PREFACE
1. “Of Tragedy,” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1987), 222.
2. Letter to William Temple, 12 August 1775, Letters of James Boswell, Addressed to the Rev. W. J. Temple (London, 1857), 214.
3. Kelvin Tavarez once admitted such a hope.
4. 1598 E. Blount in Marlowe Hero and Leander, Ep. Ded. sig. Aiij, “The impression of the man, that hath beene deare vnto vs, liuing an after life in our memory, there putteth vs in mind of farther obsequies.”
5. Or continuations: Bernard A. Drew’s Literary Afterlife charts continuations of over three hundred literary works (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009). The MLA Bibliography, March 2018, listed 1633 instances of the word afterlife, mostly in titles of studies of reputations, up from 593 in May 2010. Margaret Cavendish used “afterlife” for fame in 1662, Playes Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, 111.
6. John Speed, The History of Great Britaine Under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans. Their Originals, Manners, Warres, Coines & Seales: with ye Successions, Lives, acts & Issues of the English Monarchs from Iulius Caesar, to our most gracious Soueraigne King Iames (London, 1611), 331. The OED’s first reference is 1615, Sir Edward Hoby’s account of the Sadducees’ afterlife denial.
7. Denis the Carthusian (1402–1471), Thus endeth the prologue of this book named. Cordyal. Whiche treteth of the four last and final thinges that ben to come…(Westminster, England: Caxton, 1479).
8. Richard Allestree, Eighteen Sermons whereof fifteen preached the King, the rest upon publick occasions (London, 1669), 109, 187.
9. Gervase Babington, A profitable Exposition of the Lords Prayer, by way of Questions and Answers for most playnnes: Together with many fruitfull applications to the life and Soule, as well for the terror of the dull and dead, as for the sweete comfort of the tender harted. (London: 1588). It lies between George Turberville’s translation of Mantuanus, The Eglogs of the Poet B. Mantuan Carmelitan, Turned into English Verse, & set forth with the Argument to euery Egloge (London: 1567) and Richard Verstegan (c. 1550–1640), The Copy Of A Letter Lately Written By A Spanishe Gentleman, To His Freind In England: In refutation of sundry calumnies, there falsly bruited, and spred emonge the people (Antwerp, 1589).
10. In A. Campbell (d. 1756), Authenticity of Gospel–Hist. Justified” (1759) I. x. preface. Among rare earlier uses is Thomas Adams, The Deuills Banket described in foure Sermons (London: 1614), 219: “Read in euery Starre, and let the Moone be your Candle to doe it, the prouident disposition of God, the eternitie of your afterlife.”
11. The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 27.
12. Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 231.
13. 1945. The concept but not the phrase appears in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s European source, Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom: A Legend in Seven Scenes and a Prologue (1909) (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 164–65. The phrase is deducible from Hume’s “The Platonist” of human perfectibility: “The task, which can never be finished in time, will be the business of an eternity,” Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 158.
14. Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
15. The Meanings of Death (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28.
1. CONCERNING THE PRESENT STATE OF LIFE AFTER DEATH
1. Rob Walker, “Things to Do in Cyberspace When You’re Dead,” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2011, 31+.
2. The Historie of the World: commonly called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. Philemon Holland (London 1634), Book 7, chap. lv.
4. For “old souls,” see Tom Shroder, Old Souls (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
6. New York Times Book Review, September 25, 2011, 33. 90 Minutes in Heaven is now a minor motion picture, directed by Michael Polish, 2015. Curiously, the NY Times review begins, "Caveat emptor: ‘90 Minutes in Heaven’ does not in fact depict a full hour and a half of the afterlife, as the travel-guide-like title might suggest.” Nicolas Rapold, “ ‘90 Minutes in Heaven,’ Then a Long Road Back,” New York Times, September 11, 2015, C8.
7. New York Times Book Review, April 14, 2013, 20. On the paperback best-seller list, Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven is no. 1 and Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent’s Heaven Is for Real, no. 6. Oddly, Samuel Parnia, insisting from the emergency room that one returns from these “true death” experiences, has not yet made his way to the lists, Samuel Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries between Life and Death (New York: Harper Collins, 2013).
8. I owe this reference to Anna Pasquin, at Mrs. London’s, June 5, 2010. Kathryn Davis, “Lost,” Salmagundi, 195–96 (Summer-Fall 2017), 201–05.
10. Robin Henig is confident that “belief in an afterlife is universal.” Robin Henig, “Darwin’s God,” New York Times Magazine, March 4, 2007, 85; Ashley Montagu, Immortality, Religion, and Morals (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1971), 2, 18–36, supposes belief in immortality to be itself eternal. John Bowker, author of The Meanings of Death and general editor of The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), is better informed.
11. John Scheffer, The History of Lapland (Oxford, 1674), 35.
12. Ralph Harold Faulkingham, Political Support in a Hausa Village (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1971 [1972]), 116.
13. Brooks B. Hull and Frederick Bold, “Hell, Religion, and Cultural Change,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), 150:3 (1994):455–57.
14. Adam Smith included an aversion to the extinction of the species as one of the basic human ends. “Self-preservation and the propagation of the species, are the great ends which Nature seems to have proposed in the formation of all animals. Mankind are endowed with a desire of those ends, and an aversion to the contrary; with a love of life, and a dread of dissolution; with a desire of the continuance and perpetuity of the species, and with an aversion to the thoughts of its intire extinction.” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1976), II.i.5. 9, p. 77.
15. S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce A. Carnes, The Quest for Immortality: Science at the Frontiers of Aging (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 28.
16. Future of an Illusion, sec. III (New York: Classic House Books, 2009), 14–16. Freud describes death as “a return to inorganic lifelessness,” 15, an odd way to think of a dissolving organic compound like the body.
17. Karl Marx, “Introduction,” The Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 131.
18. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 263.
19. So does the OED, not yet updated from 1885. The 1699 citation from Shaftesbury concerns God’s providence, not his existence. Pierre Bayle defined atheism as the denial of providence and a future state, Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 9, a usage echoed in David Hume’s essay, “Of a Particular Providence and a Future State,” Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1748).
20. Preface to Sylvae, John Dryden, Works of John Dryden: Vol. 3 Poems 1685–92, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 11–12.
21. Quentin D. Atkinson and Patrick Bourrat, “Beliefs About God, the Afterlife and Morality Support the Role of Supernatural Policing in Human Cooperation,” Evolution and Human Behavior 32 (2011): 42.
23. Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Philosophical Writings, ed. Patricia Sheridan (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2006), 138, 142–43. Benjamin Beit-hallahmi, “Morality and Immorality among the Irreligious,” in Atheism and Secularity. Vol. 1: Issues, Concepts, and Definitions, ed. Phil Zuckerman (Oxford: Praeger, 2010), 113–34.
24. “Reason will neither deny, nor affirm, that there is to be a future state: and the doctrine of rewards and punishments in it has so great a tendency to enforce civil laws, and to restrain the vices of men, that reason, who cannot decide for it on principles of natural theology, will not decide against it, on principles of good policy. Let this doctrine rest on the authority of revelation.” Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, Philosophical Works of the Late Right Honourable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vo, ed. David Mallett (London, 1754), V, 32. See also I, 268; IV, 64, 288.
25. Covent-Garden Journal, #11, The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 80–81.
26. Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 177.
27. Two angels walking across the clouds, one pats the other on the back: “When you get a chance, remember to ask God the meaning of life—it’s a riot.” Zachary Kanin, New Yorker, June 22, 2015, 31.
28. Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (New York: Random House, 2015). For examples of cross-cultural effects, Kim-Pong Tam, Chi-Yue Chiu, and Ivy Yee-Man Lau, “Terror Management among Chinese: Worldview Defence and Intergroup Bias in Resource Allocation,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 10 (2007): 93–102; Ryutaro Wakimoto, “Mortality Salience Effects on Modesty and Relative Self-effacement,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 9 (2006): 176–83. Critics of Terror Management Theory offer alternative evolutionary explanations for the observed phenomena, e.g., Lee A. Kirkpatrick and Carlos David Navarrete, “Reports of My Death Anxiety Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: A Critique of Terror Management Theory from an Evolutionary Perspective,” Psychological Inquiry 17:4 (2006): 288–98.
29. Phyllis Korkki, “Need Motivation? Declare a Deadline,” New York Times, April 21, 2013, BU 9.
30. Mike Friedman, “Religious Fundamentalism and Responses to Mortality Salience: A Quantitative Text Analysis,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 18:3 (2008): 216–37.
31. Lennart J. Renkema, Diederik A. Stapel, Nico W. Van Yperen, “Go with the Flow: Conforming to Others in the Face of Existential Threat,” European Journal of Social Psychology 38:4 (2008): 747–56.
32. Immo Fritsche and Eva Jonas, “Gender Conflict and Worldview Defence,” British Journal of Social Psychology 44:4 (2005): 571–81.
33. Kim-Pong Tam, Chi-Yue Chiu, Ivy Yee-Man Lau, “Terror Management among Chinese: Worldview Defence and Intergroup Bias in Resource Allocation,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 10 (2007): 93–102.
34. Ryutaro Wakimoto, “Mortality Salience Effects on Modesty and Relative Self-effacement,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 9 (2006): 176–83.
35. David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 216–17.
36. Roni Caryn Rabin, “Study Links Religion and Terminal Care,” New York Times, March 18, 2009, A18. Quoting Holly G. Prigerson, senior author, “Religious Coping and Use of Intensive Life-Prolonging Care Near Death in Patients with Advanced Cancer,” JAMA, March 19, 2009, 1140–1147. “To religious people, life is sacred and sanctified,…and there’s a sense they feel it’s their duty and obligation to stay alive as long as possible.”
37. Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 225–26, 241–42. Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 122–24. Quoted in Tipler, 225–26. John Leslie, Immortality Defended (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Jim Holt, “Eternity for Atheists,” New York Times Magazine, July 29, 2007, 11–12.
38. Tatiana Schlossberg, “Black Bear Kills a Hiker in North Jersey,” New York Times, September 23, 2014, A25.
39. Steven Millhauser’s story of contagious suicidal exuberance takes the form of “A Report on Our Recent Troubles,” submitted by a Committee, Voices in the Night (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 86, 96–97.
40. Karen Dwyer and Marlina Davidson, 2012, cited in Joan Acocella, “I Can’t Go On!” The New Yorker, August 3, 2015, 69.
41. Tom Pyszczynski, Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, Molly Maxfield, “On the Unique Psychological Import of the Human Awareness of Mortality: Theme and Variations,” Psychological Inquiry 17:4 (2006): 342.
42. Gilad Hirschberger and Tsachi Ein-Dor, “Does a Candy a Day Keep the Death Thoughts Away? The Terror Management Function of Eating,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 17:2 (2005): 179–86.
43. C. Nathan DeWall and Roy F. Baumeister, “From Terror to Joy: Automatic Turning to Positive Affective Information Following Mortality Salience,” Psychological Science 18:11 (2007): 984–90. Summarized as “Mortal Thoughts,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2008.
44. Samuel Scheffler, “The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 2013, 1, 6, and Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Scheffler argues that for consolation and purpose we require others’ lives to continue after our own deaths, the immortality of our species. Certainly, the immortality of the species is meaningful and consolatory for those who deny a personal afterlife or metempsychosis. Scheffler underestimates, however, the elasticity and inventiveness of human identification, which does not confine itself to humans but readily extends to other, nonhuman species, to the earth itself, or to solar space, as in Jan Zalasiewicz’s The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Mortality salience tells against Scheffler, as does the current vogue for apocalyptic literature, which invigorates through the prospect of annihilation. Granted, most American apocalypses focus on a few survivors—Snowpiercer is down to two people and a polar bear—but others enjoy watching the asteroid make its way toward all of us, with Kirsten Dunst, in Lars van Trier’s Melancholia (2011).
45. Quoted in Alec Wilkinson, “Finding the Words,” The New Yorker, August 4, 2014, 50. Gabriel: A Poem (New York: Knopf, 2014), 3.
46. Edward B. Tylor theorized that the difference between a dead body and a living one, combined with the traces in dreams and visions, led to the concept of the soul among primitive men, enduring among modern ones. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, (1871) (New York: Gordon Press, 1974), I, 387.
Freud remarked the expectation that what goes returns in the child’s “fort-da” game. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1950), 13–15.
47. David Hume, “On the Immortality of the Soul,” Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 597.
48. Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, ed. Jacques Rolland, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 9, 11.
49. God, Death, and Time, 47.
50. God, Death, and Time, 19.
51. Jennifer A. Kingson, “What Do Babies Know?” New York Times, April 23, 2013, D2.
52. Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 24.
53. Pascal Boyer analyzes these processes as separate systems active in the brain that respond inconsistently to a dead person: an intuitive psychological system (theory of mind plus), an animacy system, and a person-file system. Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 217–20.
54. Robert Hertz, “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death” (1907) in Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960), 70, 78.
55. Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 145.
56. Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann, The Chimpanzees of the Taï Forest: Behavioural Ecology and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 248–51.
57. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Shivani Bhalla, George Wittemyer, Fritz Vollrath, “Behavioural Reactions of Elephants towards a Dying and Deceased Matriarch,” Applied Animal Behaviour Science 100:1–2 (2006): 87–102.
58. Charles Siebert, “Watching Whales Watching Us,” New York Times Magazine, July 12, 2009, 31, 35.
59. Anne Zeller, “The Grieving Process in Non-human Primates,” in Coping with the Final Tragedy: Cultural Variation in Dying and Grieving, ed. David R. Counts and Dorothy A. Counts (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1991), 11–15.
60. Dora Biro, Tatyana Humle, Kathelijne Koops, Claudia Sousa, Misato Hayashi, and Tetsuro Matsuzawa, “Chimpanzee Mothers at Bossou, Guinea, Carry the Mummified Remains of Their Dead Infants,” Current Biology 20:8 (April 27, 2010): R351–52.
61. Christophe Boesch, “Patterns of Chimpanzees’ Intergroup Violence,” Human Morality and Sociality: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Henrik Høgh-Olesen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 139.
62. Boesch, “Patterns,” 140–41.
63. Other cases report “unusual calls” or repeated “loud alarm calls.” Boesch and Boesch-Achermann, Chimpanzees, 248, 250. Reporting the “wraah” call are Kazuhiko Hosaka, Akiko Matsumoto-oda, Michael A. Huffman, Kenji Kawanaka, “Reactions to Dead Bodies of Conspecifics by Wild Chimpanzees in the Mahale Mountains, Tanzania,” Reichorui kenkyu/Primate Research, 16:1 (2000): 15.
64. In a similar case, a mother carried for two days her two-year-old son, his neck broken after falling from a tree. Just before she finally left the body, other females and juveniles returned to the body, made “soft ‘hou’ calls,” and then left. Boesch and Boesch-Achermann, Chimpanzees, 250.
65. Geza Teleki, “Group Response to the Accidental Death of a Chimpanzee in Gombe National Park, Tanzania,” Folia Primatologica 20 (1973): 81–94.
66. James R. Anderson, Alasdair Gillies, and Louise C. Lock, “Pan Thanatology,” Current Biology 20:8 (April 27, 2010): R349–R351.
67. Boesch and Boesch-Achermann, Chimpanzees, 249.
68. Anderson, Gillies, and Lock, “Pan Thanatology,” R349–R351.
69. Zeller, “Grieving Process,” 7.
70. Jonathan Swift, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” ll.228, 241–42. Jonathan Swift, Swift Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 504.
71. Evincing some discomfort with that project is Osamu Nishitani, “The Wonderland of ‘Immortality,’ ” Contemporary Japanese Thought, ed. Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 136, 143.
72. “The Modern Life of Shidoken” (Furyu Shidoken Den, 1763), in Early Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology, 1600–1900, ed. Haruo Shirane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 492.
73. Michael S.A. Graziano, Consciousness and the Social Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), “Speculations on the Evolution of Awareness,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26:6 (2014): 1300–1304. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Back Bay Books, 1992) and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).
74. Peter Ramsden, “Alice in the Afterlife: A Glimpse in the Mirror,” in Coping with the Final Tragedy: Cultural Variation in Dying and Grieving, ed. David R. Counts and Dorothy A. Counts (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1991), 35.
75. Henri Chambert-Loir and Anthony Reid, eds. The Potent Dead: Ancestors, Saints and Heroes in Contemporary Indonesia (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 77–78.
76. Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1, 5, 7, 9.
77. Ying-Shih Yü, “‘O Soul, Come Back!’ A Study in the Changing Conceptions of the Soul and Afterlife in Pre-Buddhist China,” Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 47:2 (1987): 379; “Shen,” Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
78. Douglas Palmer, Neanderthal (London: Macmillan, 2004), 124–25. Palmer dates the bin 300,000 years ago, as do Josep M. Parés, Alfredo Pérez-González, Arlo B. Weil, and Juan Luis Arsuaga, “On the Age of the Hominid Fossils at the Sima de los Huesos, Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain: Paleomagnetic Evidence,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 111:4 (2000): 451–461. More recently the skulls at the bottom of the 43-foot shaft have been dated to about 430,000 years ago, Sindya N. Bhanoo, “Ancient Skull Points to an Early Murder,” New York Times, June 2, 2015, D2; Nohemi Sala, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Ana Pantoja-Pérez, Adrián Pablos, Ignacio Martínez, Rolf M. Quam, Asier Gómez-Olivencia, José María Bermúdez de Castro, and Eudald Carbonell, “Lethal Interpersonal Violence in the Middle Pleistocene,” PLoS One, May 27, 2015. Zach Zorich, “A Place to Hide the Bodies,” Archaeology, September/October 2015, 21. In 2015, DNA sequencing showed the two dozen individuals in Sima de los Huesos to be closely related to early Neanderthals. Gemma Tarlach, “Human Origins,” Discover, July/August 2016, 40, confirming earlier morphological analysis, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Ignacio Martínez, Lee J. Arnold, Eudald Carbonell, et al. “Neandertal Roots: Cranial and Chronological Evidence from Sima de los Huesos,” Science 344:6190 (2014):1358–363; Ewen Callaway, “Ancient DNA Pinpoints Dawn of Neanderthals,” Nature 531:7594 (March 17, 2016):286.
In 2013, an analogous cache of some 1,500 fossils representing 15 individuals identified as a new species Homo naledi was found in a South African cave. The fossils have not been dated, but disposal of corpses by a small-brained species has surprised the discoverers. Chris Springer, “The Many Mysteries of Homo Naledi,” eLife, September 10, 2015. 4: e10627. Russ Juskalian, “Homo Naledi and the Chamber of Secrets,” Discover, January/February 2016, 10–11.
79. Katerina Harvati and Terry Harrison, eds. Neanderthals Revisited: New Approaches and Perspectives (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 321–22; João Zilhão, “The Emergence of Ornaments and Art: An Archaeological Perspective on the Origins of Behavioral Modernity,” Journal of Archaeological Research, 15:1 (March 2007):1–54.
80. Paul Mellars, The Neanderthal Legacy: An Archeological Perspective from Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 379–380; Ian Tattersal, The Last Neanderthal, rev. ed. (New York: Nevraumont, 1999), 168–69, plate 115.
81. Francesco d’Errico and Lucinda Backwell, “Earliest Evidence of Personal Ornaments Associated with Burial: The Conus shells from Border Cave,” Journal of Human Evolution 93 (April 2016): 91–108.
82. Andrew Curry, “The World’s First Temple?” Smithsonian, November 2008, 54–60.
83. Thomas A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 52. Home-baked cakes are still placed on graves in Russian Orthodox circles. Joshua Yaffa, “The Double Sting,” New Yorker, July 27, 2015, 47.
84. Kumiko Kakehashi, So Sad to Fall in Battle: Based on General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s Letters from Iwo Jima (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 94.
85. V. Gordon Childe, “Directional Changes in Funerary Practices During 50,000 Years,” Man 45 (January/February 1945): 13–19.
86. Donna C. Kurtz and John Boardman, Greek Burial Customs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 203–17.
87. John Boardman, ed. Oxford History of Classical Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19.
88. Fredrik Hiebert and Pierre Cambon, Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2008).
89. Bernard Sellato, “Castrated Dead: The Making of Un-ancestors among the Aoheng, and Some Considerations on Death and Ancestors in Borneo,” in The Potent Dead, 10–11.
90. As in Steve Stern’s Frozen Rabbi (New York: Workman, 2010).
91. Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S. P.D., with the epigraph, “Dans l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis nous trouvons quelque chose, qui ne nous deplaist pas. (In the Adversity of our best Friends, we find something that doth not displease us.” Swift Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 496.
92. The Ten Canoes is the product of collaboration among a (dead) anthropologist, a filmmaker, a prominent aboriginal actor (who provides the film’s voice-over), and a community. Louise Hamby, “Thomson Times and Ten Canoes (de Heer and Djigirr, 2006),” Studies in Australasian Cinema 1:2 (2007): 127–46; Therese Davis, “Remembering Our Ancestors: Cross-cultural Collaboration and the Mediation of Aboriginal Culture and History in Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer, 2006),” Studies in Australasian Cinema 1:1 (2007), 5–14; James Bell, “The Way It Was,” Sight and Sound 17:6 (2007): 34–37. The title derives from a photograph made by the anthropologist Donald Thomson in 1935–37 of ten canoes, each with a single canoeist, crossing a reed swamp. The actors in the film apportioned parts according to their descent from the canoeists in the photograph. Cf. Mircea Eliade, From Primitivism to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 186.
93. Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Neil Levy, What Makes Us Moral? Crossing the Boundaries of Biology (Oxford: Oneworld, 2004); David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2003); Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 1998); Jane Maienschein and Michael Ruse, eds., Biology and the Foundation of Ethics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Dennis L. Krebs, The Origins of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (New York: Basic Books, 2012).
94. De Waal, Primates and Philosophers, 29, 29–36, 42–49, 69–73, 172.
95. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.i.3, p. 10. Bence Nanay, “Adam Smith’s Concept of Sympathy and Its Contemporary Interpretations,” The Philosophy of Adam Smith: Adam Smith Review, volume 5: Essays commemorating the 250th anniversary of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker (New York: Routledge, 2010), 85–105.
96. De Waal, Primates and Philosophers, 18, 42–44.
97. Frans de Waal, YouTube TED Talk.
98. Boesch, “Patterns,” 142–46.
99. Dennis L. Krebs, The Origins of Morality (2011); “Born Bad? Evaluating the Case against the Evolution of Morality,” in Human Morality and Sociality: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Henrik Høgh-Olesen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 13–30.
100. “Shen,” Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1997).
2. IMPERMANENT ETERNITIES: EGYPT, SUMER, AND BABYLON, ANCIENT ISRAEL, GREECE, AND ROME
1. A. R. George, trans., The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) I, 279. Most quotations from Gilgamesh will be from this edition, as less generally available and enabling comparison with other translations.
2. Muhammad Abdel Haleem, “Life and Beyond in the Qur’an,” in Beyond Death: Theological and Philosophical Reflections on Life After Death, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Christopher Lewis (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 66–79.
3. Tractate Sanhedrin, m10.1–2; Part VI, chap. 11, The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, vol. 20 (New York: Random House, 1999), 83.
4. The resurrection is not forever: another death precedes entry into the purely spiritual, unbodied world to come. Moses Maimonides, Moses Maimonides’ Treatise on Resurrection, trans. Fred Rosner (New York: KTAV, 1982), 25, 33.
5. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “The Jewish Doctrine of Hell,” in Beyond Death: Theological and Philosophical Reflections on Life After Death, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Christopher Lewis, 54–65. Claudia Setzer assures readers that Jews once did believe in an afterlife, however unlikely that now seems. “Resurrection of the Dead as Symbol and Strategy,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 69: 1 (2001): 65–101. The joke was repeated on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air in 2011.
6. But concealed or forgot earlier anti-iconic movements. Yuval Yekutieli argues that the first regional evidence of a theological reformation, specifically the “Aniconic Reformation” of the Early Bronze Age, appears in the latter Chalcolithic period (post 4200 BCE) in the southern Levant. A cache of hidden icons wrapped in bloodstained cloth occupies a cave adjacent to twenty-one murdered bodies in the Judean desert. Icons and significant sculpture in the region disappearing in the immediately subsequent Bronze period, Yekutieli hypothesizes that iconoclasts moved against images and those who cherished them already in prehistoric polytheism. Image making revives in later periods, but the prohibition of images is enshrined in the Decalogue. “Solving a 6000-Year-Old Murder Mystery,” Greenberg Middle East Lecture Series, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, Oct. 9, 2016.
7. François Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, ed. [William Ricketts Cooper], (London: S. Bagster, 1878); Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink, Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic & Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Folk Religion 1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961); David Ogden, Greek and Roman Necromancy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); David Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Paul Mirecki and Marvin Meyer, eds. Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Joseph Naveh and Shaul Shaked, Amulets and Magic Bowls: Aramaic Incantations of Late Antiquity (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985); Richard N. Longenecker, ed. Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998).
8. Salima Ikram, Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt (London: Pearson Education, 2003), ix.
9. Taking 3500 BCE, the first grave goods, as a starting point and 400 CE, the empowerment of Christianity, as end point. If texts make the basis, there are 2,750 years between the first Egyptian texts and the last mummies, so Christianity will catch up in 850 years (2,000–100= 1,900 years).
10. “Briefly Noted: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt,” The New Yorker, June 6, 2011, 81. Others date the Middle Kingdom 2125–1773 BCE: these are matters for experts to disagree on.
11. A fine short account of changes in burial practices, styles, texts, and quality of mummification is John Taylor, “Before the Portraits: Burial Practices in Pharaonic Egypt,” 9–13, in Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits in Roman Egypt (Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications), ed. Susan Walker (New York: Routledge, 2000). See also Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Wolfram Grajetzki, Burial Customs in Ancient Egypt: Life in Death for Rich and Poor (London: Duckworth, 2003); Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Salima Ikram, Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt (London: Pearson Education, 2003); Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson, The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998); Ian Shaw, Exploring Ancient Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); John H. Taylor, Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Peter Ucko and Timothy Champion, ed. The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions through the Ages (London: UCL Press, 2003); Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (New York: Random House, 2011).
12. John Lanchester, “Money Talks,” The New Yorker, August 4, 2014, 30–33. The first reference to a Nilometer is said to be 3050 BCE, on the Palermo Stone. Toby A. H. Wilkinson, Royal Annals of Ancient Egypt: The Palermo Stone and Its Associated Fragments (London: Kegan Paul International, 2000), 23, 95. Zaraza Friedman dates the Palermo Stone to 2480 BCE, “Nilometer,” Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (New York: Springer, Dordrecht, 2008).
13. Alan F. Segal, Life After Death (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 31–33, emphasizes security. Emphasizing insecurity and threat is Toby Wilkinson, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, 107–09, cf. 47. Literary remains describe the insecurity of the peasant’s life, his grain attacked by snakes, mice, thieves, and tax collectors, his body beaten, his family scattered. William Kelly Simpson, ed. The Literature of Ancient Egypt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 344.
14. P. M. Vermeersch, et al. “A Middle Palaeolithic Burial of a Modern Human at Taramsa Hill, Egypt,” Antiquity 72 (1998): 475. I owe this reference to John Taylor’s kind response to an inquiry.
15. John Taylor, “Before the Portraits: Burial Practices in Pharaonic Egypt,” 9–13; Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 13–16, 46; Ian Shaw, Exploring Ancient Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2003), 7, 15.
16. S. G. F. Brandon, The Judgment of the Dead: The Idea of Life after Death in the Major Religions (New York: Scribner’s, 1967), 37; Taylor, Death and Afterlife, 16–21.
17. V. Gordon Childe, “Directional Changes in Funerary Practices During 50,000 Years,” Man 45 (Jan./Feb. 1945): 16.
18. Wilkinson, Rise and Fall, 57, 75–78.
19. Werner Forman and Stephen Quirke, Hieroglyphs and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 51, 187.
20. Wilkinson, Rise and Fall, 145, 173.
21. Forman and Quirke, Hieroglyphs and the Afterlife, 149, 157, 165–67. Wilkinson, Rise and Fall, 402, 434.
22. S. G. F. Brandon criticizes the democratization argument, Judgment, 21. William J. Murnane points out that the Pyramid Texts sent the pharaoh to the stars and the sun-god, while the texts for commoners sent them to Osiris in the netherworld. Later the two divinities and realms are conflated. “Taking It with You: The Problem of Death and Afterlife in Ancient Egypt,” in Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions, ed. Hiroshi Obayashi, (London: Praeger, 1992), 42. For gendered burials at a later period, see Wolfram Grajetzki, Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom: The Archaeology of Female Burials (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2014).
23. Ikram, Death and Burial, 21.
24. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973–80), I: 230. William Kelly Simpson, ed. Literature of Ancient Egypt, 67–68.
25. Wilkinson, Rise and Fall, 126–27; Forman and Quirke, Hieroglyphs, 63–73.
26. S. G. F. Brandon, Judgment, 27–28; Forman and Quirke, 120–22.
27. Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, 90, 83.
28. Forman and Quirke, Hieroglyphs, 158; Wilkinson, Rise and Fall, 425–27.
29. Persian Wars, II.86–87 in Herodotus, trans. A. D. Godley, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921–25), I, 370–73.
30. Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 160.
31. John Boardman, ed. Oxford History of Classical Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 361. Susan Walker, ed. Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits in Roman Egypt, 24.
32. National Museum of Ireland, Dublin. Funeral shroud, 1911.442; Mummy, 1911.440.
33. Ikram and Dodson, The Mummy in Ancient Egypt, 50, 282; Forman and Quirke, 167.
34. Alan K. Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs 332BC–AD642 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 186; Forman and Quirke, Hieroglyphs, 172.
35. Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs, 193, 188–92.
36. Lucie Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt, quoted in Bowman, 166.
37. At Chicago’s Field Museum, June 2012–2013, an exhibit called “Images of the Afterlife” used mummies, forensic science, and CT scans to reconstruct portrait busts of the dead. The dead faces are beautiful, their features based on averages, the biological criterion for beauty.
38. Edwin Yamauchi, “Life, Death, and the Afterlife in the Ancient Near East,” in Richard N. Longenecker, ed. Life in the Face of Death, 26
39. Forman and Quirke, Hieroglyphs, 56.
40. James P. Allen, trans, Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 23–66. Hereafter parenthetically in text. In Susan Brind Morrow’s recent translation of the first Pyramid Text, The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), this negative subtext is no longer visible.
41. Allen, Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Unis, #169, 46; #19, 19; #147, 31; Teti, #204, 83; Pepi I, #32, 106; #333, 130; rotting #337, #480, pp. 133, 165; guilt, #342, #352, #356, #443, pp. 134–35, 138–39, 150.
42. Brandon, Judgment of the Dead, 27.
43. Frans L. Roes, “The Size of Societies, Stratification, and Belief in High Gods Supportive of Human Morality,” Politics and the Life Sciences 14:1 (1995): 73–77; Frans L. Roes and Michel Raymond, “Belief in Moralizing Gods,” Evolution and Human Behavior 24:2 (2003): 126–35; Ara Norenzayan, “Why We Believe: Religion as a Human Universal” in Human Morality and Sociality: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, Henrik ec. Høgh-Olesen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 65; John Snarey, “The Natural Environment’s Impact upon Religious Ethics: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35:2 (1996): 85–96.
44. Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels: Laws and Stories from the Ancient Near East, rev. ed. (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 208–14.
45. “A Farmer and the Courts,” with versions from 2258–2052 BCE and 2134–1786 BCE, Matthews, Old Testament Parallels, 222, 215, 219. The dead sucked the breast of lactating Isis. Allen, Pyramid Texts, p.20, #30.
46. The Secrets of Tomb 10A: Egypt 2000 B.C., exhibit, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Jan-May 2010.
47. Edwin Yamauchi, “Life, Death, and the Afterlife in the Ancient Near East,” in Longenecker, Life in the Face of Death, 25.
48. Ikram, Death and Burial, 128–31.
49. Forman and Quirke, Hieroglyphs and the Afterlife, 72.
50. Ikram, Death and Burial, 43–44.
51. Matthews, Old Testament Parallels, 206–07.
52. Egyptian legal edicts and stelae date from the thirteenth-fourteenth century BCE, and the earliest Egyptian legal code from 700 BCE. Russ VerSteeg, “The Machinery of Law in Pharaonic Egypt: Organization, Courts and Judges on the Ancient Nile,” Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law 9 (2001): 109. Contemporaneous with late Mesopotamian stelae were the Edict of Horemheb (c. 1323–1295 BCE) and the Nauri Decree of Seti I (c. 1294–1279), in stone, in Nubia. As in Mesopotamia, the rules collected on stelae bear only a tangential relation to the extensive remains of lawsuits, contracts, and other records that demonstrate a lively legal system, VerSteeg, 107–09.
53. Wilkinson, Rise and Fall, 134; Taylor, Death and the Afterlife, 117, 123.
54. Yamauchi, “Life, Death, and the Afterlife,” 28.
55. Ikram, Death and Burial, 130.
56. Field museum wall text, 2013.
57. Ogden Goelet, Jr. “A New ‘Robbery’ Papyrus: Rochester MAG 51.346.1,” Journal of Egyptian Arcaheology 82 (1996): 107–27; T. E. Peet, The Great Tomb Robberies of the Twentieth Egyptian Dynasty (Oxford, 1930).
58. Ikram, Death and Burial, 196–200.
59. Jean Capart, Alan Henderson Gardiner, and Baudouin van de Walle, “New Light on the Ramesside Tomb Robberies,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 22:2 (1936): 188, 173.
60. Harco Willems, “Crime, Cult and Capital Punishment (Mo’alla inscription 8),” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 76 (1990): 27–54.
61. Jan Assmann, “When Justice Fails: Jurisdiction and Imprecation in Ancient Egypt and the Near East,” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 78 (1992): 149–62; Henri Sottas, La Preservation de la Propriété Funéraire dans l’ancienne Egypte (Paris, 1913). Assmann finds a profound change in the New Kingdom apprehension of divine intervention, 155.
62. Capart, Gardiner, and van de Walle, “New Light on the Ramesside Tomb Robberies,” 171–72.
63. Mansour El-Noubi, “A Harper’s Song from the Tomb of Roma-Roy at Thebes (TT 283),” Studien zur Altägptischen Kultur 25 (1998): 254, “heretical”; Edward F. Wente, “Egyptian ‘Make-Merry’ Songs Reconsidered,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 21:2 (1962): 122, “dubious.”
64. Miriam Lichtheim, “The Songs of the Harpers,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 4:3 (1945): 178–212.
65. Brandon, Judgment, 26; Lichtheim, “Songs of the Harpers,” JNES, 191–2; Simpson, Literature of Ancient Egypt, 307.
66. Bowman, Egypt after the Pharaohs, 187. The text is printed in full in Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, III, 59–65.
67. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature III,22, 54n, 58–59.
68. Wilkinson, Rise and Fall, 474–75.
69. East along the Mediterranean littoral, about the same period, a priest of Bel at Apameaon-Orontes headed an Epicurean school, suggesting that priesthood and philosophy were compatible. Stephanie Dalley, Legacy of Mesopotamia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 118.
70. Sarolta A. Takács, Isis and Serapis in the Roman World (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 29, 5, 124–5, 189–91; Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 75–78, 84, 95, 101–03; J. M. C. Toynbee, Death and Burial in the Roman World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 41–42; Françoise, Dunand, Le culte d’Isis dans le basin oriental de la Mediterranée, 3 vols. Leiden, 1973.
71. Malcolm Drew Donalson, The Cult of Isis in the Roman Empire: Isis Invicta (Lewiston, New York: E. Mellen, 2003), 115–19, 167.
72. Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 358. Isaac blends zoomorphic and anthropomorphic gods in his discussion of hostility to animal cults and fails to take into account the popularity outside Egypt of Egyptian cults, 369. Molly Swetnam-Burland, Egypt in Italy: Visions of Egypt in Roman Imperial Culture (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 4, 170–72.
73. Tacitus, Annals, 16.6; Maureen Carroll, Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 164; Toynbee, Death and Burial, 41.
74. Wilkinson, Rise and Fall, 442.
75. Bowman, Egypt After the Pharaohs, 170.
76. The description of Cleopatra in that Virgilian scene catches her self-representation as Isis without naming the goddess Isis. Ovid, in contrast to Virgil, presents a much more Romanized and integrated Isis in his Amores and Metamorphoses. Vassiliki Panoussi, “Isis at a Roman Wedding: Ritual and Ethnicity in Ovid’s Metamporphoses 9,” David H. Porter Classical World Lecture, Skidmore College, April 7, 2015.
77. “Aegyptiorum morem quis ignorat? Quorum inbutae mentes pravitatis erroribus” Tusculan Disputations, 5.78; in Isaac, Invention of Racism, 357.
78. Lucian, “Menippus or Descent to Hades,” in Lucian, ed. A. M. Harmon. Loeb Classical Library (1925) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953) IV, 97.
79. Bowman, Egypt After the Pharaohs, 178–79.
80. “Dialogues of the Sea Gods,” Lucian, VII, 219.
81. The Golden Ass of Apuleius, trans. Robert Graves (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1954), vi.
82. Isaac, Invention of Racism, 359.
83. “A Farmer and the Courts” Matthews, Old Testament Parallels, 219. More accurately rendered in Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, I, 174: “‘A good deed is remembered./This is the precept:/ Do to the doer to make him do./ It is thanking a man for what he does,/Parrying a blow before it strikes.” In James B. Pritchard’s version, “Now this is the command: ‘Do to the doer to cause that he do.’ That is thanking him for what he may do.” Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 408.
84. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, III, 167.
85. Allen, Pyramid Texts 337, 133.
86. Assmann, “When Justice Fails,” 154.
87. Lucian, ” On funerals,” IV, 127–29, and 128n.
88. R[aymond] O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com, 2007), 99; Allen, Pyramid Texts, #222, 60.
89. Assyriologists now regard the Mesopotamian (and its biblical derivative) flood story as having an historical basis in catastrophic floods in the alluvial plain, as rivers changed their directions. A. R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), I, 509, cited in text as George; Steven W. Cole and Hermann Gasche, “Levees, Floods, and the River Network of Northern Babylonia: 2000–1500 and 1000–500 BC—A Preliminary Report,” in Johannes Renger, ed. Babylon. Focus Mesopotamischer Geschichte (Saabrucken, 1999), CDOG 2, 87–110; Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014). For the environmental implications of ancient Mesopotamian literature, see Stephanie Dalley, “Ancient Mesopotamian Literature and the Environment,” in A Global History of Literature and the Environment, ed. John Parham (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 21–36.
90. Anticipating modern Mexico’s Day of the Dead festivities, indigenous Mexican peoples celebrated two festivals for the dead, Miccailhuitontli, or Fiesta de los Muertecitos, for the infant dead and Xocotlhuetzi, or Fiesta Grande de los Muertos, for adults. In 1579, the Dominican Diego Durán was perturbed by the fact that on All Saints Day, the Indians made their offerings “for the dead children, that this is what they had done from antiquity, and that they retained this custom.” On All Souls Day, they made offerings “for the grown-ups.” Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 116. The Romans imagined children at play, though Virgil does not, and an Ethiopic apocalypse of Peter gives aborted infants a guardian angel and a place of delight. Danuta Shanzer, “Voices and Bodies: The Afterlife of the Unborn,” Numen 56 (2009): 330, 340–41. Al-Sara’i’s Paths of Paradise / Nahj al-faradis (Herat, 1466) sends children who died prematurely to the Heavenly Paradise of Abraham, where they climb trees, peep at their visitor Muhammad, and play games inside and outdoors. Jerusalem 1000–1400 Every People under Heaven. Metropolitan Museum, NYC, October 2016–Jan. 8, 2017.
91. Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods, trans. Zainub Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 268–86. Caitlín E. Barrett, “Was Dust Their Food and Clay Their Bread? Grave Goods, the Mesopotamian Afterlife, and the Liminal Role of Inana/Ishtar,” JANER 7:3 (2007): 7–65.
92. Matthews, Old Testament Parallels, 223–28. This late theodicy dates from about 1000 BCE, the oldest copies from Ashurbanipal’s library, 668–626 BCE, and the most recent from the Persian period, fifth century, a period extending from Amos, c750 BCE, to a post-exilic Job.
93. “Adab to Nergal for Šu-ilišu,” “Adab to Bau for Išme-Dagan,” “Balbale to Ninĝišida,” “A tigi to Enki for Ur-Ninurta,” “An ululumama to Suen for Ibbi-Suen,” “A šir-namursaĝa to Inana for Iddin-Dagan,” “A šir-namšub to Utu,” in Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, Gábor Zólyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 160,252, 271, 273–74, 266, 259–61. website www.etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk.
95. Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 193.
96. “Death of Bilgameš,” other details from “The Descent of Inana,” “Death of Ur-Namma,” “Bilgameš, Enkidu and the Netherworld,” ETCSL. The last three appear in Black, Cunningham, Robson, Zólyomi, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 65–76, 56–62, 31–40.
97. Matthews, Old Testament Parallels, 236.
98. Black, Literature of Ancient Sumer. The Romanization differs in ETCSL, as do the translations, but the numbers for the relevant poems are: “Ninjiczida’s Journey to the Netherworld,” 1.7.3.; “The Death of Bilgameš,” 1.8.1.3; “The Death of Ur-Namma,” 2.4.1.1.; “Bilgameš, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” 1.8.1.4; “Dumuzid’s Dream,” 1.4.3.; “Balbale to Ninĝišida,” 4.19.1; “An ululumama to Suen for Ibbi-Suen,” 2.4.5.4; “A šir-namursaĝa to Inana for Iddin-Dagan,” 2.5.3.4; “A šir-namšub to Utu,” 4.32.e; the great creation-flood poem, 1.7.4; and “The Descent of Inana,” 1.4.1.
99. “Inana’s Descent to the Underworld,” in Black, The Literature of Ancient Sumer, 73.
100. “Inana’s Descent,” Black, Literature of Ancient Sumer, 73–74, 76n., 295–305.
101. “Dumuzid’s Dream,” Black, Literature of Ancient Sumer, 80.
102. George, I, 15. Graves with human retinues interred have been found at Ur, Kish, and Susa. Klaas Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East (Kevelaer: Butzon und Bercker, 1986), 107.
103. For other instances, George, I, 487–89; II, 900n19.
104. “Death of Ur-Namma,” ETCSL c.2.4.1.1. Bilgameš also brings gifts for the gods, not himself: “audience-gifts for Ereškigala. He set out their gifts for Namtar. He set out their surprises for Dimpikug. He set out their presents for Neti. He set out their presents for Ninĝišzida and Dumuzid. He…. the audience-gifts for Enki, Ninki, Enmul, Ninmul, Endukuga, Nindukuga, Enindašuruma, Nindašuruma, Enmu-utula, En-me-šara, the maternal and paternal ancestors of Enlil; for Šul-pa-e, the lord of the table, for Sumugan and Ninḫursaĝa, for the Anuna gods of the Holy Mound, for the Great Princes of the Holy Mound, for the dead en priests, the dead lagar priests, the dead lumaḫ priests, the dead nindiĝir priestesses, and the dead gudug, the linen-clad and…. priests,” http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi.
105. Martha Tobi Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed. Writings from the Ancient World, vol. 6, Society of Biblical Literature (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 13–22.
106. Martha Tobi Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 34–35, 136–40. The Sumerian laws also curse, but only for this life, 39.
108. Roth, Law Collections, 25. Cf. 44.
109. “An Elegy on the Death of Nannaya,” c.5.5.2, ETCSL.orinst.ox.ac.uk.
110. BEN is probably not the name of BEN in Sumerian. The poem begins not with Enkidu and death, but with a tree of Inana’s, infested by an Anzu-bird, a serpent, and a phantom maiden, elements associated with the dead. These Bilgameš evicts for her, cutting down the tree to make furniture for her and a pukku and stick for himself. The netherworld part of the story begins when Bilgameš loses his pukku, and Enkidu his servant volunteers to fetch it. The Sumerian poem puts the netherworld into relation with creation, the gods, and the motif of the great tree that links the world of the gods and the netherworld.
111. Dina Katz, The Image of the Netherworld in the Sumerian Sources (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2003), 109. Katz points out that when Enkidu goes down to the underworld to fetch Gilgamesh’s ball and head-severing bat, Gilgamesh advises him to behave like a non-socialized, de-socialized corpse (the advice of Siduri reversed). That way, the dead won’t notice him, and he’ll be able to come back. Enkidu ignores the advice—he is alive, and cannot act as if he is dead—and so he is trapped.
112. Black, “Gilgameš, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” Literature of Ancient Sumer, 37–38.
113. A. R. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Penguin, 2000), 177, 190–91; II, 777. Including his mother in the ancestral line, Bilgameš repeats three times “my father and my mother.”
114. “The message of Lu-dijira to his mother,” extravagantly beautiful, makes the praise of the good woman in Proverbs seem like blame by comparison. ETCSL, t.5.5.1.
115. Scavenging was a shameful activity of the destitute to be performed after nightfall. An old Babylonian—not Sumerian—proverb had it that “the widow scavenges evenings on the road for something to eat.” Falkowitz, 1980, proverb 3.19, quoted in Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Ugarit, and Israel: Continuity and Changes in the Forms of Religious Life (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 30.
116. Black, “Gilgameš, Enkidu, and the Netherworld,” Literature of Ancient Sumer, 39.
117. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 146: “The most ancient and universal experience of God is that he is a moralist, and this experience supersedes all abstract ideas about him. Gods and spirits may be omniscient, but in practice, they are mainly interested in moral questions.” Citing Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 158.
118. George, number of mss, II, 745–48; locations, II, 985–86; moral lines, II, 776. Gregory Shushan cites Dina Katz, Image of the Netherworld, 2003; Jerrold S. Cooper, “The Fate of Mankind: Death and Afterlife in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion,” in Hiroshi Obayashi, ed. Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions, 1992; and Jean Bottéro, “Les inscriptions cuneiforms funéraires,” 1982, as regarding BEN as “heterodox” since its view of the afterlife is not as uniformly cheerless as scholars represent the Mesopotamian afterlife. He does not point out that most copies of BEN do not contain the moral injunctions regarding parents, tending to confirm Katz’s and Cooper’s views. Nor are those lines in the Gilgamesh Twelfth Tablet, which he does not discuss. Shushan, Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations: Universalism, Constructivism, and Near-Death Experience. Foreword, Gavin Flood (London: Continuum International, 2009), 73, 83.
120. Black, “GEN,” Literature of Ancient Sumer, 40n287; George, Penguin, 188; II, 775.
121. Roth, Law Collections, 25, 44, 113, 120.
122. The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), I, 8.
123. The surviving Sumerian poems about Bilgameš: Bilgameš and Huwawa; Bilgameš, Enkidu, and the Netherworld; The Death of Bilgameš (which mentions his trip to Ziusudra); Bilgameš and the Bull of Heaven; Bilgameš and the Aga of Kish; Bilgameš and Huwawa is an episode in the original Old Babylonian version; Bilgameš and the Bull of Heaven first appears in a middle Babylonian version. The visit to Ziusudra is recast in the OBV and given a new purpose—to escape death, rather than to restore the rites before the flood. Bilgameš and the Aga of Kish is not used at all.
124. A. R. George argues that the quest for immortality “was in fact well known in the Sumerian literary tradition” (I, 19), but no surviving Sumerian poem makes such a quest its topic. George’s argument hinges on a Babylonian “poem of early rulers” that contains the line, “where now is Gilgamesh, who sought life like Ziusudra?” The tablet is twelfth century, later than the OBV, and George considers it a Sumerian composition extant in Babylonian copies, I, 99, 96. Bilgameš’s visit to Ziusudra is clear in “The Death of Bilgameš,” but he sought not to obtain eternal life but to restore the rites from before the flood and he succeeded—he brought the forgotten rituals back. The gods recall this achievement as they discuss Bilgameš’s imminent and inevitable death in a dream. (Other kings claim to have restored the rites, as well.) In a version from Me-Turan, Segment F, ll. 116–30, the flood explains the origins of death: afterwards no one, except Ziusudra the survivor, would live forever. For the difficulties of Sumerian translation and this poem in particular, see Niek Veldhuis, “The Solution of the Dream: A New Interpretation of Bilgameš’ Death,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 53 (2001): 133–48. The text in its fragments appears on the ETCSL website: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi.
125. Relatively little of the Old Babylonian version survives, but it did not have the ring structure that has reached us. Stephanie Dalley translates four surviving OBV tablets in her Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), cited in text as Dalley. In his astonishing 2 volumes, A. R. George translates all the fragments currently extant, produces a hybrid text of the SBV in English and Akkadian, and provides sketches—and some photographs—of the tablets themselves.
Its opening line supplied by the colophon on subsequent tablets (“Surpassing all other kings,” a line that now follows the prologue in the SBV), the surviving OBV text begins with Gilgamesh’s dreaming about Enkidu before he meets him, Enkidu’s domestication through seven days of sex with a harlot and her introducing him to civilization through clothing and beer. Enkidu and Gilgamesh struggle against each other, as Enkidu keeps Gilgamesh out of a new bride’s bed before her husband, and they then join together to combat Humbaba, protector of the cedar forest, embodiment of wilderness. Missing tablets must describe Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s mourning, since in what survives, Gilgamesh meets Shamash and Siduri after Enkidu’s death as he seeks immortality, and he destroys the stones Sur-sunabu depends upon to carry him across the waters of death to Ūta-napišti, the one man granted immortality by the gods. Sur-sunabu orders Gilgamesh to cut poles so as to pole across the waters to Ūta-napišti. There the tablets break off again, and the end of the poem is missing.
In addition to the prologue, episodes missing in the OBV are Enkidu’s dream, his death, his funeral, and Gilgamesh’s mourning, as well as the episode of Ishtar and the Bull of Heaven that in the SBV precipitates Enkidu’s death. Missing is all of the present ending: the visit to Ūta-napišti, the story of the flood, the sleep test, the quest for and loss of the magic plant of youth, and the return to the city and the Twelfth Tablet.
126. Sin-leqi-unninni is named in a Neo-Assyrian authors’ list as author; the series of Gilgamesh is from his mouth. George, I, 28. He is variously identified as a magician and a diviner priest and was regarded as an ancestor by cult-singers, I, 29. A late Babylonian king list makes him a contemporary of King Gilgamesh, I, 29, the poet as ancient as the hero. In George’s view, Sin-leqi-unninni is not the author of the OBV but of a MB version, I, 30, who, in what George calls a “bold” suggestion, recast the OBV into an eleven-tablet version with prologue and reprising epilogue, I, 32, with Tablet 12 a “prose appendix” that turns a hero story into “a somber meditation on the doom of man,” I, 33. George finds the OBV version more energetic, young, ambitious, the SBV more meditative and modern.
127. Douglas, Thinking in Circles: An Essay in Ring Composition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 126.
128. Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia, 34–35. These features may be attested in Sumerian poems that have not survived.
129. Katz, The Image of the Netherworld, xvi–xvii. The ETCSL translations place the “underworld” “below” the earth, but that may be simply contagious expectation.
130. Katz, Image of the Netherworld, 109, 218, 238. Between “Inana’s Descent” and “GEN,” however, the Sumerian afterlife goes underground.
131. “The Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld,” in Stephanie Dalley, ed. Myths from Mesopotamia, 155–56. The lines about the dead eating the living do not appear or are not preserved in the Sumerian “Gilgameš and the Bull of Heaven.” http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi.
132. It has been dated from the fifteenth or fourteenth century BCE, but George queries the dates. I, 26, 339–47.
133. In a remarkable parable of the difficulties of this scholarship, for those who actually engage it: an Elamite tablet was presented as a dramatized version of Gilgamesh in 1990. That identification was demolished by another scholar, and yet another scholar has identified the same tablet as a private letter, viz., “Epic of Gilgamesh or Economic Tablet from Persepolis? Neither one nor the other.” George, I, 24n67.
134. A. R. George’s two volumes supplant earlier scholarship on the epic’s development, even as they promise scholars that more work needs to be done. Sin-leqi-unninni may be either the author of the OBV or the editor of the SBV. George inclines to the latter, but there is as yet no determining evidence. George, I, 30–31. The classic account of the development of the Gilgamesh epic has been Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). Gary Beckman extends and advances Tigay’s account relative to recent findings and provides exceptionally useful charts indicating what parts of the epic appear in which manuscripts, “Gilgamesh in Hatti,” Hittite Studies in Honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr., ed. Gary Beckman, Richard Beal, and Gregory MacMahon (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003).
135. Susan Brind Morrow observes that the Egyptian words for “snake” and “life” are the same, “The snake is the life in the tree of life.” The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts, 45.
136. The means of transmission remain unclear, but the Genesis stories obviously borrow whole cloth from the earlier Sumerian/Babylonian tales—plot lines, motifs, narrative elements—while changing fundamentally the meaning of the stories to conform to Hebrew/Israelite theology. Stephanie Dalley, et al., The Legacy of Mesopotamia, 57–83. Ronald A. Veenker, “Gilgamesh and the Magic Plant,” The Biblical Archaeologist 44:4 (Autumn 1981): 199–205, makes the especially delicate point that in the Gilgamesh flood story, a person who will be drowned closes the ark for Ūta-napišti, whereas in the Biblical J narrative, YHWH himself closes the ark. In the Babylonian Atrahasis version, Atrahasis closes the ark himself, and if the Atrahasis version had been the source, it seems logical that Noah could have shut his own ark. Instead, the Jahwist makes God responsible and does not impugn God’s justice in making Noah depend on a doomed sinner. For the relationship between Gilgamesh and the Greeks, see Walter Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 21–48; M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); George, I, 55–59.
137. Stephanie Dalley, ed. The Legacy of Mesopotamia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). M. J. Geller. “The Last Wedge,” ZA 87 (1997), 43–95. Darius I’s stele commemorated the first Suez Canal’s opening in 497 BCE in cuneiform and hieroglyphics; Sumerian and Babylonian learning survive into Greek magical papyri and the origins of Stoicism, succumbing to Christian, Muslim, and Zoroastrian hostility. Legacy, 166, 169.
138. Stanley Mayer Burstein, The Babyloniaca of Berossus (Malibu, CA: Undena, 1978).
139. George, I, 201, OBV col.iv, 140-43; cf. Dalley, Tablet 3, column iv, 144.
140. “[F]ly up to the sky and live with them [the gods], cause your wings to grow with your feathers on your head and your feathers on your arms,” Faulkner, Pyramid Texts, 282.
141. John Bowker, The Meanings of Death (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 154; Ronald A. Veenker, “Gilgamesh and the Magic Plant,” The Biblical Archaeologist 44:4 (Autumn 1981): 199–205; Jerrold S. Cooper, “The Fate of Mankind: Death and Afterlife in Ancient Mesopotamian Religion,” in Hiroshi Obayashi, ed. Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions (London: Praeger, 1992), 31n6.
142. Asking Shamash to protect Gilgamesh as he goes against Humbaba, Ninsun questions the sun god over a series of inconsistent fates, including that promised Bilgameš in the “Death of Bilgameš”:
O Šamaš, will Gilgameš not…the gods?
Will he not share the heavens with you?
Will he not share a scepter with the moon?
Will he not become wise with Ea of the Apsû?
Will he not rule the black-headed race with Irnina?
[Will he] not dwell in the Land-of-No-Return with Ningišzida?”, Tablet III. ll. 101–106; George I, 581.
143. “Did [you see] the man fallen in battle?” “I saw him.]” “How does he [fare?]”
“His father and mother could not hold his head, his wife weeps.” George, II, 776.
Of the emendation on the Twelfth Tablet, George observes: “The Akkadian follows a tradition in which the first verb is not negated. Both the legible Sumerian manuscripts have a clear negative…; the Nippur sources are broken at the crucial point” II, 904n149.
144. “The Lament for Nibru,” 181–183. ETCSL, t. 2.2.4.
145. A similar security for the grave may be imagined for Enkidu in some fragmentary lines from Tablet VIII, ll. 207–10; George, I, 490.
146. Recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, 1996, Jiří Bĕlohlávek conducting. BBC Music, vol. 4, no. 11.
147. Barry Brenesal, Fanfare: The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors 31:4 (Mar/Apr 2008), 168. Theodore Ziolkowski, Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2012), 71–77.
148. Relief of the Capture and Decapitation of the Elamite King, upper left register, British Museum, 124801a, From Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age, Metropolitan Museum, Nov. 2014. For bones, Cooper, “Fate of Mankind,”27–28.
149. Hercules, with Hebe on Olympus in Homer and Hesiod, is the classical prototype for afterlife ascents. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 198, 211, 427n40, n41, 433n40.
150. Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Ugarit, and Israel, 208, 354–62.
151. Wisdom of Solomon addresses the problem death creates in Genesis: it had never been God’s intention for man to choose death, WS 1:13–15; 2:23.
152. The Torah was assembled during and after the exile 597/87 BCE–538 BCE, achieving something like its modern form about 450 or 400 BCE. The prophets were collected by about 250 BCE, forming Jesus’ “Law and the Prophets.” Resurrection first appears in Jewish writing during the Maccabean rebellion against Antiochus Epiphanus IV in Daniel, c. 165 BCE (canonized c. 100 CE as part of the Writings), the Christian deuterocanonical books Maccabees, and outside the Bible in some Dead Sea fragments, especially Enochic literature. John F. Hobbins, “Resurrection in the Daniel Tradition and Other Writings at Qumran,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, ed. John J. Collins and Peter Flint (Leiden: Brill, 2001), II, 395–420.
153. Unless otherwise specified, biblical quotations are from the NRSV, HarperCollins Study Bible. KJV designates the King James Version, 1611.
154. The earliest reforms referred to by the Deuteronomist under Asa concern only idols, male temple prostitutes, and an image of Asherah, made by the Queen Mother. 1 Kings 15.12–13, ca. 913–873 BCE.
155. It has, however, been doubted. Philip R. Davies, “Spurious Attribution in the Hebrew Bible,” in The Invention of Sacred Tradition, ed. James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007), argues that Deuteronomy is post-exilic, Ezra nonexistent and his and Nehemiah’s story a late fiction composed during the fifth century BCE to prove that Deuteronomy preceded the exile and had been endorsed by a righteous king, 267, 273–74. At issue is not the importance of the Deuteronomists’ book but its timing. Timo Veijola, “The Deuteronomistic Roots of Judaism,” in Sefer Moshe: The Moshe Weinfeld Jubilee Volume, Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East, Qumran, and Post-Biblical Judaism, ed. Chaim Cohen, Avi Hurvitz, and Shalom M. Paul (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), 459–78. For a hostile account of the Deuteronomists’ work as obscuring the authentic religion of ancient, pre-exilic, pre-textual Israel and Judah, see Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah, ed. Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton (London: T & T Clark, 2010).
156. Van der Toorn suggests that Jeremiah’s father Hilkiah may have been the same Hilkiah who took the book of the law to king Josiah, and his uncle Shallum may have been the same Shallum who had been the husband of the widow Huldah, the prophetess who verified the book of the law, Family Religion, 370.
157. Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion, 225–29. T. J. Lewis, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit, HSM 39 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars, 1989).
158. Leonard J. Greenspoon, “The Origin of the Idea of Resurrection” in Traditions in Transformation: Turning Points in Biblical Faith, ed. Baruch Halpern and Jon D. Levenson (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1981), 247–322.
159. For Šamaš in nocturnal divination in Babylon, Piotr Steinkeller, “Of Stars and Men: The Conceptual and Mythological Setup of Babylonian Extispicy,” Biblical and Oriental Essays in Memory of William L. Moran, ed. Agustinus Gianto, Biblica et Orientalia 48. (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2005), 24–45.
160. Rachel S. Hallote, Death, Burial, and Afterlife in the Biblical World (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2001), 113.
161. Klaas Spronk, Beatific Afterlife, 231 and n3; Nicholas J. Tromp, Primitive Conceptions of Death and the Nether World in the Old Testament, Biblica et Orientalia 21 (Rome: Gregorian and Biblical Press, 1969), 99–100; John Barclay Burns, “The Mythology of Death in the Old Testament,” Scottish Journal of Theology 26: 3(1973): 327–40.
162. Michael David Coogan, trans. and ed. Stories from Ancient Canaan (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978), 112–13; Oxford Study Bible, *59; J. C. L. Gibson, Canaanite Myths and Legends (New York: T & T Clark International, c. 2004), “Baal and Mot.”
163. Spronk, Beatific Afterlife, 169–70, 276. Cf. John Day, “Resurrection Imagery from Baal to the Book of Daniel,” in Congress Volume: Cambridge 1995. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum ed. J. A. Emerton (Leiden: Brill, 1997), LXVI, 128–9.
164. Later Christians sometimes do: Greenspoon, “Origin of the Idea of Resurrection,” 307–09. Cf. James S. Ackerman, “Satire and Symbolism in the Song of Jonah,” Traditions in Transformation, 220.
165. William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2005); John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Tilde Binger, Asherah: Goddesses in Ugarit, Israel and the Old Testament (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Richard J. Pettey, Asherah: Goddess of Israel (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). Phyllis A. Bird, “The End of the Male Cult Prostitute: A Literary-Historical and Sociological Analysis of Hebrew QĀDĀŠ-QĔDĒŠÎM” in Congress Volume: Cambridge 1995. Supplements to Vetus Testamentum, ed. J. A. Emerton (Leiden: Brill, 1997), LXVI, 37–80.
166. Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992), 133, 140–42.
167. Van der Toorn suggests that Saul’s outlawing mediums may not be an anachronism, but a move by Saul against family religion and its cult of the dead, Family Religion, 318.
168. Elizabeth Bloch-Smith, Judahite Burial Practices, 109–32; Francesca Stavrakopoulou and John Barton, ed. Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah (London: T & T Clark, 2010); Theodore J. Lewis, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit, HSM 39 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989); Barry M. Gittlen, ed. Sacred Time, Sacred Place: Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2002); Saul M. Olyan, Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).
169. Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion, 48–65, 125.
170. Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985).
171. Karel van der Toorn finds the same bargaining with one’s gods in Old Babylonian texts, Family Religion, 140. So Abraham barters over Sodom, Genesis 18.22–33.
172. ETCSL translation t.5.5.3.
173. Klaas Spronk, Beatific Afterlife, 11, 13–24. Cf. K. A. D. Smelik, “The Witch of Endor: I Samuel 28 in Rabbinic and Christian Exegesis Till 800 AD,” Vigiliae Christianae 33 (1979): 160–79.
174. Klaas Spronk, Beatific Afterlife, 75, 109; Jean Bottéro, “Les inscriptions cuneiforms funéraires” in Gherardo Gnoli and Jean-Pierre Vernant, ed. La mort, les morts dans les sociétés anciennes (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 392–403.
175. Stefan Schorch, “ ‘A Young Goat in Its Mother’s Milk’? Understanding an Ancient Prohibition,” Vetus Testamentum 60 (2010): 120; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 737–38; Burkert, Greek Religion, 295; Robert Ratner and Bruce Zuckerman, “ ‘A Kid in Milk’? New Photographs of ‘KTU’ 1.23, line 14*,” Hebrew Union College Annual 57 (1986): 15–60; Calum M. Carmichael, “On Separating Life and Death: An Explanation of Some Biblical Laws,” Harvard Theological Review 69: 1–2 (1976): 1–7.
176. Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets (New York: Routledge, 2007), #3, 9; #5, 13; #26 a, b, 37; Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, 295; Günther Zuntz, Persephone: Three Essays on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 323–27, 277–86; Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus, a Study in Ancient Religion: Vol. 1: Zeus God of the Bright Sky (1914–40) (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1964), I, 676–8.
177. Stefan Schorch, 120. Wisdom of Solomon, c. 30 BCE-50/70 CE, connects grief for dead children with idolatry and “secret rites and initiations,” WS 14.15.
178. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette, 2007), 99, 217–28: “Is Religion Child Abuse?”
179. Sumerian kings insisted on their care of the widow and the orphan, their protection of the poor against the strong, e.g., “A Praise Poem for Išme-Dagan,” ETCSL, t.2.5.4.01.
180. Herodotus, Persian Wars, I.91, Loeb, 116–17.
181. Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Folk Religion, 107. Blurred deliberately in this discussion is the distinction between Torah or the Law as icon and Torah as particular rules and regulations. For a discussion of the distinction and the relationship, see John J. Collins, The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
182. Eden as the garden of the Lord appears in Isaiah 51:3 and Ezekiel 36:35; 28:13, but there is no reference to the narrative of the trees, death, and curses on Adam, Eve, and serpent. Sirach (200–180 BCE) knows the story but breaks the Genesis narrative’s link between death and knowledge (Sirach 16:30–17:11). Paul thematizes the first Adam’s bringing death, enabling Augustine’s original sin, I Cor. 15.45.
183. Abraham A. Neuman, “A Jewish Viewpoint,” in In Search of God and Immortality, ed. F. Lyman Windolph (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1961), 5.
184. James D. G. Dunn, “The Danielic Son of Man in the New Testament,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, ed. John J. Collins and Peter Flint (Leiden: Brill, 2001), II, 528–49.
185. Greg Goswell, “Resurrection in the Book of Daniel,” Restoration Quarterly 55:3 (2013): 139–51.
186. Leonard J. Greenspoon, “The Origin of the Idea of Resurrection,” Traditions in Transformation, 319–20.
187. John J. Collins, The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 125, 128–29.
188. Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Alice K. Turner, History of Hell (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 12–15; E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell (1925) (New York: AMS, 1976); R. O. Faulkner, trans. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, ed. Carol Andrews (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Jens Braarvig, “The Buddhist Hell: An Early Instance of the Idea?” Numen 56 (2009): 254–81.
189. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History, 12; Alan F. Segal, Life After Death (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 183, 200.
190. Baruch Halpern and Jon D. Levenson, ed. Traditions in Transformation: Turning Points in Biblical Faith; Klaas Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East, 57–59, 125, 294–96, 171; Daniel I. Block, “Beyond the Grave: Ezekiel’s Vision of Death and Afterlife,” Society for Biblical Research 2 (1992): 113–141; Philip C. Schmitz, “The Grammar of Resurrection in Isaiah 26:19a-c,” Journal of Biblical Literature 122:1 (2003): 145–49; Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, ed. John J. Collins and Peter Flint (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 2 vols.; Jan N. Bremmer, “The Resurrection between Zarathustra and Jonathan Z. Smith,” Nederlands theologisch tijdschrift 50:2 (1996): 97; Michael Stauberg, “A Name for All and No One: Zoroaster as a Figure of Authorization and a Screen of Ascription,” in The Invention of Sacred Tradition, ed. James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 177–98.
191. The gospel of Luke explains that when Jesus appeared to the disciples after his death, he took them through the scriptures (now the Christian Old Testament) and pointed out the applicable passages (Luke 24:27). The “suffering servant” passages in Isaiah (42:1–4; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12) now predict a Messiah, rather than recording the sufferings of faithful Israel. Psalm 22 provides Jesus’s last words on the cross and the gambling for his garment. In Acts, the disciple Philip interprets a puzzling passage from Isaiah (Isaiah 53:6–8) for a high-ranking eunuch of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, founding the Ethiopian church (8:26–39).
192. Walter Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis, 101.
193. Fragment 4Q385, Jan N. Bremmer, “The Resurrection between Zarathustra and Jonathan Z. Smith,” Nederlands theologisch tijdschrift 50:2 (1996): 92–93; Stephen Goranson, “The Exclusion of Ephraim in Rev. 7:4–8 and Essene Polemic against Pharisees,” Dead Sea Discoveries 2:1 (1995): 84–85.
194. Isaiah combines texts by and about the eighth-century prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, by a sixth-century celebrant of Judah’s imminent return from exile (Deutero- or Second Isaiah), and by writers struggling with the return (Trito-Isaiah). Mingled texts promise doom and marvel at restoration. Second Isaiah calls Cyrus the Persian “the Lord’s messiah” (Isaiah 45:1; cf. 44:28, 45:13) and hears the voice calling for the road in the wilderness to be made straight for the Lord’s—and the people’s—return. There will be no wanderings as in the first wilderness of Exodus (Isaiah 40:2): “A voice cries out, in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” Re-punctuated to put the voice, rather than the way, in the wilderness, a “voice cries out in the wilderness, prepare the way,” the verse identifies John the Baptist’s preparing the way for Jesus, as lord (Mark 1:3; Matt. 3:2).
195. Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, XVIII.11–25, in Josephus, trans. Louis H. Feldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), IX, 9–23.
196. James D. Purvis, “The Samaritan Problem: A Case Study in Jewish Sectarianism in the Roman Era,” in Traditions in Transformation, 339.
197. Jan N. Bremmer, “Resurrection between Zarathustra and Smith,” 91n10, citing P. W. Van der Horst, Ancient Jewish Epitaphs (1991), 117.
198. Jewish Wars, ii.119–166. Josephus, II, 369–87.
199. Jewish Wars, iii.374, Josephus, II, 681.
200. McDannell and Lang, Heaven: A History, 25–26.
201. Regina Janes, “Why the Daughter of Herodias Must Dance (Mark 6:14–29),” JSNT 28:4 (2006): 446–48.
202. Donald A. Hagner, “Gospel, Kingdom, and Resurrection in the Synoptic Gospels,” in Longenecker, Life in the Face of Death, 112–13.
203. Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 138, 35–36, 18–30.
204. Prods Oktor Skjærvø, “Zarathustra: A Revolutionary Monotheist?” in Beate Pongratz-Leisten, ed. Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 345.
205. Burkert gives Homer priority, suggesting that Hesiod’s reference to lying muses criticizes Homer’s depictions of the gods, Greek Religion, 246.
206. H. W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 116.
207. Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, trans. Glenn W. Most (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
208. Alexander Pope, The Iliad, 2 vols., ed. Maynard Mack (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), I, 82; II, 205; I, 395–96.
209. The Greeks associated severed heads with immobility, the instant between a fight or flight response. Regina Janes, Losing Our Heads (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 25.
210. “To Demeter,” ll. 478–482. Homeric Hymns, Apocrypha, Lives, ed. Martin L. West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 68–71. Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) and Greek Religion, 199, 296–97; Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis, 74–79, W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (London: Methuen, 1935), 148–54; Parke, Festivals of the Athenians, 70; Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (New York: Random House, 2001), 147.
211. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Beginning of Knowledge, trans. Rod Coltman (New York: Continuum, 2002), scrutinizes these inscrutable passages, 28, 31–2, 46, 49, 54, 60–64, 71–72.
212. “Second Olympian Ode,” ll. 57–80, Pindar, The Odes of Pindar, including the Principal Fragments, trans. Sir John Sandys (1915) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 22–27.
213. Burkert, Greek Religion, 289, 460n36, c 38. Parke, Festivals, 135, 63–64.
214. Herodotus, II.123, pp. 424–25.
215. Aristophanes, trans. Benjamin Bickley Rogers, 3 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), II, 311.
216. Gorgias, 523a-527e, Plato, Gorgias, Menexenus, Protagoras, ed. Malcolm Schofield, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109–13. “They could see beauty shining, when with the divine chorus they beheld the blessed sight and vision…we went through the initiations which it is right to call the most blessed, which we celebrated in complete wholeness…, seeing, as mystai and epoptai, entire and whole…and happy visions in pure light.” 250b-c, Phaedrus, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), p. 215; Phaedo, 82e, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
217. Phaedo, 70cd, 81c-82d. Pythagorean materiality resembles Jain karma.
218. Phaedrus, trans. Robin Waterfield, 245c-246e, 249ac; Fred D. Miller Jr. “The Platonic Soul,” in Hugh H. Benson, A Companion to Plato (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 278–93; Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World, 143.
219. Plato, The Republic of Plato, ed. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974) II. 383-87, p. 76.
220. Cornford, Republic of Plato, X.614, p. 352.
221. Burkert, Greek Religion, 237–38.
222. “Of the Pythagorean Philosophy: From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book xv,” Fables, 1700.
223. Cornford, Republic of Plato, X.612, p. 347.
224. Maxwell Staniforth, “Introduction,” Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (New York: Penguin, 1979), 15–16.
225. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.3, pp. 54–55; V.13, pp 83–84; VI. 24, p. 96; VII. 21, p. 110; VIII. 25, 58, pp. 126, 134; X.7, p. 153; XI. 3, p. 166; XII.5, 21, pp. 181, 183.
226. Hanne Sigismund Nielsen, “The Value of Epithets in Pagan and Christian Epitaphs,” in Suzanne Dixon, ed. Childhood, Class and Kin in the Roman World (New York: Routledge, 2001), 91, 173. Alison Sheridan, ed. Heaven and Hell and Other Worlds of the Dead (Edinburgh: NMS, 2000), 143.
227. Maureen Carroll, Spirits of the Dead, 4.
228. Betty Rose Nagle, trans. Ovid’s Fasti: Roman Holidays (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 72. Her lines correspond to the Latin.
229. CIL xii.5102/ILS 8154. Maureen Carroll, Spirits of the Dead, 4.
230. The only afterlife vision in Roman literature before Virgil’s, Cyril Bailey, Religion in Virgil (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), 266.
231. Monica Gale, “Lucretius and Previous Poetic Traditions” in Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 114–15. “Epicurean apostate”: J. D. Minyard, Lucretius and the Late Republic (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 65.
232. Maureen Carroll insists seven examples from CIL and ILS are not typical, compared to expectations of mixing with the earth as flowers or reunion with surviving children, husbands, wives, friends. Spirits of the Dead, 4. Mingling with earth as flowers is more consistent with Epicurean sentiments than with familial reunions.
233. Leg. 948c. Burkert, Greek Religion, 315. “Most people fear” and “say” the soul is destroyed at death with the body, Phaedo 77e, 80d.
234. John Bodel calls Oenoanda [sic], a Hellenistic city strangely remarkable for ostentatious inscriptions. Epigraphic Evidence: Ancient History from Inscriptions (New York: Routledge, 2001), 14. More recent excavations estimate the wall was originally 12-feet high and 200 feet long, containing about 25,000 words. It has been damaged by earthquakes and recycling of its blocks for other uses. Eric A. Powell, “In Search of a Philosopher’s Stone, Archaeology, July, August 2015, 34–37. Images at www.archaeology.org/philosopher and Martin Ferguson Smith, “In Praise of the Simple Life: A New Fragment of Diogenes of Oinoanda,” Anatolian Studies 54 (2004): 35–46.
235. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Natura Deorum/On the Nature of the Gods, Liberty Fund online, sect. viii. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Brutus, On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, On Duties, trans. Hubert M. Poteat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), sec. 8, p. 185.
236. Thomas Creech, trans., Titus Lucretius Carus, Of the Nature of Things: In six books (London, 1722), Preface, n.p.; Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, sec. 21, p. 199; Savonarola, Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 220.
237. Epicurus, Vatican Sayings, #7; Principal Doctrines #35. www.epicurus.net. Letters, Principal Doctrines, and Vatican Sayings, ed. Russel M. Geer (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 64, 66.
238. Cf. David Armstrong, ed., Vergil, Philodemus, and the Augustans (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), 13–14, 19.
239. Alexander Pope, reworking Dryden’s lines, made them more succinct but did away with their longing as well: “The blest today is as completely so, As who began a thousand years ago” (Essay on Man, I, 75–76). Dryden, incidentally, claimed not to believe a word of what Lucretius had to say about the mortality of the soul. As poet laureate, he Englished the best bits, on death, sex, philosophic indifference, and Venus, in 1685, post-Creech. He also made Lucretius more aggressively atheistic than he is in Latin. Lucretius liberates, even those who have converted, like Dryden, from radical Protestantism to Anglicanism to Catholicism, perhaps especially those.
240. On Feb. 11, Greenblatt specifies, The Swerve, 51.
241. Eve Adler, Vergil’s Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 44–45; Leah Kronenberg, “Mezentius the Epicurean,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 135 (2005): 416n41. E. J. Kenney, ed. Lucretius De Rerum Natura Book III (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 8, 226.
242. Tusculan Disputations, trans. J.E. King (London: William Heinemann, 1927), I. xvii. 39–40, p. 47; I.xxi.48–49, p. 59; Tusc. Disp. I.vi.10–12, p. 15.
243. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 81–83.
244. John Pollini, “Ritualizing Death in Republican Rome: Memory, Religion, Class Struggle, and the Wax Ancestral Mask Tradition’s Origin and Influence on Veristic Portraiture,” in Nicola Laneri, ed. Performing Death: Social Analyses of Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean. Oriental Institute Seminars No. 3 (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2007).
245. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles, intro. Bernard Knox (New York: Viking, 2006), 6. Henri Bergson, The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 28–35. Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions, 180–228.
246. Dryden, 2 Georgics, 673–737; Virgil, Georgics II, 475–512.
247. Hardie, Lucretian Receptions, 147–48 and Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 76–83; Peter Aicher, “Ennius’ Dream of Homer,” The American Journal of Philology, 110:2 (1989): 227–232; Emma Gee discusses Virgil’s use of Cicero’s poetry, “Cicero’s Poetry,” Cambridge Companion to Cicero, ed. Catherine Steel (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 95–101.
248. Sadly, the uncredited uterine map in Turner’s History of Hell, 38, has it wrong, misplacing the two gates of dreams, the crossroads that separates Tartarus from the gated way to the Elysian Fields, and much else. Cf. Andrew Feldherr, “Putting Dido on the Map: Genre and Geography in Vergil’s Underworld,” Arethusa 32 (1999): 85–122. P. Vergili Maronis, Aeneoidos Liber Sextus, ed. with commentary, R. G. Austin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 48–58; 81, l. 132; 124, l. 295.
249. Burkert, Babylon, 81, Plate II B 2, from G. Pugliese Carratelli, Le lamine d’oro orfiche. Istruzioni per il viaggio oltremondano degli iniziati greci (Milan, 2001), 112f; Bowden, Mystery Cults, 150–51.
250. Austin, Aeneoidos Liber Sextus, 134, n.329.
251. Macrobius, Commentary, 141; Toynbee, Death and Burial, 34, 285n73.
252. It is possible those slain for adultery are the wives, but that creates an anomalous gender-switch in the middle of a list (and book, Feldherr, “Putting Dido,” 103n46) that seems largely masculine. Some of the crimes are mentioned in legal codes or seem to have been punished when known. Tacitus reports a man thrown from the Tarpeian rock for incest with his daughter, but, like a later case of brother-sister incest, he views the charges as a lie trumped up to appropriate the victim’s fortune or fiancée (Ann. 6.19). Filial impiety as the specific crime of beating a parent is “an ancient law of Servius Tullius [Festos 260L],” while defrauding clients is a violation mentioned in the 12 Tables. Austin, Aeneoidos Liber Sextus, 194, l.609. The Lex Julia of 18 BCE, the year after Virgil died, empowered husbands to kill the male adulterer as well as the wife. Austin, 195, l. 612.
253. De Re Publica, De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (London: William Heinemann, 1928), DRP, Book 6, sec. xxi, p. 277.
254. Austin, Aeneoidos Liber Sextus, 250–51, l.815; Agnes Kirsopp Michels “Lucretius and the Sixth Book of the Aeneid,” American Journal of Philology 65 (1944): 135–48.
255. Cicero, De Re Publica, De legibus, Book 2, sec. xviii, pp. 140–41.
256. Jan M. Ziolkowski and Michael C. J. Putnam, ed. The Virgilian Tradition: The First Fifteen Hundred Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
257. Edward Gibbon, Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of the Aeneid (1770) (London, 1794), 54.
258. Toynbee, Death and Burial, 37. Citing Cumont, Lux Perpetua, 73n7.
3. TOURING ASIAN AFTERLIVES: ETERNAL IMPERMANENCE
1. Tomomi Ito, “ ‘Dhamma’ Study and Practice in Contemporary Thai Buddhism: Thoughts of Buddhadasa Bhikku,” Southeast Asia: History and Culture 1997:26 (1997): 113–36.
2. Jonathan Hay, “Seeing through Dead Eyes: How Early Tang Tombs Staged the Afterlife,” Anthropology and Aesthetics 57/8 (2010): 16–54.
3. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin, 2009), 262–63.
4. “This epic, which promotes long life, grants good fortune and destroys sin, is equal to the Veda and should be recited by the wise to men of faith.” Chap. 111, The Ramayana of Valmiki, trans. Hari Prasad Shastri. Vol. 3: Yuddha Kanda, Uttara Kanda (London: Shanti Sadan, 1959), 637.
5. Some scholars identify a proto-Śiva in an Indus Valley seal; others deny the identification. Doris Srinivasan, “Unhinging Śiva from the Indus Valley Civilization,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 116:1 (1984): 77–89; “The So-Called Proto-Śiva Seal from Mohenjo-Daro: An Iconological Assessment,” Archives of Asian Art 29 (1975): 47–58; Yan Y. Dhyansky, “The Indus Valley Origin of a Yoga Practice,” Artibus Asiae 48: 1/2(1987): 89–108.
6. Doniger, Hindus, 24–28.
7. Peter Harvey, ed. Buddhism (New York: Continuum, 2001), 2; An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 459–62. See also Ulrich Pagel, “The Sacred Writings of Buddhism,” in Peter Harvey, Buddhism, 29–63.
8. Ian Johnson, “Is a Buddhist Group Changing China, or Is China Changing It?” New York Times, 25 June 2017, [1,] 16.
9. Harvey, Introduction to Buddhism, 307.
10. Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller, ed. Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996).
11. Lee Dian Rainey, Confucius and Confucianism: The Essentials (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 60.
12. Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen, The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang, 3 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 2004), I, 2.
13. Rainey, Confucius, 58.
14. Patrick Olivelle, ed., trans. Early Upaniṣads (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 12–13; Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism, provides a chronology of Hinduism’s texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), xviii-xx.
15. The six are frequently listed together. Cūlasāropama Sutta: Sutta 30: The Shorter Discourse on the Simile of the Heartwood; Mahāsaccaka Sutta: Sutta 36, The Greater Discourse to Saccaka; Mahāsakuludāyi Sutta: Sutta 77; The Greater Discourse to Sakuludāyin, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya), trans. Bhikku Ñāṇamoli and Bhikku Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom, 1995), 291, 343, 630–31.
16. John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, ed., Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami (Richmond, VA: Curzon, 2000).
17. Harvey, Buddhism, 18, 21.
18. Harvey, Introduction to Buddhism, 200.
19. Nicholas Standaert, ed. Handbook of Christianity in China (Leiden: Brill, 2001), I, 18.
20. Harvey, Introduction to Buddhism, 398–401.
21. John Clifford Holt, The Buddhist Visnu: Religious Transformation, Politics and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 14.
22. Rupert Gethin, “Cosmology and Meditation: From the Aggañña-Sutta to the Mahāyāna,” History of Religions 36:3 (1997): 183.
23. Fukansai Habian in James Baskind and Richard Bowring, eds., The Myōtei Dialogues: A Japanese Christian Critique of Native Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 143.
24. “The Rebirth Eschatology and Its Transformations: A Contribution to the Sociology of Early Buddhism,” in Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions, ed. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 137–64. Herman W. Tull argues that karma as sacrifice is ethicized in the Brahmanas and that its earliest appearance in the Upaniṣads, the Bṛhadāran.yaka, retains the sense of rites properly performed: “one becomes good by good action and bad by bad [action].” The Vedic Origins of Karma: Cosmos as Man in Ancient Indian Myth and Ritual (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 104–06.
25. The Rig Veda: An Anthology, trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (NY: Penguin: 1981, 2000), 126, 92–95; Doniger, Hindus, 132–33; Cf. Henk W. Bodewitz, “Pits, Pitfalls and the Underworld in the Veda,” Indo-Iranian Journal, 42: 3 (Jul 1999): 218.
26. Bodewitz, “Pits, Pitfalls and the Underworld in the Veda,” 218; Rita Langer, Buddhist Rituals of Death and Rebirth: Contemporary Sri Lankan Practice and its Origin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 27–34; H. W. Bodewitz, “The Dark and Deep Underworld in the Veda,” JOAS 122: 2 (Apr.–Jun., 2002): 213–223.
27. Bodewitz, “Dark and Deep,” 215.
28. Michael Witzel, “Vedas and Upanis.ads,” in Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 84. He is more cautious elsewhere, viz., “The Earliest Form of the Idea of Rebirth in India,” Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Congress of Human Sciences in Asia and North Africa, Tokyo-Kyoto 1983, ed. Tatsuro Yamamoto (Tokyo: Toho Gakkai, 1984), I, 145–46.
29. Patrick Olivelle, trans., The Early Upaniṣads, 237.
30. Doniger O’Flaherty, Rig Veda, 48, 44, 45n9. Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton see rebirth in a far-off heaven (10.56; 10.135) and caution against the temptation to “read back” in the Vedas (7.104). The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, trans. Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), III, 1466, 1620; II, 1016.
31. Gananath Obeyesekere, Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist and Greek Rebirth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), xiii.
32. Thomas J. Hopkins, “Hindu Views of Death and Afterlife,” in Hiroshi Obayashi, ed., Death and Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions (London: Praeger, 1992), 147–48.
33. Doniger O’Flaherty, Rig Veda, 49.
34. RV 4.4 Patrick Olivelle, “AMṚTĀ: Women and Indian Technologies of Immortality,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 25:5 (1997): 431; Doniger O’Flaherty, Rig Veda, 206, 221.
35. Olivelle, Early Upaniṣads, intro. 20–21.
36. Olivelle, Early Upaniṣads, 519.
37. Dates for the Upanisads are correlated with dates for the Buddha. Michael Witzel proposes 500 BCE for the early Upanisads as “not impossible.” “Tracing the Vedic Dialects,” Dialectes dans les Littératures Indo-aryennes (Paris: College de France Institut de civilization indienne, 1989), 244–51.
38. Olivelle, Early Upaniṣads, 37–39.
39. Doniger, On Hinduism, 92; H. W. Bodewitz, “Redeath and its Relation to Rebirth and Release,” Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 20 (1996): 27–46.
40. Olivelle, “AMṚTĀ: Women and Indian Technologies of Immortality,” 431.
41. Olivelle, Early Upaniṣads, 119–25, BU 4.4.1–24. Brahman is a term with sliding meanings: “a sacred utterance,” the ritual formulas of the Vedas or the Veda, “formulation of truth,” source of reality or the absolute, and so sometimes interchangeable with Ātman; Olivelle, 491n3.21.
42. “On this point there is the following verse,” 121, otherwise unidentified. It appears in the final song in the Katha U, 6.14,403, Olivelle 4. 4.7,519, but the end of Katha U is thought to be later than BU.
43. Olivelle, Early Upaniṣads, BU, 149. CU, 5.3.7, 237.
44. RV 10.88.15, Olivelle, Early Upaniṣads, 527 n6.2, 2.
45. Olivelle, Early Upaniṣads, 383.
46. Doniger, On Hinduism, 45–48; #2 Sâmañña-Phala Sutta [Fruits of the Life of a Recluse] Dialogues of the Buddha, part 1 [Digha Nikaya: Long Discourses of the Buddha] Part 1, trans. T.W. Rhys David, in Sacred Books of the Buddhists, ed. F. Max Müller (1899), (London: Luzac, 1956), II, 73–74. Also “Annihilationists” in #1 Brahma-Gâla Sutta, Sacred Books of the Buddhists [SBB], II, 46–49.
47. John Brockington, “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ in the Rāmāyana,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 32:5/6 (2004): 660, 665.
48. James L. Fitzgerald, “ ‘Dharma’ and its Translation in the ‘Mahābhārata,’” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 32:5/6 (2004): 679; Patrick Olivelle, “The Renouncer Tradition,” Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 277–78; Patrick Olivelle, The Āṡrama System: The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
49. Vālmīki, The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki, trans. Hari Prasad Shastri, vol. 3: Yuddha Kanda, Uttara Kanda (London: Shanti Sadan, 1959). Uttara Kanda, chap. 21, p.431. Modern translations often cut these concluding books.
50. Rāmāyana Book Two Ayodhyā by Valmíki, trans. Sheldon L. Pollock (New York: New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2005), 100.10–13, p. 551; 100.1, p. 549.
51. K. C. [Kailash Chand] Jain, History of Jainism, 3 vols. (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld 2010), I, 156.
52. Doniger, On Hinduism, 97. Karma, the soul, and death are among the instructions the dying Bhishma gives Yudhishthira after the battle. Mahābhārata. Book Twelve. Peace. Volume Three. The Book of Liberation, trans. Alexander Wynne (New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2009), Sections 181, 187, pp. 87–89, 119–27.
53. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 2009).
54. Freda Matchett, “The Purāṇas,” in Gavin Flood, ed. Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, 129–43; Wendy Doniger, ed. Purāṇa Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993).
55. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, ed. Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism (1988) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 116–23.
56. Meanings of Death (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 156.
57. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu: Collected Essays on Birth into Paradise,” trans. A. K. Reischauer, Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. Second Series, Vol. 7 (1930): 32.
58. N. A. Deshpande, The Padma-Purāṇa, parts iii, vi, viii, in Ancient Indian Mythology, ed. D. P. Bhatt (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991), vol. 41, 1166 (II.67, 95b–103b).
59. Doniger, On Hinduism, 98.
60. N. A. Deshpande, The Padma-Purāṇa, parts iii, vi, viii, in Ancient Indian Mythology, ed. D. P. Bhatt, vols. 44, 46 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991) vol. 44, p. 2117 (V.98.97–103), p.2128 (V. 100. 33–39), p. 2134 (V.102); vol. 46, pp. 2708–2712 (VIII.113–114).
61. Cornelia Dimmitt and J. A. B. van Buitenen, Classical Hindu Mythology: A Reader in the Sanskrit Purāṇas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 12.
62. Wendy Doniger, “The Scrapbook of Undeserved Salvation: The Kedara Khanda of the Skanda Purana,” in On Hinduism, 237–45.
63. Allan A. Andrews, The Teachings Essential for Rebirth: A Study of Genshin’s Ōjōyōshū (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973), 4.
64. E. H. Rick Jarow, Tales for the Dying: The Death Narrative of the Bhāgavata-Purāna (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 6.
65. Doniger, On Hinduism, 239–40.
66. Vauhini Vara, “Bee-Brained: Inside the Competitive Indian-American Spelling Community,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2017, 60.
67. Paul Dundas, The Jains (London: Routledge, 1992), 83–86.
68. Jeffrey D. Long, Jainism: An Introduction (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 18–19.
69. Dundas, The Jains, 88.
70. Dundas, The Jains, 155–56, 245n27.
71. Dundas, The Jains, 90–91.
72. Dundas, The Jains, 81. Cf. Dialogues of the Buddha: translated from the Pali of the Digha Nikaya, trans. T. W. and C. A. F. Rhys David, fifth ed. (London: Pali Text Society, 1966), 349.
74. E. A. Burtt, ed. The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha: Early Discourses, the Dhammapada and Later Basic Writings (New York: New American Library, 1982), 92; Harvey, Introduction to Buddhism, 78–80, discusses such passages.
75. Paul Horsch, “From Creation Myth to World Law: The Early History of ‘Dharma,’” trans. Jarrod L. Whitaker, Journal of Indian Philosophy 32:5/6 (2004): 438.
76. The similarity may be more than coincidence: Hume may have learned something of Buddhism from Jesuits he met in France. Alison Gopnik, “Could David Hume Have Known About Buddhism? Charles François Dolu, the Royal College of La Flèche, and the Global Jesuit Intellectual Network,” Hume Studies 35.1 & 2 (2009): 5–28; revisited as “David Hume and the Buddha: How My Search for the Eastern Roots of the Western Enlightenment May Have Solved a Philosophical Mystery and Ended My Midlife Crisis,” The Atlantic, October 2015, 96–110. Buddhism and Hume may see all the “there” that is there. For the view that “consciousness” or “awareness” is a distorted model deriving from the “attention” the brain pays to its own processes, see Michael S. A. Graziano, Consciousness and the Social Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); “Speculations on the Evolution of Awareness,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26:6 (2014): 1300–1304; Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Back Bay Books, 1992); and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (W. W. Norton, 2017). The relationship between Dennett’s views and Nāgārjuna’s is discussed in Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 208–10; the relationship to Hume, 156–157.
77. Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 86.
78. Daigan and Alicia Matsunaga, The Buddhist Concept of Hell (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971), 49–54.
79. Udāna 8:3/80, i.e., chap. 8, sutta 3 and the 80th vol of the PTS edition, quoted in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya), trans. Bhikku Ñāṇamolí and Bhikku Bodhi (Boston, MA: Wisdom, 1995), 31. In rebirth of a non-self, the effects of action continue. As one practitioner puts it, one’s life packs a suitcase and ships it ahead; someone else picks it up and lives its contents, one’s “effects.”
80. Sâmañña-Phala Sutta [Fruits of the Life of a Recluse] Dialogues of the Buddha, part 1, [Digha Nikaya: Long Discourses of the Buddha), SBB, II, 73.
81. Rupert Gethin, “Cosmology and Meditation: From the Aggañña-Sutta to the Mahāyāna,” History of Religions 36:3 (1997): 183–217 argues the interchangeability of cosmological and psychological states in the Pali canon.
82. Lotus Sutra, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 98.
83. Ulrich Pagel, “The Sacred Writings of Buddhism,” in Harvey, ed. Buddhism, 33.
85. The sutras are collected in five groups or Agamas in Sanskrit: the Digha Nikaya, or long discourses; the Majjhima Nikaya, or medium-length discourses; the Anguttara Nikaya, or additional collection; the Samyutta Nikaya, or miscellaneous collection; the Khuddaka Nikaya, or small collection, which does not exist in Sanskrit, its items having separate names. A.A. G. Bennett, trans. Long Discourses of the Buddha (Bombay: Chetana, n.d.), 1, 3.
86. Occasionally excepted from universal salvation was the icchantika, “an irredeemable evildoer,” and the Avici hell is sometimes referred to as eternal. Barbara Ambros, “Animals in Japanese Buddhism: The Third Path of Existence,” Religion Compass 8:8 (2014): 255.
87. It has been argued that the Pali canon was open for a period, differing from monastery to monastery, but closed in response to new Mahāyāna texts. Joseph Walser and Sanchez Walsh, Nāgārjuna in Context: Mahāyāna Buddhism and Early Indian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 19.
88. Harvey, An Introduction, 6–7 map.
89. Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 5.
90. Dialogues of the Buddha. [Digha Nikaya: Long Discourses of the Buddha] Part 2, 5th ed. (1951), trans. T. W. and C. A. F. Rhys Davids, in SBB (London: Pali Text Society, 1966), III, 1.
91. “16. Mahâ Parinibbâna Suttanta/ Book of the Great Decrease,” Dialogues of the Buddha. [Digha Nikaya: Long Discourses of the Buddha] Part 2, 5th ed. (1951), trans. T. W. and C. A. F. Rhys Davids, in SBB, vol. III, 98–99.
92. “16. Mahâ Parinibbâna Suttanta/ Book of the Great Decrease,” III, 91.
93. Harvey, Buddhism, 96.
94. “16. Mahâ Parinibbâna Suttanta/ Book of the Great Decrease,” 91. The five-fold losses of the wrongdoer householder: poverty through sloth, evil repute noised abroad; shy and confused in society he enters, full of anxiety at death, “and lastly, on the dissolution of the body, after death, he is reborn into some unhappy state of suffering or woe.” The well-doing householder enjoys wealth through industry, good reports, confidence in company, dies without anxiety, “and lastly, on the dissolution of the body, after death, he is reborn into some happy state in heaven.” The passage repeats in “33. Sangīti Suttanta [The Recital],” Dialogues of the Buddha Part III, (1921) SBB, IV, 226.
95. Sangīti Suttanta, Dialogues of the Buddha. Part III, SBB, IV, 240–41.
96. “15. Mahâ-Nidâna-Suttanta [The Great Discourse of Causation],” Dialogues of the Buddha [Digha Nikaya: Long Discourses of the Buddha] Part 2. 5th ed. (1951), trans. T. W. and C. A. F. Rhys Davids, in SBB, III, 51.
97. “Mahāsīhanāda Sutta: Sutta 12:35 -42 (The Greater Discourse on the Lion’s Roar),” Middle Length Discourses, Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi, 169–72.
98. Middle Length Discourses, Ñāṇamolí and Bodhi, 791–797.
99. Middle Length Discourses, Ñāṇamolí and Bodhi, 1016–17. The same description appears in the “Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta: Sutta 13:13–14 (The Greater Discourse on the Mass of Suffering),” 13, 13.14, p. 182, where the sufferers are plural “they” rather than “him,” the individual fool.
100. “Sutta 129,” Middle Length Discourses, 1023–27. The treasures of the wheel-turning monarch are listed without description in the “Brahmāyu Sutta: Sutta 91.5,” Middle Length Discourses, 744.
101. “Devadūta Sutta (The Divine Messengers): Sutta 130,” Middle Length Discourses, 1031–32.
102. A late compilation, the Mahāvastu is described as a Lokottaravāda text (Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism 215, 20) and as a Mahāyāna-influenced text of a pre-Mahāyāna school (Harvey, Buddhism, 265).
103. Joseph T. Sorensen, “Poetic Sequence as Personal Salvation: Saigyō’s Poems ‘Upon Seeing Pictures of Hell,’” Japanese Language and Literature, 46:1 (2012): 1–45.
104. Chap. 16, “Life Span,” Lotus Sutra, trans. Burton Watson, 232.
105. Lotus Sutra, ix. Harvey, Introduction, dates the translation 286 CE, 110.
106. Jan Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka, 157.
107. Harvey, Introduction, 120, 124–26, 96.
108. Kenneth K. Tanaka, The Dawn of Chinese Pure Land Buddhist Doctrine: Ching-ying Hui-yüan’s Commentary on the Visualization Sutra (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990) 7, 10–12, 174–75.
109. Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism, 86.
110. Chap. 3, “Simile and Parable,” Lotus Sutra, 74.
111. Chap. 5, “Parable of the Medicinal Herbs,” Lotus Sutra, 99.
112. “Medicinal Herbs,” Lotus Sutra, 100.
113. “Simile and Parable,” Lotus Sutra, 56–59.
114. Harvey, Introduction, 111.
115. Nagarjuna: Buddhism’s Most Important Philosopher, trans. Richard H. Jones (New York: Jackson Square, 2010), 13.
116. Wu Hung, The Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 7; Ying-shih Yü, “ ‘O Soul, Come Back!’ A Study in the Changing Conceptions of the Soul and Afterlife in pre-Buddhist China,” HJAS 47:2 (1987): 382, places the appearance of the Yellow Springs as a term in common use in the eighth century, the time of duke Zhuang.
117. Michael Loewe, Faith, Myth and Reason in Han China (1994, 1982) (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2005), 34.
118. Cambridge History of Ancient China, ed. Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 719. It becomes “the Ninefold Springs” in T’ang Hsien-tsu (1550–1617), “Twenty-two Quatrains on Receiving the Obituary Notice for My Son Shih-ch’ü,” The Shorter Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 139–40.
119. K. E. Brashier, Ancestral Memory in Early China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 194.
120. David N. Keightley, “The Making of the Ancestors: Late Shang Religion and its Legacy,” in Religion and Chinese Society: Vol. I: Ancient and Medieval China, ed. John Lagerwey (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press 2004), 7–8, 22, 27–28.
121. Keightley, “Ancestors,” 35, 43.
122. Arthur Waley, trans., The Book of Songs (New York: Grove, 1960), #140. Cf. James Legge, trans. The Chinese Classics: Vol. IV The She King (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1955), 357. Book V, Ode x, decade of Seaou Min, x. Sze yueh.
123. Brashier, Ancestral Memory, 209.
124. Brashier, Ancestral Memory, 215, 228.
125. The Analects of Confucius, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 5, 1.
126. Ssu-ma Ch’ien, now Sima Qian (145 or 135–86 BCE), in his Records of the Historian, the source on both Laozi and Zhuangzi, told the story of Laozi’s being consulted by Confucius and described as a dragon. Wing-tsit Chan, trans., The Way of Lao Tzu (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), gives a clear account of the controversy over Laozi’s existence and the dating of his book, 3–4, 35–53, 61–82.
127. Confucius, Analects, I.9, p. 17; XI.12, p. 73.
128. Michael Loewe, Faith, Myth and Reason in Han China, 27, 35, 110.
129. Fukansai Habian, in James Baskind and Richard Bowring, eds. The Myōtei Dialogues: A Japanese Christian Critique of Native Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 142 and n28.
130. Jie Shi, “ ‘My Tomb Will Be Opened in Eight Hundred Years’: A New Way of Seeing the Afterlife in Six Dynasties China,” HJAS 72:2 (2012): 219–20.
131. Li Chi: Book of Rites, trans. James Legge (1885), ed. Ch’u Chai and Winberg Chai (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1967), II, 220, Book 21, chap. 1, sec. II, par. 1.
132. Ying-shih Yü, “O Soul Come Back,” 365.
133. Li Chi, II, 221, Book 21, chap. 1, sec. II, par. 3.
134. Wing-tsit Chan, ed., The Way of Lao Tzu, 97. Dao de jing breaks down to Way (dao), Virtue (de, or a favor or good deed done some one), Essence (jing; or many other possible meanings).
135. Chang Chung-yuan, ed. Tao: A New Way of Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 137–39.
136. Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts (London: Kegan Paul International, 1998), 113–14.
137. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi: Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 141, sec. 26, “External Things.”
138. Zhuangzi, 115, sec. 18, “Supreme Happiness.” Cf. pp. 80–82, sec. 6, “The Great and Venerable Teacher.” Other mourning ritual violations concern Laozi and his disciple (47–48), friends singing in the presence of their friend’s corpse (82), son for mother (84).
139. Zhuangzi, 76, sec. 6, “The Great and Venerable Teacher.”
140. Zhuangzi, 116–18, sec. 18, “Supreme Happiness.” Lieh Tzu addresses another found skull: “Only you and I know that you have never died and you have never lived. Are you really unhappy? Am I really enjoying myself?” 118.
141. Harper, Chinese Medical Literature, 399.
142. Donald Harper, “Resurrection in Warring States Popular Religion,” Taoist Resources 5.2 (1994): 13–16, 20–21.
143. Ying-shih Yü, Chinese History and Culture: Vol. 1: Sixth Century B.C.E. to Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 26–27.
144. Zhuangzi, 27–28, sec. 1, “Free and Easy Wandering.”
145. Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen, The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), I, 7. Translated as “Taoist Untruths,” Lun-Hêng: Part I: Philosophical Essays of Wang Ch’ung, trans. Alfred Forke, 2d ed. (New York: Paragon, 1962), I, 336.
146. Section 6, “The Great and Venerable Teacher,” Zhuangzi, 82.
147. Stephen Little, Realm of the Immortals: Daoism in the Arts of China (Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1988), 4, The Shenxian fuer danshi xingyao fa and Shangqing ji uzhen zhongjing neijue, Taoist Canon, I, 100, 102.
148. Harper, Chinese Medical Literature, 398.
149. Wu Hung, Art of the Yellow Springs, 32.
150. Donald Harper, “Resurrection in Warring States Popular Religion,” Taoist Resources 5:2 (1994): 21; Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, “A Scene of the Taoist Afterlife on a Sixth-Century Sarcophagus Discovered in Loyang,” Artibus Asiae, 44:1 (1983): 11.
151. Taoist Canon, I, 57–58; Harper, Chinese Medical Literature, 399.
152. Jessica Rawson, “Eternal Palaces,” 14.
153. Wu Hung, The Art of the Yellow Springs, 47. Cf. David N. Keightley, “Chinese Religions—The State of the Field Part I: Neolithic and Shang Periods,” Journal of Asian Studies 54:1 (1995): 130.
154. Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Mortuary Behavior in Pre-Imperial Qin: A Religious Interpretation,” 121–22, in Lagerwey, ed., Religion and Chinese Society.
155. Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Mortuary Behavior in Pre-Imperial Qin,” 129.
156. Alain Thote, “Burial Practices as Seen in Rulers’ Tombs of the Eastern Zhou Period,” in Religion and Chinese Society, ed. Lagerwey, 90–91, 95.
157. Wu Hung, Art of the Yellow Springs, 33.
158. Thote, “Burial Practices,” 96.
159. Wu Hung, Art of the Yellow Springs, 35, 55.
160. Wu Hung, Art of the Yellow Springs, 33.
161. Ying-shih Yü, Chinese History and Culture, I, 86; Anna Seidel, “Traces of Han Religion in Funeral Texts Found in Tombs,” in Dokyō to shūkyō bunka (Tokyo: Hirakaw Shuppansha, 1987), 25.
162. Ying-shih Yü, Chinese History and Culture, I, 87.
163. Donald Harper, “Resurrection in Warring States,” 14; three years not just bureaucratic red tape, 21; Mu-chou Poo, “The Concept of Ghost in Ancient Chinese Religion,” 177–78, in Religion and Chinese Society, ed. Lagerwey.
164. Rawson, “Eternal Palaces,” 18–19.
165. Watson, Analects, 1, 2, 5, 6.
166. Jeongsoo Shin, “From Paradise to Garden: The Construction of Penglai and Xuanpu,” Journal of Daoist Studies 4 (2011): 4.
167. Donald Harper, “Chinese Religions—The State of the Field Part I: Warring States, Ch’in, and Han Periods,” Journal of Asian Studies 54:1 (1995): 155–56; Rawson, “Eternal Palaces,” 19.
168. Jessica Rawson, “Eternal Palaces,” 5.
169. Seidel, “Traces,” 29.
170. Seidel, “Traces,” 29. Translated as “On Reprimands,” Lun-Hêng, I, 119–29.
171. Yün-Hua Jan, “The Chinese Understanding and Assimilation of Karma Doctrine,” in Ronald W. Neufeldt, ed., Karma & Rebirth: Post Classical Developments (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 147.
172. Taoist Canon, I, 127–29; “Statute of the Dead Souls,” attested 485 CE, Seidel, “Traces,” 41.
173. Qi, or “vital energy,” emerges in the cosmology of the fourth century BCE. “Qi permeates the entire cosmos. It is in constant movement and, when differentiated and individuated, all things in the world are formed.” Yang-shih Yü, Chinese History and Culture, I, 10. Its two types, light and heavy, anticipate the yang and yin to come, and the hun and po souls in place.
174. Brashier, Ancestral Memory, 303.
175. Wu Hung, Art of the Yellow Springs, 56. Yün-Hua Jan, “The Chinese Understanding and Assimilation of Karma Doctrine,” 145–68.
176. Ying-shih Yü, Chinese History and Culture, I, 144.
177. John Lagerwey, ed., Religion and Chinese Society, xiii.
178. Overmyer, “Chinese Religions—The State of the Field Part I: Intro.,” Journal of Asian Studies 54:1 (1995): 127.
179. Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, “A Scene of the Taoist Afterlife on a Sixth-Century Sarcophagus Discovered in Loyang,” Artibus Asiae, 44:1(1983): 6–7, 11.
180. Jonathan Hay, “Seeing Through Dead Eyes: How Early Tang Tombs Staged the Afterlife,” Anthropology and Aesthetics 57/8 (2010): 36.
181. Mou Tzu Li-huo, trans. William Theodore de Bary et al., in Buddhist Tradition in India, China and Japan (New York: Vintage, 1969), 134, quoted in Yün-Hua Jan, “The Chinese Understanding and Assimilation of Karma Doctrine,” Karma & Rebirth, 147.
182. Ying-shih Yü, Chinese History and Culture, I, 53n111.
183. E. Zurcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China. The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 239, 73; Kenneth K. S. Ch’en, Buddhism in China: An Historical Survey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 111–12.
184. Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994).
185. Ying-shih Yü, “O Soul, Come Back!” 390.
186. Taoist Canon, I, 223, 225, 199, 231.
187. Patrice Fava, “The Body of Laozi and the Course of a Taoist Journey through the Heavens,” trans. Vivienne Lo, Asian Medicine 4 (2008): 526. Taoist Canon I, 544.
188. Ying-shih Yü, Chinese History and Culture, I, 41.
189. Jacqueline I. Stone and Mariko Namba Walter., ed. Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 6. Harvey, Introduction, 162–63, 174–75.
190. Harvey, Introduction, 173.
191. Kenneth K. Tanaka, The Dawn of Chinese Pure Land Buddhist Doctrine: Ching-ying Hui-yüan’s Commentary on the Visualization Sutra (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 11–13 Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 238–43; Richard K. Payne and Kenneth K. Tanaka, eds. Approaching the Land of Bliss: Religious Praxis in the Cult of Amitābha. Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).
192. Barbara Ambros, “Animals in Japanese Buddhism: The Third Path of Existence,” Religion Compass 8:8 (2014): 256.
193. Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism, 240–41, from the Longer Sukhavativyuha Sutra.
194. Harvey, Introduction, 174.
195. Tanaka, Dawn of Chinese Pure Land, 12. Anything Nāgārjuna describes as easy….
196. James C. Dobbins, Letters of the Nun Eshinni: Images of Pure Land Buddhism in Medieval Japan (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 27.
197. Heng Sure Bhikshu and Martin J. Verhoeven, trans., “The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch,” Religion East and West 12 (2014): 19–20.
198. Saying attributed to Bodhidharma, legendary founder of Chan, in an 1108 text, Harvey, Introduction, 218.
199. Harvey, Introduction, 222.
200. William M. Bodiford, “Zen in the Art of Funerals: Ritual Salvation in Japanese Buddhism,” History of Religions 32:2 (1992): 161–63.
201. Arthur Waley, Ballads and Stories from Tun-Huang (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 165–73, 261.
202. Waley, Ballads, 166. Yama does not seem to be accompanied as yet by Ten Kings; the awkward fit between one king of the dead and ten continues into the sixteenth century in Japan, where Haruko Wakabayashi finds the juxtaposition of motifs awkward as late as the Muromachi period (1336–1573). The motif of traveling back and forth between worlds is present in both. “Officials of the Afterworld: Ono no Takamura and the Ten Kings of Hell in the Chikurinji engi Illustrated Scrolls,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 36: 2 (2009): 319–49.
203. Tibetan Book of the Dead, trans. Gyurme Dorje, Intro., the Dalai Lama (New York: Penguin, 2005), 337.
204. Tibetan Book of the Dead, xxxix-xlii; Georgios T. Halkias and Richard K. Payne, ed., Luminous Bliss: A Religious History of Pure Land Literature in Tibet (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012), 146.
205. Tibetan Book of the Dead, xxxi. The claim is disputed in Bryan J. Cuevas and Jacqueline I. Stone, eds., The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 4.
206. Tibetan Book of the Dead, 271.
207. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, trans. W. G. Aston (1896) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), II, Book xix, sec. 35, p. 67; I.i.1, p.1. Helen Hardacre observes that from the late fourth century Korean and Chinese artisans, many of whom were Buddhists, had immigrated to Japan. “State and Religion in Japan,” Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions, ed. Paul L. Swanson and Clark ‘Chilson (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 276.
208. Tenjukoku, a term not found in Buddhist scriptures, has been taken by some scholars to be a first Japanese reference to a Pure Land. Michael I. Como, Shötoku: Ethnicity, Ritual, and Violence in the Japanese Buddhist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 34. Given “long life,” Daoist influence seems possible, with “land,” perhaps a Buddha-field evocation.
209. Jacqueline I. Stone and Mariko Namba Walter, eds., Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 3; Nelly Nauman, “Death and Afterlife in Early Japan,” in Susanne Formanek and William R. LaFleur, eds., Practicing the Afterlife: Perspectives from Japan (Vienna: Der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2004), 51–62.
210. Nihongi, I. 18–26, pp. 24–31. Kojiki, trans. Donald L. Philippi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), Book I, chap. 9–11, pp. 61–70.
211. Nihongi, I.22, p. 28; Kojiki, I.13.1–7, pp. 72–73.
212. Kojiki, I.10.16 and n.18, p. 66; Nihongi, II.xxv.43, p. 233; xix.11, p. 45. Genshin still uses the term, “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 60.
213. Nihongi, II.xix.47, p. 76.
214. Nihongi, II.xxi, p. 106.
215. Nihongi, II. xix.33, p. 65. Harvey, Introduction, gives the date as 538 CE, 226.
216. Nihongi, II, pp. 335, 346, 378, 408, 416—100 copies, 421.
217. Nihongi, II.xx, p. 95.
218. Stone, Death and Afterlife, 4; Matsumura Kazuo, “Ancient Japan and Religion,” trans. Benjamin Dorman, in Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions, 139.
219. Nihongi, II.xxiii.15, p. 170; Allan A. Andrews, The Teachings Essential for Rebirth: A Study of Genshin’s Ōjōyōshū (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1973), 31.
220. Nihongi, II.xix.34–36, pp. 66–67.
221. Nihongi, II.xxix.57, p. 371; xxiv, p. 175. The “Mahāyāna sutra” was specified for rain.
222. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 69.
223. Robert F. Rhodes, Genshin’s Ōjōyōshū and the Construction of Pure Land Discourse in Heian Japan (Honolulu, HI: U of Hawaii Press, 2017), does not repeat the funeral story.
224. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 27, 25.
225. Andrews, Teachings Essential for Rebirth, 41.
226. Andrews, Teachings Essential for Rebirth, 40.
227. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 56.
228. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 69. The Nāgārjuna quotations are not sourced by Reischauer or discussed by Andrews or Rhodes.
229. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 62, 76.
230. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 27.
231. Andrews, Teachings Essential for Rebirth, 89, 41. Rhodes concludes the text is a forgery, Genshin’s Ōjōyōshū, 176–78.
232. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 25.
233. Andrews, Teachings Essential for Rebirth, 57–58.
234. Jacqueline I. Stone, “The Secret Art of Dying: Esoteric Deathbed Practices in Heian Japan,” in The Buddhist Dead, ed. Bryan J. Cuevas and Jacqueline I. Stone, 134–35. Isabella Tobiason first drew my attention to the importance of the last-moment thought.
235. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 18.
236. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 38.
237. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 64.
238. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 65–66.
239. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 90.
240. “Genshin’s Ojo Yoshu,” 90.
241. Andrews, Teachings Essential for Rebirth, 74.
242. Harvey, Introduction, 233.
243. Andrews, Teachings Essential for Rebirth, 40.
244. Boudewijn Walraven, “The Other-worldly Counter-Discourse of Yŏmbul pogwŏnmun: An Eighteenth-century Pure Land Text,” Journal of Korean Religions 6:1 (2015): 159–87.
245. Fujita Kōtatsu, “Pure Land Buddhism in India,” trans. Taitetsu Unno, in James Foard, Michael Solomon, and Richard K. Payne, ed. The Pure Land Tradition: History and Development, Berkeley Buddhist Studies Series No. 3. (Berkeley, CA: Institute of Buddhist Studies, 1996), 3.
246. James Baskind and Richard Bowring, ed., The Myōtei Dialogues: A Japanese Christian Critique of Native Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 105. Subsequent citations from Habian parenthetically in text.
248. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Kirishitan Stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke,” trans. Yoshiko and Andrew Dykstra, Japanese Religions 31: 1 (2006): 30–33.
249. Baskind and Bowring, Myōtei Dialogues, 10; Baskind, ibid., 28–29.
250. Kiri Paramore, “Early Japanese Christian Thought Reexamined: Confucian Ethics, Catholic Authority, and the Issue of Faith in the Scholastic Theories of Habian, Gomez, and Ricci,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 35:2 (2008): 231–62.
251. George Elison, Deus Destroyed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 280.
252. Westerhoff, Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka, 157.
253. Elison, Deus Destroyed, 271, 274–75.
255. Harvey, Introduction to Buddhism, 73.
256. David Hume, “On the Immortality of the Soul,” Essays Moral, Political and Literary, 603.
257. Sōseki Natsume, I Am a Cat, trans. Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2002), 469–70; Elisabetta Porcu, Pure Land Buddhism in Modern Japanese Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 112.