the wounds of the injured, but not of the dead. In their unsettled and uncertain responses, we see from another, prelinguistic angle the situation our afterlife narratives address. Elephants stroke the bones of other dead elephants and render themselves vulnerable to poachers by returning to the site where their dead were slaughtered.⁵⁷ Whales are said to grieve.⁵⁸ Among macaques, gorillas, chimpanzees, langurs, even baboons, mothers and male caretakers may carry dead infants for several days, and grieving primates exhibit the same physiological indicators as humans (temperature, blood pressure, heart rate).⁵⁹ Not surprisingly, the most frequently reported accounts of primates’ responses to death are of mothers carrying dead infants, days extending to months if the corpse mummifies.⁶⁰ That such reports are more common than those for adult primates is not just interspecific empathy or human sentimentality in action. Mothers carrying dead infants for days are visible to observers, while most primate deaths in the wild are not.

In the wild, chimps retire into their nests or deep vegetation when they are injured, ill, or old.⁶¹ Accident, predation, and murder (“intergroup violence”) create rare exceptions and opportunities for observation. Chimpanzees killing a chimpanzee from another group (and not cannibalizing it) abandon the corpse, often within an hour.⁶² Deaths by accident and interspecific predation are, by contrast, marked by waiting, vocalizing, and anxiety for a reaction from the dead conspecific, even to violent interventions.

At a riverbank, as two groups met, an adult male falling from a tree broke his neck on an upturned rock. No one touched him, but for ten minutes, they kept up an unusual, intense, shrill, unique distress call (“wraah”); then they gathered silently around the body, sitting and gazing at it for another ten minutes, as one continued the special “wraah” call.63 After twenty minutes, life began to resume, with sporadic feeding, grooming, mating. Periodically individuals, especially younger ones, approached the corpse, sniffed it, stared at it. For four hours, the group stayed near the corpse, adolescents still paying close attention to it as time passed, older adults grooming, feeding, nearby. Then they left. A young adult male, a paralytic adult male, and an adolescent female were the last to leave, each departing after a final gaze at the corpse.⁶⁴

For Freudians, especially interesting is the persistent copulation in the presence of the dead. The group consisted of fourteen males and two females, one adolescent, one adult with an infant; eleven males mated with the adult female sixteen times at intervals ranging from three to forty minutes over the four-hour period, some several times. Unfortunately, the author of the study does not indicate whether such rates of copulation are ordinary or represent exceptional, stress-induced sex.⁶⁵ They certainly suggest resurgent “happy thoughts,” that mechanism of mental movement to positive affect.

By contrast, predation and a natural, anticipated death induced both mild and violent contact with the body. A leopard’s killing an adolescent female provoked “intense mass excitement.” “[S]ome displaying males even dragged [her] over short distances.”⁶⁶ Others gently shook the hand and leg, looked in the face and groomed the body, removing fly cases. Six hours elapsed before they abandoned the body.⁶⁷ A natural death in captivity showed responses that were similar, the authors observe, to human reactions to an expected death. As an old chimp grew lethargic, her three companions, a daughter and a mother-son pair, groomed her frequently, orienting themselves towards the dying chimp’s head. The two female chimps gradually ceased grooming and moved slightly away. After about ten minutes, the male charged the platform where the dead chimp lay, pounded her torso with both hands, and then ran away from the platform, an act he repeated twice during the night. The daughter sat beside the body all night, without grooming it. The mother of the mother-son pair groomed her son longer than usual. The three survivors’ sleep was disturbed, and in the morning they removed straw from the body, “cleaning the corpse.” Once the body was removed, for several days they avoided the old sleeping area.⁶⁸

As Anne Zeller observes, primates experience grief at loss of individuals, but lack mourning as a communal response or recognized “group activity”: “Since mourning is the culturally constructed social and public response to the loss of an individual, it rests in a social and symbolic context which is not available to primates.”69 Primates respond to the breakdown of social responses by waiting for those responses to reappear and crying out or by trying to provoke some response through violent, expressive actions. Different causes of death—predation, accident, natural in captivity—elicit different reactions: fury, wonder, anxious resignation. As with us, primate theory of mind demands a response that death frustrates. But our few surviving primate relations do not bury each other. They just move on.

Like them we howl—and move on—but we also touch, prepare, and dispose of the body that unites survivors by its presence. Funeral rituals form a community around the dead, separate the living from the dead, re-situate the dead relative to the living. Protecting the survivors from death and the dead, they fulfill the obligations of the living to the dead, which are obligations to the community created and threatened by death. Wakes, sitting shivah, and cemeteries close the gap created in the community, as dirt fills the grave. The greater the loss to the community, the greater the need to fill the grave with gifts, to secure life with magic. When the community feels no loss, when the dead does not signify to the collective, the mere individuals who care may scatter ashes where they will, or they may keep the body close by.

Funerary rituals rarely articulate but always presuppose a narrative about what next happens to the person gone missing. Jonathan Swift, the Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin, imagined his friends disposing of him in lines as rapid as grief: “The Dean is dead;…he ran his race,/ We hope he’s in a better place.”⁷⁰ In the popular western view, soul and body separate abruptly at death; death is precisely that separation. The soul flies off with a devil or an angel; the body “remains.” The modern medical West understands death as a process before a final shutting down. Medically defined, brain death enables organs to be harvested for reuse before death has progressed too far through the body.⁷¹ Organ donors are not being harvested while they are still alive.

Some materialists send a nonexistent soul into nonexistence. So Hiraga Gennai in eighteenth-century Japan called on Buddhist imagery of flame, of material sparks: “Life comes into being the same way a spark does when stone and metal are rubbed together. Life continues as long as the firewood burns, but when the fire goes out, nothing is left but burned-up charcoal—yes, that’s right, your body.”72 Michael Graziano and Daniel Dennett take consciousness to be the attention the brain pays to its own processes, which ceases when the brain ceases processing. ⁷³ In the funerary practices most familiar today, departure is assumed, and the body is burned, buried, or, more rarely, exposed (among the Maasai, on the Parsis’ Towers of Silence, both burned and exposed among Tibetan Buddhists). Cremation continues the process of burning up the charcoal. Burial puts it out of sight. Exposure integrates it with other living beings. In many earlier afterlives, multiple souls take different directions; some remain, others depart the body. Empathy with the body underlies the aversion to burning attested in the earliest recorded afterlives or, until recently, in Roman Catholicism, for the sake of the resurrected body. God is now trusted to be able to reassemble ashes as well as naturally decomposed dust.

Other cultures understand death as a process that continues over time, a gradual separating. Peter Ramsden contrasts the twentieth-century Canadian belief in abrupt separation with the seventeenth-century Huron view that there are stages in death, recognized by points at which bodies are reburied, their bones rewrapped and moved to different resting places.⁷⁴ Certain contemporary Indonesians, who visit and periodically rewrap corpses, are horrified by western practices of cremation or burial: “How could you? How do you love (kaboro’) and remember (kilala) your forebears if you cannot hold (toe) them and see (tiro) them as we do?”⁷⁵ The soul-person is still in some way present in the bones; through care of the bones a relationship continues. Unlike the skull that brings only death to mind in the western memento mori, these bones are not anonymous. Such empathic identification with what is left undergirds the veneration of relics, literally “what is left behind” (from relinquere). In the Chapel of Relics in St. Trophîme, Arles, a note carefully explains to hordes of wondering tourists—Protestant, Buddhist, atheist—that Catholics venerate relics in anticipation of the resurrection of the dead and as the presence of the saints among them. Such an explanation was once unnecessary.

Consciousness ceases in the dead, but it has not ceased in the living. The living continue to attribute to the dead—and to themselves as dead—some aspect of the consciousness they cannot imagine (being) without. The dead glide along our memories on well-established neurological pathways of recollection. Theory of mind leads us to attribute consciousness to the dead, motivating the decoration of corpses and their provisioning with grave goods, while the practice of agent detection leads to events’ being attributed to the now invisible dead, as to the always invisible gods. The dead must have gone someplace else, but they are also still beside us. In fact, they are inside us. Our frustrated empathy with the dead also leads us to believe, not mistakenly, that where they have gone, we will follow. It is not surprising that traces of afterlife belief are both very common and extend very far back.

How far back do afterlife beliefs go? Barely five thousand years for written accounts: unambiguous testimonies to beliefs about an afterlife appear in Egypt and Sumer after 2500 BCE (mid-third millennium BCE) and develop rapidly, enriching and complicating details and imagery. Tomb inscriptions, books of the dead, amulets and magic spells, poems about visiting the world of the dead—many genres take up that terminal question. In Sumer and Babylon through at least the sixth century BCE, afterlife conditions depended on how the living cared for the dead and how the dead had died. In Egypt, within a few hundred years of their first appearance around 2350, magic spells ensuring the pharaoh’s ascent to the sky had been appropriated by queens and nobles. As access to an agreeable afterlife democratized, the conditions of access were moralized and complicated.76 In China, written evidence attesting to afterlife beliefs and ancestors’ influence appears on oracle bones in the Shang dynasty (c. 1200–1045 BCE), with the first grave offerings appearing around 5800 BCE. Their successors, the Zhou, limited commoners to two generations of ancestors, royals to seven.⁷⁷

Before writing, archeology provides evidence of death’s social context. Skull rings, burials, and cremations disclose a community’s consciousness of death. Yet it is not always clear whether a body was intentionally buried. Are the bones in a shaft in Spain from four hundred thousand years ago signs of burial or simply “bin-ends,” left behind?⁷⁸

The earliest burials that seem clearly intentional occurred ninety thousand to one hundred thousand years ago, performed by Neanderthals and early modern humans.79 An early-modern human holds a boar’s jaw in his hands, and a young Mousterian woman is buried with an infant at her feet. Neither those faint intimations of cause and effect or of desire, nor the ibex ring perhaps associated with a Neanderthal burial, nor the rose petals perhaps scattered by Neanderthals disclose any certain information.⁸⁰ About 74,000 years ago, a four- to six-month-old infant was buried with a seashell ornament in KwaZulu-Natal.⁸¹ By thirty thousand years ago, bodies are elaborately decorated with ochre and ivory, beads and baubles, but the decoration does not speak for itself to clarify what it means, beyond the community’s willingness to dedicate valuable resources to this body. (And where is everyone else?) The beautifully bedecked corpses of thirty thousand years ago may be arrayed for a festival of the gods or a meeting with other dead of which we will never know the particulars. The community may be asserting itself among the dead or placating greedy divinities or soothing the aggrieved dead or assuaging social panic at the loss of a key personage. Some eleven thousand years ago, at Gobekli Tepe in southwestern Turkey, hunter-gatherers carved vultures, spiders, and snakes on t-shaped stones that they then buried. Bits of human bone have been found in the dirt, and the site, once dismissed as a medieval cemetery, may have served both as temple and for the dead.⁸² Grave goods, objects placed with the dead in a burial, are somewhat more suggestive, seconded by the proximity of burials to dwellings, either in them or nearby.

Like a decorated body, grave goods show symbolism in action, and they attribute to the corpse—or to the gods underground—desires that remain powerful in the living. In themselves, they do not prove a belief that the dead continue as conscious beings. Personal objects may be regarded as polluted by contact with the dead and so buried with them. Survivors wistfully project this life’s lost desires on to the dead, as when a nineteenth-century French mother buried her daughter with a sou so that “she could have some fun in Paradise.”⁸³ Still, when the dead are put in the grave accompanied by objects they found useful in life, or when traces of food or drink remain in the grave, some continuing life seems to be attributed to the dead. When a pipe for pouring libations extends from the surface into the grave, some necessary service is being performed. The dead need feeding; they become thirsty. Theory of mind, or empathy, considers what I would like or need were I in this situation. Burials in houses or very near them keep the dead close for some purpose, for power or influence attributed to them or for the comfort of their presence, staving off loss to individuals as to the community. The dead, too, may want to stay nearby. From Iwo Jima, the Japanese general wrote his family about what to do with his remains, “If I have a soul, it will stay near you and the children, so enshrining me in the house that you’re living in will be fine. (And then there’s always Yasukuni shrine.)”⁸⁴

Studying the last fifty thousand years of funerary practices, V. Gordon Childe found simple grave goods in Paleolithic graves, joints of meat, unspecialized scrapers, lumps of ochre as toiletries. Practical, reusable items began appearing in abundance about seven thousand years ago: food, drink, pots, weapons, tweezers, rings and beads and necklaces, dice, lamps, buttons, amulets, and figurines. Absent from graves, though frequent in other domestic sites, were work tools. Either tools were too valuable to place in graves, or working in the next life was not part of the plan, neither imagined nor projected nor desired. Childe also found that after an initial elaboration and enrichment of grave goods, quality fell off. As societies grew rich, complex, and stable, they replaced real goods, like human sacrifices, with symbolic—and cheaper—models of human beings, animals, implements, jewels, and foodstuffs.85 Greek grave goods of the first millennium shrink beside the glittering Mycenaean royal tombs of the thirteenth century BCE.⁸⁶ The seventh century BCE saw a woeful “falling off in number and value of goods offered to the dead,” a modern classicist laments.⁸⁷ The great gold hordes of Afghan nomadic tribes eclipse contemporaneous burials by richer urban peoples in the first century CE.⁸⁸ Sixteen centuries later, reforming burghers rejected buying indulgences for the dead to hasten the soul’s release from the pains of purgatory. Provisioning the dead shifts from human sacrifice to roast meats to water to prayer, and finally even prayer is denied utility.

Less happily, archeologists have found corpses that seem to be mutilated so they cannot come back. Their legs are broken; their bodies are bound; their heads are removed. Rather than trusted ancestors or fortunate infants buried in the walls of the house, these seem to be dangerous corpses, dismembered and disabled to prevent their making their way back to the precincts of life and taking their places among the living.89 Such burial treatments seem to be signs of a different narrative about the dead. The dead are hostile and may impede others’ route to the afterlife.⁹⁰ The dead are hungry, ravenous for the taste of the living, whom they would devour if they could. So Homer’s shades surge towards blood, and the gods quail when Ishtar threatens to break open the underworld to let the dead up to eat the living. The dead, in sum, feel all the anger, rage, and resentment toward the living that the living feel toward death. They may be hostile, unforgiving, and vengeful. They may have it in for us, rejoicing in our failures, as malevolent as those living friends in whose misfortunes we take a secret pleasure. “As Rochefoucault his Maxims drew/From Nature, I believe ‘em true:…. This Maxim more than all the rest/Is thought too base for human Breast;/‘In all Distresses of our Friends/‘We first consult our private Ends,/‘While Nature kindly bent to ease us,/‘Points out some Circumstance to please us.’ ”⁹¹ The dead, after all, are dead, and we are not—how can they help hating us? Therefore, the living need to protect themselves.

All such speculations are merely speculative, in the absence of words or stories. Words, too, can be misleading. The common Christian tombstone inscription “requiescat in pace,” or “rest in peace,” proposes eternal sleep rather than eternal life. Addressing the body until its resurrection, the inscription skips the question of what the soul is doing in the meantime. Is it sleeping or dead with the body, awaiting the body in heaven, hell, purgatory, or enjoying some other intermediate state? Islam proposes the simplest burials and among the most beautifully elaborated afterlives. Yet while the Taj Mahal creates paradise on earth, the stones outlining the shape of a body over a simple Maghreb grave tell no afterlife tales. In Rabat, the richer dead have proper tombs, white or brightly tiled, blue, orange, green. The tombs take the shape of a body, a vertical stone at the head, the body a rectangular outline above ground. In the center of new graves, a little indentation holds water. In older graves, the center fills with growing vegetation, foliage flourishing, overflowing the sides, green life growing abundantly from death. Exquisitely consonant with Islam’s faith in eternal life, the striking exuberance of this sign of life’s conquest of death is perhaps misleading in its theology.

Cultures often have elaborate death rituals and beliefs that leave no physical evidence ten years later, much less ten thousand. In Ten Canoes (2006), the aboriginal Australians who collaborated on the film tell a story of cyclical origins. People are born from fish; they occupy water holes in the water and slip into the mother’s vagina when the father dreams them. When people die, their souls go back into the water hole as little fishes and wait to be reborn. At death, until they collapse, the dying sing and dance. Then others take up the dance and death song that summons the fathers, all the spirits, who find the soul and take it, flying—sometimes it has to be brushed away from the body, with bunches of leaves dusting it off—back to the water hole, into the water. Birth and death participate in a cycle playing through water and fathers’ dreams and mothers’ dark, deep holes.92 No morality is enforced, no priests empowered, the destination common to all and not undesirable. One could wish to be a little fish. Elaborate, intricate systems of afterlife beliefs may disappear without a trace.

Writing reveals what archeology intimates—the variety and variability over time, within and between cultures of afterlife narratives. Among the surprises of ancient afterlives is how grim they often were and how amoral. However watchful the earliest high gods were, they looked out only for the living and paid no mind to the dead, hived off to their own god(s) and left there. It was long before afterlives were integrated with other means of social control, and it was patchily done. The still common assumption that an afterlife is necessary to enforce morality is a back-formation from the afterlife’s late adaptation to policing people’s behavior. It seems necessary because it has been in place for a long time. Yet it was not always so.

That afterlives and morality merged only gradually, cobbled together at various places and times by persuasive thinkers, indicates their disparate evolutionary origins. Morality or our social rules proceed from the need to govern relations among the living, to adjudicate the interests of individuals and of the group through which alone individuals survive. Morality has little to do with the dead or dying, except to define correct treatment for the dead within the community. The living know that their actions affect the circumstances of the dead, who may be starved or denied burial rites. The power of the dead to control their own future state by premortem actions develops in Egypt by the third millennium (the twenty-first century) and elsewhere around the sixth century BCE, in a few places east and west.

Morality antedates afterlife narratives, developing independently long before afterlives begin to flicker on cognitive horizons. Evolutionary psychologists trace morality’s origins in our primate cousins, related social species dependent on each other and the community for survival.⁹³ Frans de Waal’s primate studies show the basic elements of human morality—and immorality—turning up in primate sociality. Others have marked the stages of spontaneous moral development in the behavior of young children and located moral decision centers neurologically in older parts of the brain.⁹⁴ Primate sociality signifies as precursor to our morality, long recognized as social.

Adam Smith argued for the inherent sociality of morality in 1759 (Theory of Moral Sentiments). Disputing Francis Hutcheson’s concept of a “moral sense,” Thomas Hobbes’ and Bernard Mandeville’s individualist selfishness, Rousseau’s asocial autonomy, and David Hume’s utility, Smith called our involuntary wincing at a blow aimed at another “sympathy.” So the watching crowd twist and writhe along with the balancing tightrope walker, and delicate gentlefolk feel themselves itch where beggars are scratching their scabs.95 That unconscious, irresistible slipping into another person’s perspective (underlying “theory of mind”) Smith made foundational to the formation of conscience and the self. Without society, there would be no occasion for morality. In society, however, we seek others’ approval and avoid their disapproval, first to survive, then to prosper.

Monkeys were not on Smith’s mind as he developed a concept of morality based on what we now call not “sympathy,” but “empathy” (coined in 1895), but monkey morality suggests that human morality must antedate reward-and-punishment afterlife narratives, and why such narratives, once found, are so compelling. Primatologists, minding monkeys and other primates, have found robust moral systems governing intraspecific and even interspecific behavior. Chimpanzees make friends with—and have been known to assist—birds, cats, and people, as well as other chimpanzees. Primate morality has unwritten, unspoken rules that regulate behavior within the group—freeloaders are punished, the helpful are helped, hierarchy is recognized but also manipulated by cultivating allies and competing for dominance.⁹⁶ Chimpanzees share more readily with those who have recently groomed them. Adult chimpanzees punish adolescent chimpanzees who stay out late and delay every one’s dinner: they beat them, and the next night the young chimps come dutifully in on time. Fairness, the expectation of equal distribution, animates the capuchin monkey who receives a cucumber slice, sees his neighbor given a grape, and then shakes the cage and hurls the cucumber slice that was once entirely satisfactory.⁹⁷ Those rules enable cooperation against other groups and individuals. Chimpanzees hunt monkeys, attack foreign chimpanzees, seize their females, and murder their infants; they also risk themselves to defend members of their own group. Females may rescue a trapped male and trap or chase other females. Many will risk drowning to save an infant. Sometimes they exhibit behavior that humans call immoral. Female gorillas may conceal themselves in the bush to dally with a nondominant male, out of sight and hearing of the male who claims exclusive access. Female chimps may visit other groups of chimpanzees for surreptitious matings.⁹⁸ They, too, know to avoid watchful, censorious eyes.

Chimpanzees lack the higher reaches of human self-denial and group identification, but then, so do many people. We admire our species-specific altruism because it is uncommon, or we begrudge it, denying its existence or impugning its motives or calculating its probabilities.99 Primates share the groundwork of our morality, but they have no rules for coping with the dead, apart from watching to see if their companion comes back and moving away when it is clear that there will be no return. Morality is for the living.

That does not cease to be true among the higher primates. Almost 50 percent of human afterlives do not distinguish pleasant and unpleasant situations for their dead. No one is rewarded or punished; everyone is in the same situation. Such unfairness has a powerful empirical warrant. Everybody dies, the just and the unjust, those who help and those who hurt. Their bodies undergo the same process of dissolution. There are no distinctions in death, so why should there be distinctions after death? If such distinctions are to exist, they must be invented in defiance of death’s evident leveling. There are two exceptions: people die in different ways, and bodies receive diverse treatments in death.

Primates respond differently to different kinds of deaths—natural and expected, accidental, and by predation, those they suffer and those they cause. Some afterlives catalogue such distinctions. For example, in ancient Sumer, among the earliest human afterlives on record, individuals experience different conditions depending on how death happened. So, too, the condition of the dead depends upon the care taken by the living. What matters to the dead is that others perform the proper rites. Chinese (and Indian) ancestors die if the rites are not performed.¹⁰⁰ Sumerians sip muddy water.