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We moderns have avidly perpetuated the alchemists’ ardent disinclination to die. But instead of concocting elixirs of immortality, contemporary “immortalists” use cutting-edge scientific methods to forestall death in order to ultimately render it obsolete, and they take their work very seriously indeed.
almost three quarters of Americans in the twenty-first century are confident that they possess an indestructible soul of some sort.
Otto Rank
“the soul was created in the big bang of an irresistible psychological force—our will to live forever—colliding with the immutable biological fact of death.”
Strong faith in God is associated with emotional well-being and low death anxiety. Additionally, after a reminder of their mortality, people report being more religious and having a stronger belief in God. Death reminders make people more confident that God exists, and that God answers prayers; they also make people more interested in, and accepting of, supernatural phenomena in general. (This is also true for atheists, who, following death reminders, make more rapid connections between the word “real” and words such as “God,” “heaven,” “angels,” and “miracles,” which psychologists use as a measure of “implicit” or unconscious religiosity.) Moreover, reminding devoutly religious people of their faith enables them to think about death without reacting defensively.
Chinese nobles and kings, following the proverb “Treat death as life,” had their servants, artisans, concubines, and soldiers buried alive with them when they died.
Ritual, art, myth, and religion thus play a much more significant role in human affairs than it is currently fashionable to acknowledge. Many evolutionary theorists view art and religion as superfluous by-products of other cognitive adaptations that have no adaptive significance or enduring value. This view is simply wrong. These products of human ingenuity and imagination were essential for early humans to cope with a uniquely human problem: the awareness of death. The striving for immortality—universal to all cultures—forestalls terror and despair. Consequently, humans do not have agriculture, technology, and science despite ritual, art, myth, and religion; rather, humans developed agriculture, technology, and science because of them. Although “in their developed forms, phantasythinking and reality-thinking are distinct mental processes,” wrote psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs, “reality-thinking cannot operate without concurrent and supporting…phantasies.” We might not have calculus without grave goods, or dentistry without the tooth fairy.
“religious behavior evolved for a single reason: to further the survival of human societies.”
Burying the best grains (along with other grave goods) with the corpses was the first planting of seeds; the decaying flesh may incidentally have provided fertilizing nutrients for the seeds. When new plants grew on the grave site the next year, people likely attributed their good fortune to the goodwill of their ancestors or the gods with whom they were believed to be dwelling. Eventually they would have figured out that seeds, sans corpse, would suffice to grow food.
The existing evidence strongly suggests that rituals surrounding death and the afterlife led to large gatherings of people and impressive technological developments that contributed both to farming and to other cultural advances that follow from the development of larger settlements and a less nomadic lifestyle.
Göbekli Tepe
German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt proposed that it was the center of a death cult, with the departed laid to rest among the gods and afterlife spirits and the animals carved on the pillars to protect them. “First came the temple,” Schmidt concluded, “then came the city.” Scientists had previously assumed the march of human progress was based on procuring food: we evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers, domesticating plants and animals along the way and then building towns and cities around our collective farms. The discovery of Göbekli Tepe cast doubt on this assumption, suggesting that the problem of death motivated architectural advances that had nothing to do with practical concerns. These religious monuments predated agriculture and may have even helped stimulate its development.
Indeed, recent studies confirm that such supernatural escapades serve to manage existential terror. After pondering their mortality, people fantasized more about being able to fly. Additionally, after visualizing themselves flying above a lush green mountain, people reminded of their mortality had fewer death thoughts hovering on the fringes of consciousness.