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

David Hume had an answer for the FBI. The single most famous event in that British philosopher’s life was a visit James Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s biographer-to-be, paid him in 1776. “Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death,” Hume had observed,¹ yet it was not sorrow moving Boswell to Hume’s side, but curiosity. As Hume lay dying, Boswell came to see how an atheist died. Serenely and cheerfully, was the answer, with no itchy desire after eternal life, no fear of roasting in flames, no apprehensions about annihilation, and no dread of the gaping gap of vanished consciousness. Boswell had bad dreams for a week.

To begin a book about afterlives with someone who did not believe in one may seem perverse, but it has a purpose. Everyone has some belief, or beliefs, about what happens after death, even if the belief is that nothing at all happens or that nothing can be known about what happens or that there is no point even thinking about it. Once death becomes a phenomenon that human beings can think and talk about, we inevitably ask, “So what comes next; what’s after that?” The question applies both to the dead and to the survivors, and answers range from “nothing” to “eternities.” Whatever the answer, it establishes our relationship to the cosmos we live in: what it means, what it is for, and how we are to live within it while we live.

Death, of course, has at once everything and nothing to do with the afterlife. Afterlives are narratives made by the living in order to define the relationship between the living and the dead, between the self and the prospect of its own death, between survivors and those who have disappeared from the social unit. Death is the limit that provokes those fictions. Out of death’s blank wall, we want to make a gate, and then we demand to know what is on the other side of the gate. Hume vanished without fear. Boswell lived less happily, complaining of his melancholy the year before Hume died, “[A]ll the doubts which have ever disturbed thinking men, come upon me. I awake in the night, dreading annihilation or being thrown into some horrible state of being.”2 Some of us know exactly what and whom to expect—and may be praying that we’ve got it wrong and there will be a loophole through which we can wriggle out of our just deserts into paradise.³ Many presume on paradise.

The word afterlife presupposes some posthumous existence, pleasant or unpleasant, but beliefs about what happens “after life” include the denial of any such existence. Whether an afterlife is affirmed or denied, the afterlife narrative overcomes death, dominates it, and reintegrates death and the dead into the continuing self-conceptions of the living. When blurb writers exclaim, “This book is not about death, it’s really about how to live!” they are describing not a happy accident but a necessary fact.

As a word denoting what happens after death, rather than in later life, “after life” comes tardily to English. It is not used until 1598, in an introduction to Christopher Marlowe’s posthumous works, where it refers to the memory of the author and the man.4 Literary studies still use the word most frequently to refer to authors’ reputations.⁵ Not until 1611 does the term refer to the state of a soul after death, when it turns up in the wondering words of a pagan, surprised by Christian missionaries who tell “vs strange things, and giue vs faire promises of after life, when this life shall be ended.”⁶ Christians, firmly possessed of “eternal life,” a phrase first attested in 1479,⁷ had no need to meddle with any life that was merely “after.” For seventeenth-century writers, “after life” designated the speculations of heathens and the denials of Epicureans and Sadducees.⁸ The preferred generic term for their own afterlife expectations was “future state,” a phrase that the OED gives to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733), but that already appears in 1588 in Gervase Babington’s exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, sandwiched between one’s future state in this life (1567) and the future state of England (1589), also very much in this life.⁹ Christians start using the term afterlife to refer to their future and eternal state only in the mid-eighteenth century.¹⁰ As the word changes, so does the concept, less “state” and more “life.”

In religious studies, afterlives accompany the complex and nuanced understanding of a religious tradition over time and in time. Scholars maintain a careful professional agnosticism as to the reality of intrinsically unverifiable afterlives and the claims of contending traditions. What a tradition maintains as to immortality is accepted as given, while its chops and changes, responses to political and intellectual ferment, differences from itself from moment to moment, form the object of study. Creating new knowledge through meticulous detail, religious-studies scholars are rightly suspicious of grand historical narratives and ahistorical cognitive arguments. This study proceeds otherwise.

It proposes a fable of origins in cognitive studies because the irreligious, too, need to be accounted for. As unbelievers like Hume demonstrate, there is no “hard wiring” of afterlife belief (or God), but afterlife beliefs (like God) do originate in human sociality and cognition, that is, language. Other primates recognize death and dislike it, but they have nothing to say about it. Human afterlife talk weaves death into life’s narrative, if only to write FINIS, as Walter Benjamin implies. Religious traditions occasionally recount the origins of their afterlife beliefs, while those outside those traditions (and outside of religious studies) commonly explain away those beliefs in functional terms ranging from condescending to paranoid: as compensatory or consoling or ethical or controlling or imitative or stolen.

Yet the earliest attested afterlife beliefs (and some still current) are not compensatory, consoling, ethical, or controlling. Nor can we know what they may imitate or from whom they may have been stolen. They neither satisfy human desires nor have anything to do with justice or morality. Some other explanation is necessary, for people wanting explanations. The human mind seems the place to look. But not just the mind: human minds are always (already) social. Proposed is an ahistorical account that accommodates both the cognitive quandary death poses and the social injury it creates.

Dispelled are a number of common misconceptions about the afterlife, including the assumptions that afterlife beliefs are universal and all cultures subscribe to some promise of life after death, that afterlives originate to console the dying and their mourners, that afterlives originate as a form of wish fulfillment, that afterlives are necessary for morality, that afterlives are a construct of power to control the minds and behavior of the living. Many of these misconceptions are a product of the afterlife that the Enlightenment put in place three hundred years ago, and there is something to be said for each of them, as a purpose such beliefs have served. Their grudging attitude obscures, however, the very interesting work an afterlife can do, the creation ex nihilo of great imaginative fabrics. They also underestimate the persistent note of skepticism that accompanies afterlife affirmations. More damagingly, they have sometimes inhibited modern atheists from developing their own afterlife narratives independent of, though derivative from, their culture’s traditional religions. The calligraphy for FINIS can be as elaborate as one likes, as extensive as the mind can reach.

Chapter 1, “Concerning the Present State of Life After Death,” takes up the current proliferation of afterlives, proposes an origin for afterlife theorization in primate behavior and theory of mind relative to dead bodies, sketches the prehistoric evidence for afterlife beliefs, assesses the role of afterlife beliefs relative to morality, and indicates the insufficiency—and necessity—of anti-afterlife arguments from John Toland to Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. The questions here are why we construct afterlives at all and what they do for us. The argument is that afterlives originate in empathy with the socialized dead body and respond to a cognitive and social demand: what has happened to the life that animated this body? What now is the community’s relationship to that body? Justice and morality have originally no connection with death. Death comes like the sun and the rain equally to the just and the unjust, the moral and the immoral. Death levels; it does not differentiate. The connection to justice and morality is self-consciously patched in at different times and places; thereafter it sticks like a burr. For this argument to be persuasive, it needs to be held against actual afterlife conceptions as they developed through time.

Chapter 2, “Impermanent Eternities,” sketches the transformations in western afterlives from the Egyptians and Sumerians through Jews, Greeks, and Romans, ending when Christianity arrives. When such well-informed writers as S. Jay Olshanky and Bruce A. Carnes assure readers that concepts of life after death emerged to “soften [death’s] harsh reality,”¹¹ only acquaintance with harsh early concepts can provide the necessary corrective. Early afterlives are dismal everywhere but Egypt. Even Egypt lacks initially any correlation between justice and death, although it will model exploiting the afterlife for social control. Elsewhere afterlife fates were more likely to correlate with how one died and how fecund one had been. Post-Homeric philosophers and poets belatedly meted out justice after life to Greeks and Romans, but ancient Israel zealously erased its traditional justice-free afterlife beliefs as it compiled the Torah and Prophets, leaving only traces of disapproval. Analogous to varnashramadharma’s role in Hinduism, lineage and the law gave Israel all the meaning and morality it needed. Post-exilic Deuteronomic ideology linked God, life, and law with temporal reward, apostasy with temporal punishment and death. When those linkages broke down in the Hellenistic period and diaspora (reported in Esther, Daniel, and Maccabees), a new concept was borrowed: resurrection. Life became for the first time eternal and linear. Having infiltrated Judaism, eternal life and resurrection defined Christianity and Gabriel’s message to Muhammad. After a brief tour of Asia, fast forward seventeen hundred years.

Chapter 3, “Touring Asian Afterlives: Eternal Impermanence,” visits that part of the world where “afterlife” is a misnomer. “Afterlife” assumes an ending. Asia adopts rebirth, the endless, visible burgeoning of life from life, and then sets about putting an end to it as the highest philosophical attainment. A better life may be in prospect the next time around—or much worse. Morality is sometimes supposed to depend on rebirth: what other guard is there on behavior? Life continues, or the consequences of actions, though bodies do not. Consequences unfold into the future, well beyond the individual performing an action. Tracing the ancestors, rebirth, and such key concepts as dharma, karma, non-self, emptiness, and Pure Land, from the Vedas through Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism in their travels from India, the chapter jogs to China to pick up Confucianism, Daoism, and new varieties of Buddhism, hovers over Tibet, and on to Japan, ending with two encounters between Buddhism and the Christian west that validate Buddhist insight.

Chapter 4, “Pursuing Happiness: How the Enlightenment Invented an Afterlife to Wish For,” exposes a neglected but crucial period in the development of modern afterlives. In the eighteenth century, British thinkers created the wish-fulfilling afterlife that we now take to be eternal and that Marx and Freud attacked with such energy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The traditional Christian afterlife damned to eternal sulfurous flames all non-Christians and many Christians (almost all, among Calvinists); for the devout, the faithful, the repentant, or the elect, it was theocentric. The beatific visions that close the biblical book of Revelation (c. 100 CE) and Dante’s Paradiso (set in 1300) are paradigmatic. Dying, one encountered God, at best met Jesus and the souls of good men made perfect, and enjoyed eternal, unimaginable ecstasies. (Whether these meetings took place immediately upon death or only at the Last Judgment puzzled Protestants.) Those rigorous God-centered raptures yielded to an afterlife that accommodated friends, relations, children, and current intellectual movements, all the secular delights of love, life, and mind. As Keith Thomas observed, “only in the early modern period [was] stress…laid on the reunion of the nuclear family. As earthly values changed, so did conceptions of heavenly felicity.”¹² Particularly significant for conceptualizing historical change is that improvements came from below, moving from popular discourse into mainstream theological acceptance. Theology bent to desire, led by women, sealed by men. A pivotal moment in the human demand for happiness after death as well as in life, the eighteenth century located the truth of the afterlife in the human mind, where the argument of this book begins, but in a different drawer. Their drawer was labeled “wishing makes it so, because of the organization of the human mind and the benevolence of God.” Unnoticed, Adam Smith re-filed it where it is found today.

Chapter 5, “Wandâfuru Raifu or Afterlife Inventions and Variations,” asks what use afterlives are if we do not believe in them. Freed from that odd couple theology and reality, afterlives in which no one believes function as usefully as, but less threateningly than, afterlives in which almost everyone believes. Representing the dazzling variety of modern reinterpretations of afterlives are Hirokazu Kore-eda and Spike Jonze, J. M. Coetzee and Milan Kundera, Steve Stern and George Saunders; meanwhile Samuel Beckett sneers. Unlike traditional afterlives, the modern ones pretend to no explanatory power, but they continue to dissipate death’s terrors by articulating and reinforcing values that shape living in the present. Certain behaviors are rewarded, others punished, and the project elicits reflection and self-examination from reader or viewer, as to the quality and character of life as it is lived. Authors approaching death as their topic disclose their deepest concerns as artists and, perhaps, as human beings in their fantasies of last things, beyond the end. Some modern writers, Nadine Gordimer and Julian Barnes come to mind, carp at the afterlife, sour grapes in the sky, but do not leave it alone.

Some fascinating topics are no more than glimpsed. Only in America are the dead tormented by “unfinished business,” like Carousel’s Billy Bigelow.13 When Europeans come back from the dead, as in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, Guillaume Canet’s Ne dis personne, or Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the person has not really died, though someone else is likely to have been murdered. An afterlife is a narrative of destination, the reciprocal of a myth of origins. Cultures want stories about where they came from; so they want stories about where their members go when they are no longer here. Giving up Genesis, we cling to a Big Bang. Why develop whole other worlds for the dead? is much the same question as why tell stories about characters as imaginary as the dead have become.

A study that traverses this much terrain temporally and geographically is evidently much indebted to the work of other scholars in many fields; their ghosts appear in the notes and bibliography. The literature on death and the afterlife is vast: it would require several lives perfectly to control it. Primary material begins in prehistory and continues to the present. Modern secondary material has a briefer history but has multiplied exponentially in the last fifty years. Philippe Ariès’s complaint in the 1970s that death cannot be spoken or addressed transformed the world it entered and generated numerous studies of dying practices and beliefs. Studies now document death and afterlife beliefs from the Egyptians and Sumerians to the present.¹⁴ This study does not pretend to analyze in detail the death rites or beliefs of a single culture or religious tradition but rather ranges widely across cultures and times and traditions, ending in mere literature and movies. Why? In our end is our beginning.

Once upon a time, renting all the Japanese films at the local video store to keep company with a son away in Japan, I came across one that made me ask: what course can I teach that will let me show this film? After Life is the mistranslated English title of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Wandâfuru raifu. Ten years earlier, a children’s version of Gilgamesh had astonished me, much as the first translations had astonished the nineteenth century. Familiar with biblical and classical traditions, passionate for John Dryden’s translations of Lucretius, and curious about the power of this Japanese film, I began looking into primatology and the origins of morality, Terror Management Theory, with its important discovery of mortality salience and odd insistence on death’s terrors, and such current standard works as Alan Segal’s Life After Death (2004), Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang’s Heaven: A History (1988, 2001), and John Bowker’s Meanings of Death (1991), among many others. I found myself troubled by certain absences.

The insights and scrupulous accuracy of these authors move with a teleological thrust toward the afterlife most Christians now enjoy. There seemed no place for the tradition of afterlife denial or the afterlife fantasies of afterlife deniers or the inventions that emerge outside religious traditions. John Bowker seemed almost discontented when he observed that “Virtually everything that can be imagined about death has been imagined.”15

What a literary scholar finds, of course, is narrative. Once language possesses us, it expresses individuals’ thoughts and concerns, but more importantly it makes a society cohere through shared stories and their meanings. Afterlives are stories we tell each other and ourselves about death, a word so powerful that it elicits as strong a physio-psychological response as a life-threatening situation or the thing itself. These stories may be Aristotelian in form, their meaning produced by the end, or they may be cyclic, unfolding endlessly, their meanings in process, provisional, momentary. Traditionally, afterlives have been presented as something to be believed, nor is this study exempt, though it leans the wrong way. Those who believe in their disbelief are also represented here. All that we know of any afterlife is the stories we tell now, and they are perhaps afterlife more than enough.

As to Kore-eda’s film, it is worth traversing millennia of afterlives to reach it. Whether or not you read this book, do see the movie. But be warned—it is a Japanese movie, and so it is slow, very slow. Some viewers will regard it as taking an eternity to come to an end.

Errors, gaffes, and inadmissible inferences remain all my own, but for suggestions, inspiration, encouragement, assistance, and correction that they themselves may have forgotten by now, I should like to thank Kathryn Davis, Bill Fox, Alexandra Golcher, Steve Goodwin, Joshua Katz, Eliza Kent, Leslie Mechem, Francine Lichtert, Robert Mahony, Claude Rawson, Rebecca Schiffenhaus, the Skidmore Help Desk, Joel Smith, Adrienne Stefani, John Taylor, Charles E.Z. Woolley, and Eric Zencey.