 | MYTHS OF THE OTHERWORLD: LOVE, GUILT AND MEMORY |  |
The last three lectures dealt with myth.
Prof. Isser talked about creation myths in ancient Egypt and
Mesopotamia, and Prof Ng talked about Chinese and Japanese myths.
Prof. Isser gave us a characterization of myth (from Frankfurt's
book) as "a cloak for abstract thought," and a key term:
"to demythologize" which means to take the cloak off,
to show the naked underlying abstract thought--in other words,
to explain a myth in philosophic and scientific terms.
In her lecture Prof Ng's emphasized the role that myths played
in establishing, maintaining and legitimizing political arrangements;
how rulers used certain myths in order to secure their own position
of power. Today I'll present a different view of myth, one very
close to the basic theme of our course: human identity and the
human condition. In this view, myth is a way of expressing, an
attempt at communicating, the basic hard facts of our human condition.
This lecture forms a unit together with the next two, and the
other main theme we will study is how "abstract thought,"
that is, philosophy, branched out of mythical thought. We'll
deal with the beginnings of Greek philosophy in the lecture after
the next. Then, later in the semester, we'll deal with the origins
of Western science out of Western philosophy.
Today, most of us live under the basic assumption that we are
all in one universe, large and complex, to be sure, but one. From
all we know about the life of our ancestors, though, we can say
with certainty that since the earliest time human beings have
lived in at least three different worlds: the world of the living
which we experience with our senses while awake, the world of
the dead and the spirits, and an intermediate world of dreams.
Dreams often allow the living to communicate with the dead, or
so it was believed. In previous lectures we have mentioned some
brute facts of human nature, for example that we are born without
being consulted, and we have seen that our thought, our beliefs,
must somehow accomodate themselves to those facts. Well, no fact
is more brutal than the death and the absence of a loved one.
The offensive smell of a decomposing body may be one of the marvels
of biological evolution, to ensure that the survivors don't cling
on to the dead and instead carry on the important business of
life; nevertheless it is a smell that conveys the full meaning
of the word "brutal."
This brutal fact, the death of a loved one, is always pregnant
with something else, for which our language, amazingly enough,
doesn't have a word. This something else is not a fact, because
it hasn't happened yet ("fact" etymologically means
something which has been done, which has already happened), but
it is more than a possibility, since it carries with it the necessity
of an accomplished fact. The death of a loved one is always pregnant
with this something which is neither fact nor possibility, yet
partakes of both: I mean my own death. Often, language cannot
show what pictures can: this dreadful pregnancy of the death of
a loved one has been depicted by Piero della Francesca on a mural
in the church of San Francesco, in Arezzo, Italy.
Death of Adam by Piero della Francesca
Click here for Detail of Painting
Today we'll talk about the positive answer: Something happens
to the dead. This opens up the rich realm of further answers about
what happens to the dead and, just as the negative answer
("nothing") leads us into philosophy and abstract thought,
the positive answer ("something") leads us into myth
and religion.
When we say, "Something happens to the dead," almost
immediately we imagine a place, a space and time, a world where
they dwell: this is called "the otherworld." Archaeology
shows that through the millenia our ancestors cared about their
dead, kept with them the skulls and long bones of their loved
ones, buried the corpses together with their jewels, ornaments,
tools and domestic implements, and even sprinkled their bones
with a red mineral, ocher, to simulate the blood of life. All
this points to a belief in an afterlife, often conceived as similar
to the life down here. The most impressive monuments still standing,
the Egyptian pyramids and the huge stones erected in Western Europe
from Spain to Sweden, most notably at Stonehenge and in Brittany,
France, are memorials, silent but durable witnesses to the concern
of ancient cultures for their dead. In China, at the time of the
Eastern Han dynasty (AD25-220), so much wealth was lavished on
tombs that many families were ruined competing with their neighbors
in displays of tomb furnishings. (Remember that Prof. Ng spoke
of the Chinese cult of ancestors).
The location of the otherworld depended on the culture: for hunter-gatherer
nations it might have been located in the woods beyond their territory,
or two islands away from their own island. Among agricultural
peoples, who are used to bury the seed and to see the plant grow
forth after a season, the otherworld was often a netherworld,
that is, a world under the earth. The relations between the living
and the dead differed from culture to culture too: among some
peoples the space of the dead and that of the living had a lot
of overlap--the living and the dead "lived together,"
as it still happens, for example, in Mexico, where people eat
and drink on the graves of their loved ones. In other cultures
there was a strict separation, enforced by ritual practice. One
feature of the interaction between the two worlds is apparently
universal: the dead are remembered, missed, cared for, payed all
kinds of respects--but they are also feared. Ghosts can cause
sickness and mischief among the living, and one important aspect
of ritual is to ensure their "peaceful rest," to keep
them in their proper place. But the dead may appear to the living
in dreams: the world of dreams functions as an intermediate one,
a connection between this world and the one of the dead. Humans
have maintained for thousands of years what we might call a conflictual
relation to their dead: both love and fear. One could spend a
lifetime analysing the different interactions of the living and
the dead in various cultures, but we will focus on just one ancient
Sumerian text, the Descent of Inanna to the Netherworld, and we
will try to make sense of it. One of the reasons I've chosen this
myth is that it is probably the oldest one we have in written
form.
The oldest civilization we know about, the Sumerian, was located
in what today is southern Iraq, the locale of the recent military
campaign called "Desert Storm," and was flourishing
about 3,000 B.C. As far as we know, they built the first cities,
each built around a central temple where the statue of the local
god was adored, and their language was the first to be written
down (on clay tablets). The Sumerian cities depended on agriculture
and a complex irrigation system; initially they were governed
by the free, adult male citizens divided into two groups, like
our own bicameral legislatures: a kind of Senate, constituted
by the old men, and another whose members were the young warriors.
Eventually, the needs of warfare--cities warring against each
other, and also against invading nations--gave rise to the institution
of kingship: the king was the general of the army. Roughly by
2,000 BC the Sumerians were conquered by, and mixed with, the
Akkadians, who spoke a Semitic language, related to modern Arabic
and Hebrew; thanks to our knowledge of Semitic languages, and
thanks to the finding of bilingual tablets (Sumerian and Akkadian
face to face), Sumerian was deciphered in the 1900's. The Sumerian
language is unrelated to any spoken today. Among the Akkadians,
Sumerian survived as a learned and sacred language, much as Latin
survived throughout the European middle ages and beyond.
For the Sumerians, the souls or ghosts of the dead were supposed
to descend to the netherworld or world under the ground, where
most agricultural cultures located the dwellings of the dead.
The lives of the dead were similar to our lives here, only grayer,
weaker, slower--less lively. Corpses were buried with their jewels
and implements. Courtiers, wives, horses, etc., were slaughtered
and buried with royal personages, to minister to their needs in
the netherworld.