Afterlife

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In 1901, a physician named Duncan MacDougall set out to weigh the human soul. He placed dying patients on a scale, watching the needle at the moment of death, hoping to catch the instant something measurable left the body. His results varied wildly, yet one figure stuck in the popular imagination: 21 grams. That number became so famous that a 2003 movie borrowed it for its title. MacDougall's findings have never been reproduced. Most scientists regard them as meaningless. But the question behind his experiment is older than recorded history. What survives death? The afterlife, or life after death, is the speculation that some essential part of a person's stream of consciousness or identity continues to exist after the physical body dies. What survives changes from one belief system to the next. It might be a partial element, or the entire soul, carrying personal identity with it. Where does that surviving piece go? Some traditions send it to a supernatural realm. Others send it back into this world, reborn into a new body with no memory of the past. The questions that follow have occupied gods, kings, mystics, and laboratory researchers alike. They are questions about justice, about memory, and about what a person owes the dead.

• 2. The Weighing Of The Heart

  ›

  In the Hall of Two Truths, the deceased's heart was placed on a scale. The afterlife played a central role in Ancient Egyptian religion, one of the earliest belief systems known in recorded history. When the body died, parts of its soul, the ka or body double and the ba or personality, traveled to a place the Egyptians called the Kingdom of the Dead. Arriving at one's reward was a demanding ordeal. The dead person needed a sin-free heart and the ability to recite the spells, passwords, and formulae of the Book of the Dead.

  The heart was weighed against the Shu feather of truth and justice, taken from the headdress of the goddess Ma'at. If the heart was lighter than the feather, the deceased could pass on. If it was heavier, a demon named Ammit would devour it. The living sustained the dead through offerings of food and drink, believed to nourish the ka's spiritual needs. Statues placed in tombs served as substitutes for the deceased.

  Mummification mattered because Egyptians believed it was the only way to have an afterlife. Only a properly embalmed corpse, entombed in a mastaba, could live again in the Fields of Yalu and accompany the Sun on its daily ride. The Coffin Texts, inscribed on coffins, guided the dead through these challenges. They duplicated the older Pyramid Texts, which guided pharaohs and queens. For them, death was a temporary interruption rather than a complete end. On the 30th of March 2010, a spokesman for the Egyptian Culture Ministry announced a discovery in Luxor: a large red granite door inscribed by User, an adviser to the 18th Dynasty Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled between 1479 BC and 1458 BC. Archaeologists believed it was a door to the afterlife.

• 3. Ferrymen And Fields

  ›

  Charon, the ferryman, would not cross the river without payment. In Greek mythology, Hades ruled the underworld, the place where souls lived after death. Hermes, the messenger of the gods, carried each dead soul to the banks of the River Styx, the river between life and death. Families placed coins under the tongue of the deceased at burial, so the soul could pay Charon for passage across the water.

  The Elysian Fields rewarded those who lived pure lives, a place of green fields, valleys, and mountains where everyone was peaceful and the Sun always shone. Once across the river, three judges decided each soul's fate: Aeacus, Rhadamanthus, and King Minos. Tartarus awaited those who blasphemed against the gods or were consciously evil, punished by burning in lava or stretching on racks. The Asphodel Fields held a varied mix, including souls whose sins equaled their goodness and those who had been indecisive in life.

  In Book VI of Virgil's Aeneid, the hero Aeneas travels to the underworld to see his father. By the Styx, he sees souls denied proper burial, forced to wait until someone buries them. He passes the fields of sorrow where those who committed suicide and now regret it reside, including his former lover. He reaches the river of forgetfulness, Lethe, which the dead must drink to forget their lives and begin anew. The Romans shared a similar system, with Hades known to them as Pluto. The philosopher Plato argued for reincarnation in several dialogues, including the Timaeus, while Cicero, in Dream of Scipio, described what reads like an out of body experience, the soul rising high above a small and distant Earth.

• 4. Halls Of The Slain

  ›

  Half the warriors who die in battle join the god Odin in Valhalla. The Poetic and Prose Eddas are the oldest sources for the Norse concept of the afterlife, and they describe several realms. Valhalla, literally the Hall of the Slain, sits in Asgard. The other half of the battle-dead join the goddess Freyja in a great meadow called Folkvangr.

  Niflhel, meaning the Dark or Misty Hel, was a place of punishment for oathbreakers and other wicked people. Hel herself was the daughter of the god Loki, and her kingdom lay downward and northward. Snorri Sturluson's Gylfaginning tells of evil men going to Niflhel by way of Hel. Celtic mythology imagined something gentler: the Otherworld, a realm of the deities and possibly the dead, described either as a parallel world beside our own or a heavenly land beyond the sea or under the earth. In Gaelic and Brittonic myth, it was usually a supernatural place of everlasting youth, beauty, health, abundance, and joy.

• 5. The Wheel Of Rebirth

  ›

  Samsara names the process in which souls, the jivas, move through a sequence of human and animal forms. Reincarnation is the conjecture that an aspect of a living being begins a new life in a different body after each death, part of the Samsara and karma doctrine of cyclic existence. Traditional Hinduism teaches that each life helps the soul learn, until it becomes pure enough for liberation. All the major Indian religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, carry their own interpretations of the idea.

  Pythagoras and Plato, among historic Greek figures, held a belief in rebirth or metempsychosis. The idea appears in many ancient cultures and tribal societies, in Australia, East Asia, Siberia, and South America, and in modern movements like Spiritism, theosophy, and Eckankar. Most Abrahamic denominations reject individual reincarnation, but particular groups embrace it: followers of Kabbalah, the Cathars, Alawites, the Druze, and the Rosicrucians.

  In Hinduism, the philosophical view holds that each person consists of three bodies: a physical body of water and biomatter, a subtle body, and a causal body of mental impressions. The thought occupying a person's mind at death determines the quality of their rebirth, which is why Hinduism advises cultivating positive thoughts and chanting mantras. The mythical view adds the divine court of Yama, the god of death and justice. There, the cosmic accountant Chitragupta reads from a book recording the dead person's choices, and the deceased sees their entire life reflected in a mirror. The Bhagavad Gita compares it to changing clothes: just as a man discards old garments for new ones, the Atman discards the old body and takes on another. Buddhism teaches rebirth without an unchanging self passing between forms. The type of rebirth depends on the moral tone of one's actions, the kamma, with the last thought moment before death carrying decisive weight.

• 6. Sheol And The World To Come

  ›

  Sheol, in the Hebrew Bible, is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, righteous and unrighteous alike, regardless of the moral choices made in life. Its inhabitants were the shades, the rephaim, entities without personality or strength. The Witch of Endor was said to contact the shade of Samuel for Saul, though such practices were forbidden in Deuteronomy. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek in Alexandria around 200 BC, the word Hades was substituted for Sheol.

  The Talmud describes the soul brought for judgment after death. Those who led pristine lives enter the Olam Haba, the world to come, immediately. Most instead pass through a period of reflection, sometimes seen as re-schooling, lasting no longer than one year. Eternal damnation is not a tenet of the Jewish afterlife; extinction of the soul is reserved for a far smaller group of malicious leaders. This view forms part of Maimonides' 13 principles of faith, and Maimonides describes the Olam Haba in spiritual terms.

  Reincarnation, called gilgul, became popular in folk belief and appears throughout Yiddish literature among Ashkenazi Jews. The Zohar, the classic work of Jewish mysticism, refers to reincarnation repeatedly. Nachmanides, the kabbalist who lived from 1195 to 1270, attributed Job's suffering to reincarnation. Yet many rabbis rejected the idea, including Saadia Gaon, who refuted metempsychosis in his Emunoth ve-Deoth and argued that Jews holding to it had adopted non-Jewish beliefs. Among the many volumes of Yitzchak Luria, recorded by his disciple Chaim Vital, is the Shaar HaGilgulim, or Gates of Reincarnation, a book devoted entirely to the subject.

• 7. Resurrection And Purification

  ›

  We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. That phrase from the Nicene Creed sits at the heart of mainstream Christian belief about the afterlife. When the Sadducees questioned Jesus about the resurrection, asking whose spouse a much-married person would be, Jesus answered that marriage would be irrelevant, as the resurrected would be like the angels in Heaven.

  The Catholic conception teaches that the soul is judged after death, the righteous and sinless entering Heaven, those who die in unrepented mortal sin going to hell. In the 1990s, the Catechism of the Catholic Church defined hell not as punishment imposed by God but as the sinner's self-exclusion from God. Those who die in grace but still carry venial sin go to Purgatory for purification. The Latin noun purgatorium, meaning place of cleansing, was used for the first time to name this painful purification. Limbo, elaborated by theologians beginning in the Middle Ages, was never recognized as a dogma, though it remained a popular theory: a state for unbaptized but innocent souls, such as infants or the virtuous who lived before Christ.

  The Orthodox Church stays intentionally reticent, treating the location of heaven or hell as figurative. It teaches that the final judgment is a single encounter with divine love and mercy, experienced differently depending on how transformed each soul has become. Saint Isaac the Syrian wrote that those punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love. Father Thomas Hopko put it plainly: God does not punish, he forgives, and if we like his mercy it is paradise, and if we do not, it is hell. Emanuel Swedenborg, during the Age of Enlightenment, wrote some 18 theological works describing the afterlife from his claimed spiritual experiences, the most famous titled Heaven and Hell, where he reported that all angels are married and every angel or devil was once a person on earth. Other traditions diverge further still: Seventh-day Adventists hold that the dead remain unconscious, asleep, until the return of Christ.

• 8. Judgement And The Bridge

  ›

  After death, two angels named Munkar and Nakir question the dead about their faith. The Quran emphasizes the insignificance of worldly life against the hereafter, and a central doctrine of Islamic faith is the Judgement Day, when God raises all mankind and the jinn from the dead to evaluate their actions. Records of every person's deeds are kept in two books, one for good and one for evil. The resurrected cross the bridge of As-Sirat over the pit of hell; the righteous pass easily to the gardens of Jannah, while the condemned fall into the hellfire below.

  Those who die as martyrs go immediately to paradise. The Quran and hadith describe Jannah in vivid detail: cool shade, adorned couches, rich carpets, cups full of wine, and every meat and fruit. Jahannam is its opposite, a land infested with serpents and scorpions where the burnt are given fresh skins so the scorching can repeat forever. Jannah is said to have eight gates and eight levels, Jahannam seven layers, each more horrible than the one above. A common belief holds that whatever sins Muslims commit, their punishment will be temporary, while only unbelievers reside in hell permanently.

  Zoroastrianism sends the urvan, the disembodied spirit, lingering on earth for three days before it departs to the kingdom of the dead ruled by Yima. For righteous souls, a beautiful maiden appears, the personification of their good thoughts, words, and deeds; for the wicked, a very old, ugly hag. At the Chinvat bridge, the final judgment, Rashnu holds the scales of justice. If good deeds outweigh bad, the soul is worthy of paradise. If the bad outweigh the good, the bridge narrows to the width of a blade-edge, and the hag drags the soul down to hell. Yima was believed to be both the first king to rule on earth and the first man to die, and inside his realm the spirits depend on rituals performed by their living descendants to satisfy their hunger and clothe them.