Death

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DEATH

DEATH is a fact of life. This statement is at once banal and profound. It is banal insofar as it is common knowledge that all human life is limited in duration; it is profound, however, insofar as serious reflection on the end of life challenges the limits of human language, conceptual thought, symbols, and imagination. In an important sense, the meaning of life is dependent in part on one's understanding of death. That death is a fact of life is also paradoxical, for it suggests a coincidence of opposites—death-in-life and life-in-death. How people have imagined death-in-life and life-in-death has shaped their experience of biological death both individually and collectively. Death is paradoxical, as well, in that although every death is an individual experience—only individuals die, even when they die together in large numbers—death is also a profoundly social experience.

Death as a biological fact or as a physiological state is uniform across time and space. However, this universal sameness in biological terms should not lull one into the error of assuming that the human sense or experience of death has been—or is also—uniform across space and time. When contemplating death today, people must avoid the anachronism of projecting their contemporary understanding and experience of death back onto others in the past. Similarly, they must also avoid the cultural imperialism of assuming that their understanding and experiences are normative and that those of other cultures should be measured in their terms. This entry on death is concerned with the diverse ways in which death has been imagined and the many different ways it has been experienced in different cultures and different ages. To say this is to recognize that although death is "a given" in one sense, it is culturally and historically constructed in various ways.

The study of beliefs and ritual practices surrounding death has been pursued using a number of different methodological approaches, including ethnographic, sociological, psychological, historical, morphological, and structural to name a few. The best comparative studies of death in the history of religions build upon the large number of available detailed ethnographic descriptions of specific communal beliefs and ritual practices, but move beyond these in a number of ways. Comparative studies in the history of religions are interdisciplinary in nature, integrating the findings of different disciplines in an effort to understand the complex existential meanings of religious beliefs and practices. The classic ethnographic monograph tended to present a historically "flat" and socially undifferentiated picture of the conception of death and the performance of mourning and funerary rites in a given culture. Unfortunately, such "snapshot" studies of different cultures implied that religious beliefs were static over time and uniformly held by all members of a given culture or religious tradition. More recently, the subfield of historical anthropology has reintroduced history into the mix and produced numerous sensitive studies of change in beliefs and practices. Scholars have also paid more attention to the effects of cultural contact, colonialism, and issues of gender, resulting in more complex representations.

In this essay, no attempt will be made to present an exhaustive survey of beliefs and ritual practices related to death. Rather than providing ethnographic detail and careful historical analysis, the entry focuses on selected themes and issues that emerge from a broad survey of cultures and religions, and in so doing offers some general reflections concerning the human imagining and experience of death. In passing, it also touches upon methodological issues involved in the comparative, cross-cultural, and historical study of beliefs and ritual practices surrounding death.

The Concern with Death

Death has been a central concern of religious persons across space and time. The brute fact of death raises pressing questions: Why do people and other living things have to die? What happens to a person after death? Do the dead have a continued existence of some sort? Are they happy? Where do the dead go? Can the dead return to the world of the living? Can the dead communicate with the living? Is death permanent, or is it a temporary or transitional state? These and many other questions have long spurred speculation concerning death and the possibility of an afterlife.

Recognizing that death raised questions for people, numerous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars were led to speculate on the relationship of human ponderings on death to the origins of religion. These theories of the origins of religion were often written in the Enlightenment genre, represented by Rousseau's essay Discourse on the Origin of Social Inequality. Such works of imaginative reconstruction are based on pure speculation, not historical evidence. These reconstructions also are based on the ill-advised belief that modern psychological assumptions are universally applicable. Finally, such accounts are based on logical inferences (often faulty) that are presumed to have been drawn by the earliest human beings. The British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard dismissively labeled this sort of "a priori speculation, sprinkled with illustrations" the "if I were a horse" fallacy and unworthy of the name historical reconstruction (1965, p. 24). While there is little or no historical evidence to support these imaginative flights, it is salutary to note the broad influence they once had.

Today scholars strive to understand how different conceptualizations of death, the afterlife, and the body, as well as different ritual practices, affect the individual and collective experience of death. The cultural historical constructions of death, the body, the afterlife, and so on also directly affect one's religious valuations of life in this world. In thanatology (the study of death), among other things, it is important to consider the religious anthropology (i.e., the specific understanding of human nature and divine nature and the relationship between them), the understanding of the body, and the operative cosmology of a given culture or religious community. Moreover, one must take into account a given culture's epistemology of death and the afterlife (i.e., how people claim to know things about death and the afterlife). After all, most people would deny that their concepts about death are based on mere speculation. Cultures have established means of obtaining evidence on matters related to death and the afterlife. This evidence is commonly found in the content of dreams, reports from shamans concerning their ecstatic flights through the multiple realms of the universe, or individual accounts of visionary experiences or events witnessed in trance states. Alternatively, the "proof" may be found in the authoritative proclamations of myths or sacred texts.

Death may be accepted as a fact of life by many persons today, but historians of religions have clearly demonstrated that humans have rarely imagined death to have been a natural and inevitable condition from the beginning of time. Throughout the world, a myriad number of myths tell how death came into the world and how humans came to be mortal beings. Death is often claimed to be the result of an accident of some sort or an unfortunate mistake or choice made by a god or an ancestor. It may be the result of an act of forgetfulness, trickery, or theft, or it may have resulted from the breaking of a taboo or perhaps the commission of some major or minor transgression. The Genesis account of the fall, with the consequential changes in the human ontological condition and in the world itself, is only one such myth. It is important to recognize that this myth, like other such stories, continues to exercise power over the collective imagination and lives of millions of people. In yet other religions, the length of human life is imagined to be different in different cosmic ages, with the length usually decreasing as the devolutionary process continues.

Overcoming Death

If death was not always a fact of life, then the possibility suggests itself that death might be overcome in some way. The study of death in the history of religions is, in part, the history of how different cultures and religious communities have sought to deny the finality of the seemingly "given" nature of death. Many religious beliefs and practices aim to overcome death in some way or to restore humans and the world to conditions prior to the introduction of death. Eschatologies, for example, imagine the end of the world as it now exists, including the end of death. Similarly, the so-called cargo cults that emerged in the face of radical cultural disruption and rampant disease in situations of cultural contact are expressions of a desperate anticipation of the destruction of this world and the inauguration of a renewed world.

More generally, scholars have long noted that initiatory rites involve symbols and scenarios of death and rebirth. The performance of an initiatory rite rehearses death followed by a scenario of rebirth of some kind. This death may be imagined in biological terms, or it may be the death (end) of a specific status or ontological condition. In many religions, religious healers gain their powers precisely by having overcome death through an initiatory trial of some sort. Such initiatory trials are often unsought, but they need not be. Many examples of what one might call "dying onto the world" are found in the history of religions, including the elaboration of religious vocations defined over against mundane life in the world. These include, to name only two of the most common types, the renunciation of the world by monks and nuns and individuals going into the mountains, desert, or the bush in order to practice some form of asceticism and to seek visions. In many religions, lay persons or ordinary men and women can also ritually gain a foretaste of death and the afterlife. Altered states of consciousness of various sorts provide access to knowledge of the afterlife in many religions. For Pentacostal Christians, for instance, the psychosomatic experience of the descent of the Holy Ghost—the loss of consciousness, speaking in tongues, the radiant sense of divine infusion—is a form of dying onto life as, while at the same time a foretaste of what the Second Coming will bring.

Religious seekers have also proactively pursued various means of achieving immortality, sometimes in human-embodied form and other times by seeking to overcome the human body. The ancient Egyptians exemplify those who imagined the afterlife to be similar to life in this world, with the body surviving death. Thus, the corpse was carefully embalmed in order to preserve its form, while items the deceased would need in the afterlife were also buried with the body.

Practitioners in alchemical traditions around the world have searched for the elixir of immortality. Alchemists provided recipes and proffered various techniques to transform the mortal body into an immortal one. Some religions speak of a spiritual body existing after death. In such traditions, the decomposition or immolation of the physical body is often seen as a form of release into a spiritual existence. Such a belief informs the Ainu bear festival in Northern Japan in which a deity (kamui) visits the world of the living in the form of a bear cub. The cub is nursed and raised by the Ainu; it is also entertained before it is ritually killed, thereby releasing the deity from its temporary physical form and sending it back to the spirit world (Kimura, 1999).

Other traditions, such as yoga in its many forms, have sought to overcome the embodied nature of human existence (i.e., to overcome the body itself, which is identified as the locus of mortality) in order to achieve an immaterial and timeless state of pure consciousness. In Indian religious traditions, biological death is believed to lead to rebirth in another physical form, whereas moksa, release from the karmic cycle of birth-death-rebirth, puts an end to death. Death, then, has been imagined in many different ways, some positing another form of embodied existence and others a disembodied state. Only a few religions, such as the ancient religion represented in the Enuma Elish, viewed death as a real end, with no form of existence following it.

Theories of Death and the Origins of Religion

As noted above, the recognition of the central importance of death in the conceptual worlds of human beings throughout time has occasionally led Western scholars to make some overblown claims concerning death and the origins of culture or civilization. Before returning to a brief consideration of some of the issues related to death that remain central to the study of the history of religions today, it is necessary to review in a cursory manner a few of the most famous—and wrongheaded—grand theories of the origins of religion that were based in part on the scholars' imagined human response to death in the misty past.

Edward B. Tylor

The famous nineteenth-century armchair anthropologist Edward B. Tylor no doubt went too far in claiming that death was the reason religion existed. In his highly influential two-volume work Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor argued that the concept of the soul or an animating spirit arose when primitive peoples reflected on death, trance states, visions, and dreams. He asserted that the belief in the existence of the soul was the logical deduction that primitives drew from putting together two separate experiences. First, according to Tylor, the primitives' awareness of the sudden transformation of a vibrant human body into a corpse at the moment of death must have suggested to them that the animating source of life was not to be found in the physical body. At the moment of death, the material body remained, but it was cold, immobile, and lifeless. In dreams and visions, however, people often saw and conversed with dead persons, who thus seemed to continue to "exist" in some form even after their bodily demise. Putting two and two together, this led to the logical deduction that an animating spirit or soul must exist that was invisible, immaterial, and detachable from the physical body.

Tylor believed that this type of primitive reasoning was the basis of the most primitive cultural stage of development, which he labeled "animism." Animism is the belief that both animate and inanimate things, natural phenomena, and the universe itself possess a vital animating power or soul. Like many nineteenth-century theorists, Tylor assumed that all cultures passed through evolutionary stages. The precise enumeration of these stages varied from scholar to scholar, but in general they follow the pattern of evolution from a belief in magic to religion and, ultimately, to the triumph of reason and science. At each stage, it was believed that belief in the earlier form of magic or religion would decline. Moreover, contemporary peoples living in technologically primitive cultures were held to be living fossils, as it were. As such, the study of "primitives" seemed to hold the promise of providing scholars in various disciplines the opportunity to view what the life of their own ancestors must have been like millennia earlier.

Ghosts and ancestral spirits

Herbert Spencer, one of the founders of modern sociology, offered a similar theory in The Principles of Sociology (1885). However, he maintained that the origins of religion were to be found in the belief in ghosts rather than the soul. Significantly, visions of the dead—as well as encounters with them in dreams—again played a central role in Spencer's theory. Because the dead were believed to still be present somehow in the world, Spencer claimed that they came to be propitiated and offered food, drink, and so on by their living relatives and friends. Moreover, the most important and powerful members of society were believed to retain their position and power even after death. Thus, they were treated with special respect and decorum, as they had been while alive. Over time, these ancestors evolved into deities. Thus, according to Spencer, primitive ancestor worship was the basis of all religions. Unfortunately, there is no hard historical evidence for this assertion or for the other universal claims he proffered.

Sigmund Freud

For his part, Sigmund Freud made a stunning series of claims about death, sex, and religion in both his psychological writings and in his works of cultural historical interpretation. The latter include Totem and Taboo (1918), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), The Future of an Illusion (1928), and Moses and Monotheism (1939). Freud offered a psychological explanation of the paradoxical coincidence of opposites of death-in-life and life-in-death. He argued that eros and thanatos, the drives to reproduce oneself and to annihilate oneself, were both primordial in human nature and deeply intertwined at the unconscious level. Indeed, he claimed that a universal psychological connection existed between sexual activity and death. He found evidence for this assertion not only in the lives of his neurotic patients and ethnographic descriptions of primitive rites, but in such things as a colloquial phrase for male ejaculation, which translates as "the little death." Freud was not an anthropologist, though he used the work of anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers in his works of cultural interpretation. Nor was he really interested in cultural diversity. Rather, his interest, like so many others of his age, was only in different psychological-cum -cultural stages of development.

Few anthropologists or historians of religions today would accept Freud's universal claims or offer competing universal claims of their own for that matter. For instance, rather than make a universal assertion about the significance of "the little death," they would note that the male anxiety implicit in this phrase flows from the widely-held (but not universal) archaic belief that the vital fluids and life energy in one's body are finite in quantity and that they are not replenished. For those holding this understanding of the male body, any expenditure of seminal fluids is assumed to deplete the man's life force. Ironically then, the act that leads to the creation of new life ultimately contributes to the male's own physical decline and death.

Menstruation and lactation, to name two prominent female physiological functions, are also highly-charged symbols in many cultures and religions, but Freud paid considerably less attention to them. Had he, he would have found that they, too, are often associated with death-in-life and life-in-death. Freud was equally unaware of the significant impact the differences in the religious anthropologies of diverse people or their different understandings of the human body could have on their experience of sexual activity and death, among other things. Indeed, Freud dismissed native explanations of such things outright, claiming that conscious explanations never got to the real unconscious causal sources of human psychology and behavior.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud again associated death with the origin of religion, society, and civilization. Building upon the now long-discredited hypothesis that the earliest human beings lived in hordes each ruled by a dominant male and the mistaken concept of totemism, Freud produced a gothic tale (or, perhaps, a modern psychological myth) of primordial patricide. In Freud's telling, a single dominant male claimed exclusive sexual rights to all of the women in the horde. The sons produced by this supreme male must have looked up to their father and aspired to be like him, even as they hated and envied him. They no doubt became increasingly frustrated, Freud suggested, as they reached sexual maturity, but were still denied a sexual outlet within the horde. Then, one day the sons collectively hatched a plan to kill their father in order to gain sexual access to the women. After the dastardly deed had been done, "cannibal savages as they were," the sons instinctually devoured their victim in order to incorporate his power. Then, according to Freud, something momentous happened.

The sons' love and admiration of the father, which had been repressed in order to commit the murder, resurfaced as pangs of guilt and psychological ambivalence. These quickly overwhelmed them. On the one hand, they were grieved by their father's death and horrified by their role in it, but on the other they experienced a sense of satisfaction in having replaced the father. Yet Freud claims that in death the father became even stronger than he had been in life through the workings of psychological repression and substitution. In the wake of the murder, the sons forbid themselves sexual access to the local women (this is the origin of the incest taboo and exogenous marriage rules) and forbid the slaying of the father. The latter taboo was expressed through the deflected form of the totem animal or plant, the surrogate for the father, which was normally taboo but which was eaten in a collective ritual meal. In this way, Freud connected the origins of the totemic festival with the primitives' ambivalent psychological response to the death or murder of the father.

The psychological ambivalence felt towards the dead father was, Freud claims, the origin not only of the universal incest taboo and various taboos surrounding death, but also of the totemic meal, social organization, moral restrictions, and even religion itself. Significantly, Freud's narrative and analysis was concerned not only with instincts, but with the ways instincts and primitive desires are affected and controlled by the psychodynamics of family and social organization. For the primitive, the totemic object or animal is a surrogate for the murdered father, while in a more developed stage of culture the figure of God clearly serves this purpose.

Applying the biological theory of Ernst Haeckel that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny to psychology (i.e., the stages of biological development of an individual from conception through maturity replicate in abbreviated form the evolution of the species), Freud argued that the study of the mental life of children, as well as dreams and neuroses, could shed light on the primitive stage of human development. He believed that the earliest object of sexual desire for every infant boy is incestuous and forbidden—his mother. Like the grown-up sons in the primal horde, an infant son is jealous of the father's sexual possession of the mother and desires to eliminate him as a rival. Freud posited that the Oedipal complex, as he labeled it, was a universal psychological complex, but one which healthy children in civilized societies could now overcome through submitting to social controls and, thereby, learning to control their instincts and deferring the immediate gratification of their desires.

For Freud, religion was the crucial link between the individual and society. Religious myths and rituals were the collective expressions of the same unconscious desires and psychological processes that produce dreams and neuroses in individuals. Freud famously claimed that religion was a collective neurosis that would eventually be outgrown, although not in the near future. Unlike Spencer and Tylor, though, Freud did not consider primitives to be rational beings; rather, he compared them to neurotics and children. Yet, just as most healthy boys work their way through the psychological conflicts of the Oedipal stage, he believed that cultures, too, evolved psychologically, with reason gradually replacing fantasy.

Modern studies of death

Today few people ascribe to the psychological assumptions underlying these and other theories that connect death to the origin of religion. The search for origins of this sort has been abandoned. Still, scholars have been struck by the patterned ways in which death has been associated with life in many cultures. For instance, scholars have long noted the striking association of death with fertility and/or the regeneration of life in religions around the world. In Versuch über Grabersymbolik der Alten (1859), J. J. Bachofen noted the prominence of symbols of fertility (e.g., eggs) and women on the tombs of ancient Greece and Rome, which he interpreted as indicating a belief in life coming out of death. For his part, Sir George Frazer made the image of the dying-and-rising god a central theme of his influential comparative study, The Golden Bough, which went through multiple editions during the early twentieth century. Other scholars, such as the classicist Jane Harrison, carried the study of the ancient mystery cults further, demonstrating in Themis (1911) how the social order was related to the natural order through these religious rites.

In 1906, Robert Hertz, a student of Emile Durkheim, published a seminal essay on the collective representation of death in Année Sociologique in which he analyzed double or secondary burial practices in Southeast Asia (Hertz, 1960). In the cultures he studied, the first burial period was temporary and dedicated to mourning. After the flesh of the corpse had rotted away, the dry skeletal remains were disinterred and then reburied elsewhere. With this secondary burial, the deceased was integrated into the society of the dead, while the mourners were reintegrated into the society of the living. Hertz also pointed to structural and symbolic parallels between funerary rites and initiation rites and marriages, an insight that numerous other scholars subsequently followed up and detailed in many other societies. More recently, Maurice Bloch and Jonathon Parry have revived interest in the symbolic association of death and fertility in a culturally wide-ranging collection of essays entitled Death and the Regeneration of Life (1982).

One final scholar deserves special mention. In a series of important publications, Philippe Ariès presented an unprecedented survey of the changing attitudes toward and representations of death in Europe over a thousand years from the eleventh through the twentieth centuries. Ariès used an interdisciplinary approach in his quest to trace these changes, working with literary, liturgical, testamentary, epigraphic, and iconographic sources of evidence. Specialists may quibble over specific details and dispute some of Ariès' interpretations, but his work has demonstrated beyond a doubt that the experience of death is subject to change over time within the same culture. On the other hand, scholars have also disclosed the remarkable continuity of some funerary practices over several millennia. Margaret Alexiou's study, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974), and more recent anthropological field work (e.g., Danforth, 1982), has demonstrated that the performance of funerary laments and the practice of secondary or double burial continues down to the present in some rural areas, in spite of the dominant presence of Greek Orthodox Christianity.

To his credit, Ariès did not attempt to offer a grand overarching psychological or sociological theory about death. Rather, he sought to organize in a significant way the huge amount of historical evidence he had surveyed and then to trace the changes that occurred over broad sweeps of time. In his magnum opus, Homme devant la mort (1977; English translation, The Hour of Our Death, 1981), Ariès suggested that the history of the Western representations and experiences of death could be organized around variations on four psychological themes: the growing awareness of the individual; the defense of society against untamed nature; belief in an afterlife; and belief in the existence of evil.

Death in Comparative Perspective

Death has rarely been taken as an end as such, a real terminal point. Rather, for most humans throughout time, physiological death has signaled a transitional moment and state, not an absolute end. At death, life as previously lived in this world ends for the deceased, but the memory and imagination of the living open up paths to the past and the future and to other worlds and other modes of existence. A survey of the history of religions clearly shows a widespread affirmation that death creates the potential for new beginnings, for a new stage of the cycle of birth-death-rebirth, or for transitioning to different ends. The transformative possibilities signaled by death are numerous and extremely variable. However these possibilities are imagined, though, humans have rarely been content to "let nature take its course," as it were. Upon closer inspection, even those religious groups that apparently let nature take its course following a death (e.g., when the Parsi Zoroastrians of India exposed the corpse on top of a tower to be consumed by carrion birds, or the Lakota Sioux exposed the corpse on a bier to the elements), will be found to have performed ritualized acts intended to symbolically integrate the deceased into a cosmological world of meaning.

Death almost inevitably moves the living to perform ritual work of some sort in an effort to control what happens posthumously both in the world of the living and in that of the dead. The transformations made possible by death are not automatic, nor are they necessarily without danger. By and large, people have assumed that the desired transitions and transformations after death can be accomplished safely only through proper ritual acts. The performance of such rituals may require specific changes in dress, bodily decoration, voice (e.g., in ritual mourning), diet, daily activities, and so on among the living.

Liminality

Death creates a liminal time and space for the living and for the deceased. For a given period of time, those closely related to the deceased often have specific ritual obligations placed upon them, as well as a number of prohibitions (e.g., they cannot comb or wash their hair, wear colorful clothing, participate in certain activities, eat certain foods, go to certain places). The deceased is often imagined as being in a liminal condition as well, betwixt-and-between the world of the living and the world of the dead. In these cases, the funerary and mourning rites are designed to assist the deceased in his or her journey to the otherworld or to effect the transformation into an ancestor, spirit being, and so on. These rites are often viewed as aiding the dead, but at other times they are also clearly designed to keep the dead from returning to the world of the living or otherwise causing havoc. The liminal status of the newly dead or the dead for whom funerary rites were not performed is often imagined to be potentially dangerous. Such liminal beings haunt the world of the living and may cause illness, death, or other calamities; they may also possess individuals or cause them to go mad. Thus, many posthumous rituals are prophylactic in nature and designed to protect the living from the dead.

The liminal status of the corpse almost always requires that it be prepared or handled in specific ritualized ways. In some societies, the deceased is buried or cremated with objects he or she will need in the other world; in other societies, the dead may be buried in a fetal position, perhaps indicating a belief in rebirth. The care taken with the remains of the dead throughout human history has provided archaeologists with some of their most important evidence about the religious beliefs and practices of diverse peoples.

In many societies, death does not terminate all relationships between the deceased and living relatives. Throughout East Asia, for instance, ancestral cults involve regular ritual interactions often for up to thirty or more years, including prayers, offerings of food, drink, and incense, memorial services, and even dances to entertain the dead during the festival of the dead. In Japan, the corpse is cremated and the ashes buried in a cemetery. The deceased is given a posthumous name, which is inscribed by a Buddhist priest on a wooden tablet that is installed in a domestic Buddhist or Shinto ancestral shrine. After the requisite period of memorial rites has passed, the ancestral tablet is itself burned in a symbolic second cremation. Thereafter, the individual identity of the deceased ends and he or she is incorporated into the anonymous class of ancestors.

Communicating with the dead

Many religions also have ritual techniques for communicating with the dead. In traditional societies, a shaman or medium often serves as a conduit of communication with the dead. The deceased may possess a ritual functionary in order to communicate his or her needs or desires, or the ritual specialist may travel through ecstatic flight to the land of the dead to speak with the dead. In other religions, dreams or visions induced by hallucinogens may provide a means of interacting with the ordinary dead. Many societies have regular festivals to which the dead are invited, such as Obon in Japan or the Days of the Dead in Mexico.

In many mourning rites, mourners converse with the deceased by speaking, singing, or otherwise performing both voices in the dialogue. The desire to maintain some contact with deceased loved ones is widespread, although such contact is carefully controlled and of limited duration. In some societies one finds that—more than death itself—it is the fear of being forgotten after death that is paramount. One thinks of the ancient Greeks and the cult of heroes in which posthumous fame was more valued than life itself.

Many religions encourage visits to the gravesites of the deceased, where tears are shed, prayers are said, offerings of flowers, food, and incense are made, and communion with the deceased occurs. In many societies, songs associated with the dead are sung to recall the deceased, including an enumeration of the places he or she used to visit or the lands the deceased may have hunted or tilled. The deceased is often ritually mourned or keened at the gravesite, although in societies that practice double or secondary burial, these songs or mourning rites are sometimes offered at the now-empty initial burial site. In some societies, physical objects, songs, or specific places associated with the dead function as souvenirs or memento mori, recalling the deceased to mind. In ancient Japan, people employed objects (e.g., a comb, an item of clothing) called katami (to see the form/shape [of the deceased]) to conjure up an image of the dead (Ebersole, 1989). In the Victorian period, people often carried lockets containing a snippet of hair from a deceased or absent loved one. Victorian women also made elaborate hair weavings or flowers, birds, and other decorative forms—by using the hair of dead family members—for similar purposes. With the emergence of photography, photos of the deceased, including those of dead infants and children carefully posed to appear to be sleeping, became extremely popular. Today many persons find these objects macabre and disturbing, witnessing to a major shift in cultural sensibility surrounding death.

Many religions provide rituals to be performed for the benefit of the dead, as noted earlier. The practice of endowing Christian masses to be performed or the reading of Buddhist sutras for a deceased individual are examples. Sometimes individuals made arrangements for such rites to be performed on their behalf after their death, a clear indication of the belief in the continued existence of the self and personal identity. In other cases, it is the surviving family members who are expected to perform memorial or ancestral rites or to have them performed by religious functionaries. The Hindu pinda rite of offerings of food and drink to one's deceased parents is a prime example of a daily domestic practice.

Preparation for facing death, pacification, and the grieving process

Many religions also developed rites designed to help those facing imminent death to accept this fate. The Catholic rite of last unction is but one example. Such rites are based on the widespread belief that one's state of mind and mental focus at the time of death are critical in determining one's posthumous condition. Those who die in an emotionally agitated state, whether it be of fear, anger, jealousy, or lust, will not find peace in the afterlife and, thus, become potentially dangerous. Many different ritual practices seek to overcome the arbitrary nature of death precisely by controlling the timing and/or manner of death, but also one's mental response to it. By overcoming the survival instinct, one overcomes the fear of death and even death itself. The so-called self-mummified buddhas of Japan are the desiccated remains of Shugendō priests, now enshrined as objects of worship, who took a vow to have themselves buried alive in the mountains. Thousands of people gathered to witness the event, while the priest, breathing through a hollow bamboo tube, continually beat a drum and recited the nembutsu, or the ritual invocation of the Bodhisattva Amida (Amitābha), until death, or release, came (Hori, 1962).

Many religions feature rituals of pacification of the dead, designed to assist the deceased to accept his or her new status and surroundings. A certain ambivalence is evident in many of these rites. On the one hand, surviving loved ones wish for a continued relationship with the deceased; on the other hand, there is some fear or anxiety expressed over the possible return of the dead. The living seek to tightly control their interactions with the dead through ritual means. Although the dead are invoked to be present, the rites also usually include formal send-offs to return the deceased to the land of the dead.

Some scholars have long argued that mourning, funerary, and memorial rites are really for the living and answer to their psychological or social needs. Durkheim, for example, claimed they responded to the need for renewed social solidarity; more recently, psychologists and others insist on the need for individuals to work through the grieving process. (The findings of the history of religions, though, might well lead one to question whether there is a single universal grieving process.) Obviously, religious rituals serve multiple purposes, and need not be mutually exclusive. A brief consideration of the different scholarly interpretations of Japanese Buddhist rites of pacification for aborted fetuses (mizuko kuyō ) will demonstrate this. These rites were newly created in late twentieth-century Japan, where abortion was a common form of birth control. Some have argued that mizuko kuyō rites answer the psychological needs of the parent(s), who experience pangs of guilt after the decision to abort (cf. La Fleur, 1992). Others, such as Helen Hardacre (1997), have argued that entrepreneurial Buddhist priests created the need for such rites through skillful marketing techniques. Significantly, advertisements represented aborted fetuses as haunting spirits in need of pacification rites.

The corpse

Whenever death occurs, a corpse is created—an object at once like a living body and radically different from it. Yet, one finds numerous reports of anomalous cases that deny this truism a universal status—the Taoist immortal who leaves the physical world, leaving behind only sandals, mysteriously empty tombs or graves, and so on. No matter what the details are, such reports imply that the "death" involved was not an ordinary biological death. In some cases, death is denied by claims that an individual has gone away or into hiding (e.g., the Shīʿah Hidden Imam in Iran), perhaps to return triumphantly at a later time. In ancient Japan, the emperor or empress did not die; rather, as a "living deity," he or she had returned to the High Heavens and there become secluded behind the bank of clouds. In many cases, death restores a person to true form, as in the case of a deity who had temporarily taken on material or human form. In yet other cases, at death the individual is reportedly changed instantly into another now permanent or eternal form—a star in the heavens, a rock formation, a spring—leaving no corpse

When a corpse is present, however, it is usually considered to be polluted, leading to numerous avoidance procedures. In many societies, only designated individuals may touch and prepare the corpse. In India, these ritual functionaries are outcastes; in other societies, they may be close relatives, who take on a polluted state for the duration of the funerary and mourning rites. In modern technologically developed societies, these roles have been assumed by medical professionals and professional morticians.

In a striking number of cultures, though, it is predominately women who perform these ritual duties. Bloch and Parry have provocatively argued that the prominence of women in funerary rites is not, as Frazer and many others believed, so much a part of the symbolic regeneration of life as it is a symbolic elaboration of female sexuality and fertility precisely in order to oppose it to "real" vitality. That is, female sexuality and biological reproduction are equated with death-in-life, which must be overcome. Among other religions Bloch and Parry cite, they suggest that Christianity epitomizes this pattern. They contrast the role the woman Eve played in the Fall in the Garden of Eden—which led to human sexuality, biological procreation, and death—to that of the Virgin Mary. The asexual conception of Jesus and his subsequent death and resurrection restore the possibility of access to the life eternal of Paradise. The meaning and valuation of physiological death, fertility, and regeneration can be totally transformed by shifts in symbolic and ritual representations, which recontexualize these (Bloch and Parry, 1982).

Whatever the merit of Bloch and Parry's overall thesis, it is clear that the meanings of concepts such as death, fertility, sexuality, and rebirth are not singular, nor are they culturally determined for all time or for all persons within a culture. The meanings for such fundamental categories can be renegotiated over time within the same religious tradition, as Ariès and others have shown. At an individual or subgroup level, they may also be affected by one's class, gender, or occupation among other things. A few admittedly extreme examples allow a more general point about these factors to be made. Take, for instance, Egyptian pharaohs. They no doubt anticipated death and rebirth differently than did their slaves, especially insofar as the afterworld was believed to replicate the social, political, and economic structures found in this world. Similarly, the ruling Mayan and Aztec elites must have understood and experienced the ritual sacrifice of the many human captives offered as tribute differently than did many of the conquered people, who were regularly forced to provide the persons for these bloody sacrifices. Unfortunately, most of the records and representations of these sacrificial deaths come from the elite sectors of the societies. Such evidence must be used carefully, always bearing in mind that the voices of the powerless and the disenfranchised were rarely recorded.

Sacrificial rites

Modern scholars have with little difficulty reconstructed the symbolic logic informing the ritual taking of human life in Mesoamerican empires. There once again myths and rituals proffer the paradoxical claim that life comes out of death. In order to renew the cosmos and to guarantee fertility and regeneration, blood must be shed at a specific time, at a specific place, and in a specific choreographed manner. This might be in the form of ritual bleedings from the penis of the Mayan king or through human sacrifice at the Aztec New Year and other appropriate moments of transformative potential (cf., Carrasco, 1999).

Such rituals clearly represented the religio-political ideology of the power elites. It should not be uncritically assumed, however, that such ritual performances accurately represented the shared cultural understanding of all people in the empire. At the same time, neither should it be uncritically assumed that the rites were nothing more than a vehicle for ideological obfuscation on the part of the ruling elites. To be sure, in significant ways, human sacrifice was a forced performance, but cases exist in which persons voluntarily went to their own deaths, and as such require an understanding the power such symbolic activities—designed to effect the magic of transforming death into life or even immortality—can have over individuals and groups. At a minimum, the question here is one of what constitutes a meaningful voluntary death for specific groups.

The history and complex multiple and competing meanings of the Hindu ritual practice of sati—the self-immolation of a widow on her husband's funerary pyre—may serve as an exemplar of voluntary ritual death. Sati has long captured people's imagination, but only recently have scholars begun to explore its history and the complex, ongoing, and contested representations of its meaning. For instance, Catherine Weinberger-Thomas (Chicago, 1999) sensitively explored how British merchants and later colonial authorities used the ritual as a rationale for taking control of India; how Western scholars have depicted it and why; how fundamentalist Hindu religious and political groups have embraced it; the complex issues of gender; and the at times intense social and familial pressures a widow faces. She also seeks to understand why some young women chose to follow their husbands in death. She discloses the power of the belief that the widow's self-immolation makes two human bodies into one indivisible body, which is ritually transformed into a sacrificial oblation and rice ball—a pinda. The funeral pyre becomes the mirror image of the marriage bed in which male and female powers were first conjoined, although now this union of opposites is forever. This ritual suicide is also the inverse of the primordial self sacrifice of Purusha, as detailed in Ṛgveda X: 40. In the latter, the primordial divine sacrifice leads to the creation of the material world, the caste system, and so on; with the ritual sacrifice of sati, all of these are overcome and the couple escapes the cycle of birth-death-rebirth.

Continued presence of death in life

It is a commonplace to say that religions create worlds of meaning. But they also create meaningful deaths. Death is never far from human experience, no matter how people may try to banish it from sight and mind. It permeates daily life just as it structures the rhythms of collective life. Graveyards, ossuaries, tombs, memorials, and museums bring the presence of death and the dead into human consciousness and landscape. Monumental architectural buildings and structures seek to guarantee and to control the memory of the dead by future generations. The mall of Washington, D.C., for instance, is a public space filled with memorials to the dead designed to evoke a sacred sense of the past and a collective American identity. Today in secular scientific cultures, human genes and DNA have become yet another way of re-imagining the continued presence of the dead in the living.

Religious calendars are punctuated with festivals and observances related to the dead, but so are secular calendars. The citizens of modern nation-states celebrate memorial days of various sorts for their war dead, the victims of genocide, presidents, and kings, but they also celebrate birthdays and beginnings. Even when the dead are feared or are considered polluting and, thus, are segregated and separated spatially from the living, they hover nearby. Ritual avoidances of specific places, foods, words, names, and so on also bring the dead—even in their physical absence—into the consciousness of the living. The dead live in memory, in dreams, and in physical tokens. In other cases, the dead are physically near to hand—buried under the cathedral floor, enshrined in part or in whole as holy relics in temples and sanctuaries, or interred under the entranceway to a house. The dead may even be literally incorporated into the living through some form of endocannibalism (e.g., Amazonian natives drinking the cremation ashes of a villager). Scholars have noted the striking similarity to the symbolism (or the reality of the miracle of transubstantiation) of the Christian Eucharist—"This is my body; this is my blood."

Death is everpresent, as well, in the privileged myths and stories told again and again in song and poetry, in the arts (painting, sculpture, weaving, mosaics, pottery, etc.), in dance and dramatic performances, in children's play ("Ring around a rosey/pocketful of posies/ashes, ashes, all fall down."), and today on television, in the movies, and in video games. Bringing the ubiquity and the absolute redundancy of death before the mind's eye of the living has often served didactic purposes, moving persons to act in spiritually and morally proper and ascribed ways. The Buddhist ritual contemplation of putrefying corpses, the ritual visualization of the inevitable future of all human bodies, visiting collective ossuaries, and so on have been used to move people to renounce the material body and the world. Graphic pictures of hells and the land of the dead in many religions have similarly served to keep death in the minds of people, just as images of heaven and the afterlife have proffered hope to many.

The ubiquitous presence of death, however, can also make it banal and rob it of any sense of sacrality or meaning. People can become inured to death by the numbing effect of the sheer numbers of the dead in times of plague, war, and, to use a modern term, natural disaster. Death's seemingly relentless redundancy can lead persons to perform horribly immoral acts as death's banality threatens the foundations of society. Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, set in Kyoto in an age of terrible civil war and a time of rampaging plague, is an unforgettable portrait of death's power to destroy law and order and to create utter chaos. Sheer desperation, coupled with the drive to survive, can lead humans to depravity as the moral order of the universe collapses. In the European Holocaust, the carrying out of the Nazi policy of extermination of the Jews, gypsies, and others was possible in part because in the camps killing became so banal.

There is also the "death without weeping"—the resignation at times of the poorest of the poor to the necessity of death for some if others are to live. The myriad images of a happier life in the future that many religions have proffered must not blind one to the desperate, horrible, and yet rational decision that innumerable mothers have made throughout history to stop feeding one child so that others might live (cf., Scheper-Hughes, 1992). Similarly, in much of the world today and in all countries before the advances of modern medicine, giving birth was an extremely dangerous act. All too often, bringing life into the world meant the death of the mother.

Yet, in the history of religions, few societies have collectively embraced an existential fatalism, which assumes that death is meaningless. Rather, plagues, wars, and natural disasters have often been taken to be cosmological signs of some sort. They have generated eschatological visions on a cosmic scale of the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of a new world. Or they have stimulated calendrical speculation on a cosmic scale, with the positing of ages through which the universe must pass. Examples are legion, ranging from ancient Indian speculation on devolutionary cosmic ages (yugas ) and Buddhist writings on the present time as the Age of Declining Dharma to the elaborate intermeshing calendars of the Aztecs and the Mayans, which inexorably move through their cycles of change and ends and beginnings. In almost all cases, as has been seen in the case with the death of an individual, the end is imagined as a beginning. The end of a cosmic age is a moment of transition and transformation, one marked by death, destruction, and danger. Yet the religious imagination of humans turns this dark time—this descent into chaos—into a prelude to a renewed time and a return to order. Often this denouement is rehearsed in ritual performance and mythic narration.

The need to explain death

Death is both uniform and arbitrary. It is uniform in so far as all persons, regardless of social status, position, and wealth are subject to dying. Death is arbitrary, though, in terms of when it strikes, how it strikes, and often who it strikes. In this sense, death is enigmatic, mysterious, and unnerving. Although death is inevitable, specific deaths need to be explained. In many societies, the corpse or skeletal remains were examined for evidentiary purposes, or other ritual means, such as divination, were employed to determine who or what had caused a death. Today in scientifically developed countries, a special medical practitioner will perform an autopsy for these purposes.

In the past and in many traditional cultures today, ritual autopsies of a different sort were and are performed. In rural Greece, for instance, as in centuries past, old women and female relatives will fondle and closely examine exhumed skeletal bones for signs of the moral condition of the deceased and, thus, his or her posthumous fate (cf. Danforth, 1982). In other societies, the condition of a corpse after death is taken to be a sign of his or her spiritual status. In Buddhist and Christian lore, for example, the corpses of saints do not decay, nor do they emit disgusting odors. Rather, they release aromatic smells. Such extraordinary corpses are, of course, the source of relics in the cults of religions around the world. Such body relics are the repository of healing and saving powers; they are also yet another expression of the belief in life-from-death.

If the timing of death often seems arbitrary, societies and religious communities seek to regularize it temporally by punctuating religious and political calendars with days memorializing the dead. Whether it be the Shīʿah Muslims' annual memorialization and re-enactment of the martyrdom of al Husain, Christians' annual ritual remembrances of the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection, the celebration throughout East Asia of the festival of the dead, a ritual time when the spirits of the dead are invited to return to the world of the living and are entertained there, or modern national memorial days for the war dead, calendars are filled with days dedicated to the collective recollection of the dead. Through such collective reflections on death, communal values are reaffirmed. In an important sense, life cannot have meaning until death does.

While death is universal, it is imagined, encountered, and responded to in a myriad number of different ways across space and time. Death in the history of religions is the history of the ever-changing imagination and revaluation of death, as well as of the stylized responses to it. Philippe Aries' magisterial thousand-year history of death in Europe is one notable attempt to interpret and understand the existential meaning of the shifting representations of death over time. Aries' work reminds one that the manner in which death and the afterlife (or, the different possible consequences of death) are imagined and represented informs the lived experience of death both by the dying person and the survivors. Aries describes "the tame death" in medieval Europe when a dying individual accepted his or her coming death and met it at home. Surrounded by loved ones, the dying person said her or his last goodbyes and prepared to face death calmly, for one's state of mind at the time of death helped to determine one's fate.

Many religions have taught ways of preparing for death and facing this inevitability calmly. Holy men of the Agora sect in India meditate on death in the cremation grounds, spread the ashes of the dead over their own bodies, use human skulls as begging bowls, and pursue other practices in order to live with death continually (cf. Parry, 1994). Some Japanese samurai also practiced daily meditation in which they envisioned their deaths in battle. By practicing dying in this way, they sought to prepare themselves to face death unflinchingly (Reynolds and Waugh, 1977). In a myriad number of different ways, humans have sought to control death, even if it could not be conquered. The query "Death where is thy sting?" is an expression of the achievement of this control over death (1 Corinthians 15:55).

One way to gain control over death is to control the timing of one's death or to overcome the arbitrary timing of death by foretelling it. The ability to predict one's own death or to will it to happen at a certain time and place are widely recognized as a sign or a power of a holy person. The Japanese Buddhist poet-monk Saigyō (1118–1190) wrote a well-known poem (no. 77) included in his collection, Sankashū (Nihon koten bungaku taikei, Vol. 29, p. 32), that reads:

negawaku wa Let me die, I pray, hana no shita nite under the cherry blossoms haru shinan of spring. sono kisaragi no around the full moon mochizuki no koro of the month of Kisaragi.

Kisaragi is the classical Japanese name for the second lunar month. Gotama the Buddha passed away on the fifteenth of this month, so Saigyō's wish was to emulate the Buddha even in death. When Saigyō died on the sixteenth of Kisaragi, many people took this as an auspicious sign. Saigyō's posthumous fame rested in part on this "proof" of his extraordinary spiritual nature. Similar miraculous powers of forecasting one's own death are found in religions around the world.

Conclusion

These general comments on death in the history of religions have done little more than present a brief introduction to the subject. In many ways, conceptions of death are subject to change over time, just as they vary dramatically in different religions. The imagining of death is not an empty exercise; it shapes the individual and communal experience of death and life. That death is a fact of life remains one of the most intractable mysteries that human beings must confront. Human beings past and present have always sought to find meaning in death and, thereby, in life. The history of this search for meaning in the history of religions is both poignant and ennobling.

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