I'm starting (another) multi-essay series about death and its place as a socio-cultural construct, how it came to be thus, and the mythologies that are left to us in the modern era that have contributed to our understanding of it. With apologies to my readers who are outside the Judeo-Christian worldview, I'm going to start with Christianity, since it is so prevalant in the United States where I live and - for full transparency - it is the mythological system with which I am likely most personally familiar. I promise my readers that I will - with insight from members of other communities - make an earnest attempt to follow this same path with myths from other religions as well, so this will be a series of posts over the course of many weeks, and I ask for your patience and - as always - your willingness to look outside of boxes that may be present. It is an effort I will make myself, and I commit to honoring each and every system I attempt to look closely at.
Before I dive into any of this, however, I want to underline very quickly the importance of religion and more broadly myth in general, because I believe that civilizations as we have come to know them are largely based on socio-religious mythologies that serve as something of a glue that holds the entire systems together. This first installment of this series of posts is geared toward making that argument, because I want all of my readers to understand that I believe all systems of religious thought are highly valuable to us, even if I myself do not subscribe to them personally.
The reknowned comparative mythologist Mr. Joseph Campbell stated that "myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths," and that religious mythologies are extremely important in establishing and enforcing social order with in the confines of the cultural system within which they are rooted. I believe his proposals here are correct, and I can demonstrate with a few examples from the United States alone:
- In US courts of law, testimonies are often (but not always) sworn by the individual's hand being placed upon a Bible; this is considered the standard for truth-telling, with the intent to instill a sense of the gravity of the need for truth in the individual offering testimony. What better incentive to tell the truth, after all, if by lying you incur the wrath of almighty god?
- During the Colonial era of the the United States, he early American colonies, especially the Puritan settlements in New England, were explicitly founded as "Bible commonwealths." Their legal codes were heavily based on biblical law, particularly the Ten Commandments and Mosaic Law.
- In the modern era, religious opposition to medical procedures such as abortion have sparked militant debates (and sometimes action!) about the laws that support the right to access such medical procedures. Voters often make their voice on these matters heard through assemblies and protests, and oftentimes votes are cast toward more conservative values that seek to uphold these religious paradigms. This is an example of this concept at work as well.
But these are just a few examples - I could write about the Hadith in Islam, and Dharma in Hinduism, and much more. But let's use the examples mentioned above to support Mr. Campbell's argument, and let's keep in mind a very firm understanding of how religious myth - no matter its context - creates (at the very least) a type of cognitive infrastructure around which we build our collective cultures.
Let's begin now by diving into the Christian mythos.
For my readers who were raised in a Judeo-Christian tradition, you are likely already familiar with the story in Geneis of the account of creation and the subsequent and alleged fall of Adam and Eve. For those of my readers who are not familiar, here is a summary of the text from the King James translation that highlights this:
The Creator God crafted Adam and Eve,
according to biblical narrative. God - generally viewed as a male deity - then placed them protectively in the Garden of Eden wherein their every need was met, forbidding them only access to one: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A serpent - representing here a malevolent force later characterized as the Devil - tempted Eve with the fruit from the expressly forbidden tree, and she ate and coaxed Adam to eat as well. The Creator God was angered by their disobedience, and to prevent them from further acquiring eternal life God exiled them from the Garden, and placed a guardian at its entrance to prevent them from returning. As punishment, Adam and Eve were told they would forever be subject to the whims of industry and agriculture to meet their needs, and would suffer a mortal death - as would all their descendants. This is a summary only, and I encourage all of my readers to review this narrative for themselves in the stories of Genesis.
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| Our views of mortality are significantly built and continously influenced by religious mythologies. |
Even reviewing the summary, however, one can see how influential this narrative has been in shaping Western values, and moreover, our view of mortality.
A DISCLAIMER: I am not attempting to re-interpret the biblcal narrative by exploring linguistic roots or looking at cultural contexts here. I am using only one translation interpretation, and I recognize there are others -
most especially Gnostic paradigms - that differ greatly. I am only utilizing this one summary of the text to highlight what we already know: it has significantly impacted the way we view our world. Everything from agriculture - which might be viewed as a potential form of punishment we must endure for our sins - to childbirth (Eve was made to
suffer childbirth as a result of her particpation in this debaucle) and even death are viewed as part of a result of our "fall" from the presence of the Creator.
When viewed through this lens, what are we to think of these concepts? If agriculture is work we must now collectively engage in to feed ourselves, then we have forgotten that the Earth is more than capable of sustaining us without our aggressive approach to exploiting its soils, and if death is a pain we must suffer then of course we no longer understand that it is but one milestone in a potentially endless cosmic experience, and one we might undertake a mulitude of times on our journey to the infinite potential that awaits what we are becoming. Our religious myths influence us deeply in this way: creating unrelenting infrastructure deep within our own consciousness so that we begin begin to define the cosmos and all of its infinite experiences as either good or bad, right or wrong, according to how they align (or do not align) with out socio-religious infrastructure.
The view of death in particular as supported by the framework of Christianity has been detrimental to the way our western culture processes and confronts the events that mark the end of biomechanical life. In the West, for example, death is associated with loss and bereavement; an entire industry has grown around the processes associated with preserving the body and honoring the "memory" of the decedent. This implies that decedent is no longer alive, that there is by definition an unbreachable void which we can no longer cross to experience life with our beloved, and that this "loss" is to be mourned and grief must be accepted and expected. I have written other posts on grief in an attempt to help readers who may be dealing with loss - so please do not read into this any minimizing on my part of the nature and reality of grief. What I'm suggesting is that the way we react to these experiences is due in large part to cultural and ultimately religious programming that has created a framework for us that makes us see these experiences as inherently bad. I'm suggesting that we instead begin to understand the deeply rooted traditions within us, and just offer questions about whether they are serving us
When we realize and awaken to the frames that have been created within us by these institutions - and here, Christianity in particular - we can begin to rearrange our paradigms to allow for a different interpretation of the nature of reality and the experiences we will have as humans living within it. In my next post, I will attempt to evaluate how Islamic scriptural traditions have influenced us and the way we view the concepts associated with mortality.
