Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Other studies show that there is a sense in which every incident of a funeral tends to lay ghosts. If we simply hear at a distance of the death of our friends, we are far more liable to receive visits from their revenient spirits or dream of them as alive than if we have actually seen them buried, because all the incidents of this ceremony bring home, even to our unconscious selves, the fact that they are really dead and gone from us, soul and body. Thus the tears, Scripture reading, badges of mourning, and even the expense tend to reef in our sense of our dead friend’s personality and to make it powerless to project ghostly phantasms, because such ceremonials are cathartic and preventative of all such hallucinations.

Thus, at this stage of the story of the immortality cult we have two worlds well apart and the Jenseits, or the realm of death, can perhaps be reached from the Diesseits of the body only by a long and dangerous journey that the psyche must take after leaving the soma to moulder. Why has man always stood in such awe of the ghosts of even his friends? The answer is not simple. It is partly because he wanted to be free from their constraint. They included his parents, from whose control even youth, at a certain stage, wants to be well rid. Even his dearest ones might cherish some secret grudge that could now be indulged in with impunity. As spirits they have certain unknown new powers for mischief, whereas if they were enemies they could use these powers for revenge. Toward the dead we generally have a bad conscience. They can often read our secret motives while we cannot read theirs. Thus man propitiated the pallid shades of Orcus by offerings and sacrifices to abate their malevolence and secure their good-will. However remotely he banished them, he has never been able to realize the fact that they were utterly dead forever, soul as well as body. All his will to rid himself of them has always stopped short of entire fulfillment.

On the contrary, some of the great dead he has not only immortalized but deified. Others may still come back at midnight in a dream or vision at some weird haunted spot or in dire emergencies; or if conjured by constraining spells of sufficient potency; perhaps if they have not been rightly buried; or to deliver some pregnant message; or, again, to pronounce a curse or benediction. It is generally hard for them to get to us and also, having done so, to make their presence felt and they are perhaps so exhausted by this effort that they can tell us nothing; while it is given to but few mortals to visit their abode and come back unscathed and to fewer yet it is given to bring back others with them.

One of the most momentous steps in culture was taken by the ancient Egyptians, whose religion, more than that of any other race, might, in view of our recent knowledge of it, be called the cult of the dead par excellence. The new step here taken consisted, in a word, in making the postmortem status of the soul dependent upon virtue in this life, thus enlisting the mighty power of the next world in behalf of morals. Their famous book of the dead presupposes “a religious belief in the actual revivification of the body,” because of which hoped-for event the Egyptians took the greatest possible care to preserve and afterwards to hide the bodies of the dead. This famous book treats of the soul’s journey through Amenti, of the gods and other residents there, with formulæ that will deliver the migrant thither from foes. It contains prayers and hymns to the great gods intended to recommend him to all of them; texts that must be inscribed on both the amulets and bandages of the mummies; plan and arrangement of the mourning chamber; the confession before the assessors; the scene where the heart is weighed in the hall of Osiris; and a representation of the Elysian fields, etc.

At death, relatives and mourners emerged from their houses to the streets, placed mud upon their heads, fasted, and priests pronounced an oration describing the good works of the great dead. There were sometimes accusations and formal judgments by the forty elders as to whether or not the burial should be in due form to convey the soul to the gods. If the verdict was favorable, the gods were entreated to admit him into the place reserved for the good; if not, he was deprived of burial and must lie in his own house. If there were debts, the body was given to creditors as a pledge until the sacred duty of redeeming it was performed. The details of embalmment during the seventy-two days of mourning were given in great profusion for each part of the body. Each bandage had its text and the tomb must be made a proper dwelling place for the ka, or soul, which will stay there as long as the body does. Each process, pledget, and wrapping, had its name and there was an elaborate trade in bitumen, which is the meaning of the word mummy.

The people felt great satisfaction in preserving and seeing the simulated features of their ancestors, whom they came to regard in some sense as contemporaneous. The welfare of the soul in the nether world depended upon the completeness of all the funeral processes. At the height of this central cult of Egypt, bulls, antelopes, cats, crocodiles, ibis, hawk, frog, toad, scorpion, snake, fish, hippopotamus, cow, lion, sphinx, were sacred to the gods and were mummified, while the scarab was loaded down with symbolic meanings and became central in all funeral rites. These ceremonials did not decline until the third or fourth century of our era and only when Christianity taught that the body would be given back in a changed and incorruptible form, did it cease to be necessary to preserve it with drugs. This necrophilism was all for the sake of the soul and both expressed and strengthened belief in it. The cult of no race has been so saturated with thanatism.

In all we know of the folk-soul there is no more striking illustration of geneticism than the slow but sure establishment in recent years, by comparing ancient myths and rites with the findings of excavations, of the fact that in the great countries about the eastern Mediterranean, especially Thrace, Asia Minor, and Egypt, the highest religious consciousness of these races was expressed in elaborate cults of death and resurrection, to have participated in which is said to have made the celebrants over and initiated them into a new and higher life. All was so secret and oath-bound that it found little representation, save the most incidental allusions in history and literature, so that it was reserved for modern research to uncover, reconstruct, and understand its tremendous power.

Osiris, Persephone, Attis, the lover of the all-mother Cybele, Demeter and Dionysius in the Eleusinian mysteries, Astar in her restoration of Phanæus and many others, some with very high and full and some with very scanty and fragmentary developments of the myth and cult, died and perhaps went to Hades and came back bringing, now one, now many with them. Typical of these ceremonies were the funereal sadness, death dirge, wailings, active symbolic manifestations of grief and despair, as if to attain the very acme of psychalgia. The great, good, beautiful, divine hero is not only dead but has perhaps gone over into the nether-world to defy death and the power of evil in their stronghold and to conquer and bind them. There is, then, a phase of painful, anxious, silent suspense. Will he succeed and return or will he fail and never reappear? Then, when the tension is at the very breaking-point, comes the thumic ebb, rebound, or reversal. Someone whispers or cries aloud, “He has won and comes back,” and then all is changed. Lights flare out in the darkness. Instead of tears and sobs there is joy unrestrained, congratulations, embraces, and soon frantic ecstasy, leaping, shouting, wine, song, revelry, bells, fireworks, and sometimes in degenerate days, drunkenness and gluttony with the sacramental elements and, in token of the triumphs of the higher love, perhaps carnal debauch and revelry and always ecstasy and inebriation with euphoria. Thus from three to six centuries B.C. men strove to attain an immunity bath that should safeguard them from all excessive pain and pleasure of life by participation in a pageantry or dramatization of the eternal struggle between the greatest evil, death, and the dread of it and the greatest joy of the most intense living, thus ensuring their souls against being led captive by the pleasures or pains of life, neither of which could be so extreme as these, by keeping wide open the way from the extremest depression to the maximum of exaltation.

Now all this rests in every case where it can be traced upon the retreat of the sun and the death of the world, symbolized by winter and the return of spring, reinforced, of course, by the alternations of day and night. These deities or their prototypes were originally gods of vegetation and their resurrections are vernal. The everlasting bars that broke were snow and ice. The king of glory that came in when the gates were lifted was spring, the conqueror, or dawn; and in these secular changes of the year are found the first preformations of the soul and the momentum that still subconsciously reinforces belief in a life after death and supplies always an anodyne and often an antidote for the death-fear.

It was on this basis that Christianity, especially as interpreted by Paul, arose.[213] The culminating event in its story took place in the few days between the burial of Jesus and the Pentecostal outburst. Never in history, if it be history, and never in the subject story of Mansoul, if this be the stage on which it was all accomplished, has there been such an au rebours from the nadir of depression of the disciples, because the type-man of their race, who had grown to their minds to be a fully diplomated God-man, was completely dead—and that in shame and ignominy—and his corpse sealed up to moulder and rot in a rock. Then came first the timid and then the plenary conviction that He had conquered death and even hell, risen from the dead, walked and conversed with friends in an attenuated body and had visibly ascended to Heaven and God. Once fully convinced that this was all veritably true, witnessed and attested by every sense and proof, the great incubus of ages was thrown off and Death, the supreme terror, was abolished. This brought an ecstasy or intoxication of joy called the gift of the Holy Spirit, which possessed the lives of believers. The ecstatic disciples shouted in weird unknown tongues until onlookers thought them “full of new wine” (Acts 2:13, 15), gazed all day into Heaven, henceforth the home of souls, and had to be exhorted to cease their raving jubilations and go to work. In this exhilarating new joy and freedom they, and later their successors, met the nine persecutions, during which martyrdom became a passion and tender youths and maidens could hardly be restrained from throwing themselves to the wild beasts in the arena as the supreme crown and testimony to their faith.