Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

One of the fatal symptoms of decay was taken to be incapacity to satisfy the sexual passion of his wives, of whom he has very many distributed in a large number of huts at Fashoda. When this ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives reported it to the chiefs, who were popularly said to have intimated to the king his doom by spreading a white cloth over his face and knees as he lay slumbering in the heat of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon followed the sentence of death. A hut was especially built for the occasion, the king was led to it and laid down with his head resting on the lap of a nubile virgin, the door of the hut was then walled up, and the couple were left without food, fire, or water, to die of hunger and suffocation.

This custom persisted till five generations ago.

Seligmann shows that the Shilluk king was “liable to be killed with due ceremony at the first symptoms of incipient decay.” But even while he was yet in the prime of health and strength he might be attacked at any time by a rival and have to defend his crown in a combat to death. According to the common Shilluk tradition, any son of a king had a right thus to fight the king in possession, and if he succeeded in killing him he reigned in his stead. As every king had a large harem and many sons, the number of possible candidates for the throne at any time may well have been not inconsiderable, and the reigning monarch must have carried his life in his hand. But the attack on him could only take place by night with any prospect of success. Then, according to custom, his guards had to be dismissed; so the hours of darkness were of special peril. It was a point of honor for the king not to call his herdsmen to his assistance. The age at which the king was killed would seem to have been commonly between forty and fifty. The Zulus put a king to death as soon as he began to have wrinkles and gray hair. Elsewhere kings were often killed at the end of a fixed term, perhaps because it was thought unsafe to wait for the slightest symptom of decay.

A unique and transformed survival of many such customs, according to Frazer, lingered in the vale of Nemi, idealized in Turner’s picture. He tells us how in ancient times and long persisting there, like a primeval rock jutting out of a well shaven lawn, the priest-king watched all night with drawn sword. He was a murderer and would himself sooner or later be slain by his successor, for this was the rule of the sanctuary. The candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he retained office until he himself was slain by one stronger or craftier. Although he held the title of king, no crowned head was ever uneasier. The least relaxation of vigilance put him in jeopardy. This rule had no parallel in historic antiquity but we must go farther back. Recent studies show the essential similarity with which, with many superficial differences, the human mind elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Hence we must study outcrops of the same institution elsewhere, and Frazer tells us that the object of his book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi. Once, only a runaway slave could break off the mistletoe from the oak, and success in this enabled him to fight the priest in single combat; if he won he would become King of the Woods.

There are many unique features in the attitude of the Jewish mind toward old age. In Genesis 5:3 et seq. the ages of the antediluvian patriarchs are given. Adam lived 930 years; Seth, 912; Enos, 905; Cainan, 970; Mahalaleel, 895; Jared, 962; Enoch, 365; Methuselah, 969; Lamech, 777. All but four of them “begat” between 65 and 90—Adam at 130, Methuselah at 187, Jared at 182, Noah at 500. By nearly all modern scholars these great ages have been regarded as mythical, but so scientific and modern a student as T. E. Young,[43] who is very skeptical about all later records of great longevity, devotes a long chapter to these records, which he is almost inclined to credit. He goes to original sources, gives various hypotheses, epitomizes diverse writers on the subject, and finally raises the question whether or not in ancient days atmospheric conditions, food, and a different and more uniform climate might not have caused an unprecedented prolongation of human life. He does not, of course, credit the ancient literature of India, where holy men are said to have lived eighty thousand years and where in the most flourishing period of Indian antiquity the term of one hundred thousand was regarded as the average length of the life of saints. He fully recognizes, too, the influence of mystic numbers here, which persisted until the age of the higher criticism, and is incredulous about most of the modern records of centenarians. His point of view is that man has now passed his acme and that a slow decline of the human race, which will end in its extinction, has already begun, masked as it is by modern hygiene, which prolongs life beyond the average term it would otherwise have reached. Thus human vitality as measured by length of life is slowly but irresistibly waning.[44]

The correspondence between organism and environment, which makes life perfect, was probably once better than now. Bacteriology is a factor never to be forgotten and there may be a new acidity of juices. Perhaps the energy of the sun is decreasing and also the productivity of the earth. Indeed, it is very probable that the solar system has attained its maturity or midway stage. From such data Young concludes, “The average intellectual condition of the present period, I should be inclined to surmise, exhibits no sign whatever of an ampler development.” Knowledge has become mechanical and has lost its capacity as the instrument of self-cultivation. The highest faculties are decaying from cessation of activity and coherent function. Man has reached his limit. The utilities of civilization are also hindrances, so that the forces of evolution have spent their power.

The Hebrew conception of Yahveh generally made him old, the ancient of days without beginning or end; and the art of early Christendom where God the Father appears, usually represents Him as venerable with age, this trait being probably accentuated by contrast with His son, Jesus, who died in the prime of life. The ancient Hebrews had great respect for age, and many Biblical heroes from Abraham to Moses and some of the prophets were old in years and wisdom. The exhortation was to rise up before the hoary head and honor the face of the old man, and this has its nursery echo in the story of Elisha (II, Kings, 2:23–24) whom little children came out of the city and mocked, saying “Go up, thou bald-head.” He “turned back and cursed them in the name of the Lord, and there came forth two she-bears out of the wood and tare forty and two children of them.” No passage in all the literature of the world has had such influence as Psalms 90:10.[45] It is pathetic to see how incessantly this passage is quoted in the literature on old age and how not only among the Jews but perhaps quite as much, if not more, among the Christians, bibliolatry has made it accepted almost as a decree of fate.

Next most influential is the pessimistic view of senescence represented in Ecclesiastes, 12:1–8. We quote Professor Paul Haupt’s version,[46] with his explanations in parentheses:

Remember thy well (the wife and mother of thy children) in the days of thy vigor, ere there come the days of evil, and the years draw nigh in which thou wilt say I have no pleasure. Ere is darkened the sun (sunshine of childhood), and the light of the day, and the moon (more tempered light of boyhood and early manhood), and the stars (the sporadic moments of happiness in mature age), and the clouds return after the rain (for the old, clouds and rainy days increase); when the keepers of the house (hands) tremble, and the men of power (the bones, especially the backbone) bend themselves; the grinding maids (teeth) cease and the ladies that look out through the lattices (eyes) are darkened; the doors are shut toward the street (secretion and excretion cease); he riseth at the voice of the birds (awakens too early), and all the daughters of song are brought low (grows deaf), he is afraid of that which is high, and fears are in the way (avoids climbing and high places); the almond tree blossometh (he grows gray), the locust crawleth along with difficulty, the caper-berry breaketh up (the soul is freed), the silver (spinal) cord is snapped asunder, the golden bowl (brain) crushed in, the bucket at the well smashed (heart grows weak), and the wheel breaketh down at the pit (machinery runs down). Man is going to his eternal house (the grave), and the mourners go about in the street. Vanity of vanities (all is transitory), saith Ecclesiastes, all is vanity, and all that is coming is vanity.

L. Löw[47] collects from the Scripture and post-Biblical Talmud, German and other literature, instances of rejuvenescence in the old which ancient Hebrew writers seem to have stressed. We all know that sight sometimes comes back, perhaps to a marked degree, but Löw quotes cases where wrinkles vanished, the hair was restored to its youthful shade and increased in quantity, while teeth, after years of decay, have sometimes grown from new roots—occasionally more than once. In many cases sex potency has been restored as well as muscular strength, freshness of complexion, and, more rarely, hearing. Myths, of course, of many races detail cases where magic sleep lasting many, perhaps a hundred, years has converted age into youth, and in Semitic folklore this is often connected with the passage, “The righteous shall renew their strength like the eagle.” The Hebrews were perhaps even more fond than other people of dividing life into periods, usually in conformity to the magic numbers 3, 4, 7, etc. The comparison of age with the four seasons was very common, and here we may perhaps mention Lotze’s effort to harmonize the life span with the four temperaments. For him, childhood is sanguine on account of the ease of excitation, the keenness of response to sensation, the ready passage of impulse to action, and the fluctuations of mood. Youth he calls melancholic and emotionally characterized by Stimmungen. It judges the items of experience by their effect upon feeling and upon self, and oscillates readily and widely from pleasure to pain. Mature manhood is choleric, practical, executive, with definiteness of aim and fulfillment of ideas and even phantasies but with less excitability of emotion; while old age is phlegmatic, seeks repose, and has been taught by experience to abate the life of affectivity and take the attitude of laissez faire.