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 Is
there life after death? It's a question
that people have grappled with throughout
history and across cultures - from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead to
Embraced by the Light.
James Lewis is a world-recognized authority
on non-traditional religions. He is the
chairman of the
Department of Religious Studies at the World
University of America. His book,
Encyclopedia of Afterlife Beliefs and Phenomena
explores the ritual, lore, pageantry, customs,
language, theory and other aspects of afterlife.
From alchemy to near-death experiences and
from
Gilgamesh to the collective unconscious,
you'll find straightforward, objective and
sensitive information on this ever-fascinating
and elusive topic. Is there life after death?
The following are the various answers to
this question from some of history's religious
traditions. Be sure to read this website's
NDE and Religion Research Conclusions.
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Afterlife Beliefs and Phenomena
Index |
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Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism
has been an unusually fruitful faith, exercising
an influence on the doctrines of other religions
disproportionate to its size. It was founded
in ancient Persia in about 1000 BC (some
sources say much earlier) by the prophet
Zoroaster.
The religion of
Zoroaster is best known for its good versus
evil dualism. The god of light and the upper
world and his angels are locked in a cosmic
struggle with the god of darkness and the
lower world and his demons. Unlike Christianity,
in which the outcome of the war between
god and the devil has already been decided,
Zoroastrianism portrays the struggle as
a more or less even match. Individual human
beings are urged to align themselves with
the forces of light and are judged according
to the predominance of their good or evil
deeds.
As for the afterlife,
Zoroastrianism teaches that for three days
after death the soul remains at the head
of its former body. All of the individual's
good and bad deeds are entered in a sort
of accountant's ledger, recording evil actions
as debits and good actions as credits. The
soul then embarks on a journey to judgment,
walking out onto the Chinvat ("accountant's")
Bridge. In the middle of the bridge, there
is a sharp edge which stands like a sword;
and hell is below the Bridge. Then the soul
is carried to where there stands a sword.
If the soul is righteous, the sword presents
its broad side. If the soul is wicked, that
sword continues to stand edgewise, and does
not give passage. With three steps which
the soul takes forward - which are the evil
thoughts, words, and deeds that it has performed
- it is cut down from the head of the Bridge,
and falls headlong to hell. If, when bad
deeds are weighed against good ones, debits
outweigh credits, "even if the difference
is only three tiny acts of wrongdoing,"
the sinner falls off the bridge and into
hell. Hell is a dismal realm of torment,
where the damned can consume only the foulest
food for nourishment. If debits and credits
cancel each other out, the soul is placed
in Hammistagan ("region of the mixed"),
a transitional realm in which souls are
neither happy nor sorrowful and in which
they will abide until the final apocalypse.
In latter texts, a person's deeds greet
him on the bridge in personified form -
a beautiful maiden for a good person; an
ugly hag for a bad person - who either leads
the soul to paradise ("the luminous
mansions of the sky") or embraces the
soul and falls into hell, according to whether
the person has been good or evil.
After the final
battle between good and evil, there will
be a general judgment in which everyone
will be put through an ordeal of fire; good
individuals will have their dross burned
away and evil people will be consumed. Thus,
the souls of the damned will trade their
ongoing torment in hell for a painful annihilation.
The souls of the blessed, on the other hand,
will be resurrected in physical bodies,
which the "wise lord" will make
both immortal and eternally youthful. (In
a later modification of tradition, both
good and evil souls have their dross burned
away, so that everyone shares the post-resurrection
paradise.)
The concept of
resurrection as formulated in Zoroastrianism
represents one of the earliest efforts to
conceive of immortality. It is part of an
optimistic vision of the end of the world,
in which the forces of light overcome darkness
and all humankind rejoices with the renewal
of creation.
Many of the components
of this vision of the end times - a final
battle between good and evil, judgment of
the wicked, resurrection of the dead - were
adopted by Jewish apocalyptic thinkers.
From texts composed by these apocalypticists,
such notions were adopted by Christianity
and Islam.
Essenes
The
Essenes were a Jewish monastic sect
made famous by the discovery of the Dead
Sea Scrolls - the Essene monastery's library,
which had been hidden in caves near the
Dead Sea - in 1947. A good deal of excitement
was initially generated by the scrolls'
mention of a "Teacher of Righteousness,"
which some early investigators mistakenly
thought might be a reference to Jesus. The
Essenes had also been romanticized by certain
occult/metaphysical writers who thought
they perceived an ancient mystery school
in Josephus's and other authors' writings
about this group.
Further investigation
into the scrolls, however, indicated that
the Essenes were an apocalyptic Jewish sect
descended from the pietists (Hasidim, not
to be confused with contemporary Hasidism)
of the Maccabeean era. They withdrew from
society and established a monastery on the
shores of the Dead Sea at Qumran in the
middle of the second century BC, where they
had a community until attacked during the
Roman-Jewish war of AD 66-70.
In stark contrast
to other forms of Judaism and to early Christianity,
the Essene sect believed in the notion of
an immortal soul. In their very un-Jewish
antagonism toward the flesh, as well as
in certain of their notions of soul, they
appear to have been influenced by Gnosticism,
or by one of the other Neoplatonic mystery
religions of the Hellenistic period. Their
beliefs about the soul and the afterlife
were described by Josephus in "The
Jewish War":
"It is indeed
their unshakable conviction that bodies
are corruptible and the material composing
them impermanent, whereas souls remain immortal
forever. Coming forth from the most rarefied
ether, they are trapped in the prison house
of the body as if drawn down by one of nature's
spells; but once freed from the bonds of
the flesh, as if released after years of
slavery, they rejoice and soar aloft. Teaching
the same doctrine as the sons of Greece,
they declare that for the good souls there
waits a home beyond the ocean, a place troubled
by neither rain nor snow nor heart, but
refreshed by the zephyr that blows ever
gentle from the ocean. Bad souls they consign
to a darksome, stormy abyss, full of punishments
that know no end."
Sadducees
As anyone
passingly familiar with the New Testament
knows, biblical lands were under the control
of the Romans during the lifetime of Jesus.
The new social situation resulting from
this foreign occupation led to the development
of competing factions within the Jewish
community. Although all parties agreed on
the authority of the Torah, they disagreed
on certain interpretations. One powerful
faction was the
Sadducees, a group of long-time landowners
that included many priests. The name of
this party may have come from Sadoq, the
priest of David.
The Sadducees
emphasized the authority of the first five
books of Hebrew scriptures (the books of
Moses) and dismissed most later interpretations
- particularly the oral laws articulated
by the Pharisees - as human invention. Consequently,
they also rejected the influx of new ideas
that was reshaping popular Judaism, such
as beliefs in a final judgment and belief
in resurrection. As both the historian Josephus
and the New Testament witness, the Sadducees
emphatically rejected the notion of an afterlife;
like the ancient Hebrews, they emphasized
the present. As the aristocracy, the Sadducees
were comfortable with the ancient Hebrew
idea that God's rewards and punishments
were meted out in the present life.
Gnosticism
You can read
more about
Christian
Gnosticism on this website including
Gnostic texts. The
Apocalypse
of Paul which is remarkably similar
to a near-death experience is an account
of Paul's NDE to heaven.
Gnosticism
was primarily a movement and school of thought
prominent in the Hellenistic Mediterranean
world and influenced paganism, Judaism,
and Christianity. Its core teachings were
that this world - especially the human body
- was the product of an evil deity
(i.e., the
Demiurge) who had trapped human souls
in the physical world. Our true home is
the absolute spirit (the "pleroma"),
and hence we should reject the pleasures
of the flesh as a way of escaping this prison.
Unlike Christianity,
in which one is saved by faith, in this
school of thought one was saved by proper
intellectual insight, or "gnosis"
(Greek for "knowledge"). Gnosticism
in its original sense died out before the
Western Middle Ages, although the term continued
to be used to refer to any deviations the
Church deemed excessively world-denying,
or that seemed to stress mental insight
over faith as the essential mode of salvation.
Although many
mystery religions and other religious movements
in antiquity emphasized a dualism between
the body and the soul, none went to the
extreme of Gnosticism. Rather than yearning
for immortality in this life, the Gnostics
viewed living in this world as a kind of
hell. Like the southern Asian religions,
which may have influenced this school of
thought, Gnosticism saw human beings as
trapped in a cycle of reincarnation and
believed that even suicide could not release
one from bondage to the flesh.
Cathars was the
name given by the Catholic Church to members
of a dualistic heresy of Gnostic origin
in the twelfth century. Catharism arose
in the eastern Mediterranean region during
the Middle Ages and spread slowly westward.
Among its most important adherents were
the Albigensians of southern France, who
were militarily destroyed in the early 1200s
by the only successful medieval Crusade,
which began in 1209.
Cathars were distinguished
from other medieval heretic groups for rejecting
such basic Christian beliefs as the doctrine
of incarnation, Christ's two natures, the
Virgin Birth, and bodily resurrection. They
also repudiated the Church hierarchy and
sacraments, particularly baptism by water
and matrimony, and followed an ascetic lifestyle
that included celibacy, vegetarianism, and
even ritual suicide. Most Cathars accepted
only the New Testament, which they read
in its Catholic version.
The Cathars believed
the universe consists of two coexisting
sphere: the kingdom of the good God, who
is spiritual and suprasensible and who created
the invisible heaven, its spirits, and the
four elements; and the kingdom of the evil
god, Satan, who created the material world
and who, being unable to make the human
soul, captured it from heaven and imprisoned
it in the material body. Thus, the fundamental
aim of their religious practice was to release
the soul from the body by freeing it from
Satan's power and helping it to return to
its original place in heaven.
In marked contrast
with orthodox Christian belief, bodily resurrection
was not viewed as part of the scheme of
redemption. Rather, only the destruction
of the body and of all Satan's visible creation
- which is hell - was adequate to ensure
salvation of the soul and its ascent to
heaven. The only way to do so was to receive
the Cathars' unique sacrament, the "consolamentum",
which was administered by the laying on
of hands.
Individuals could
come to recognize evil through a series
of reincarnations, and could eventually
free their souls from Satan and thereby
become perfect. According to Catharism,
at the end of time all souls will be saved
or damned, even though there were some differences
between the doctrine of the absolute dualists
and that of the mitigate dualists. For the
former group, free will played no part in
salvation, and in the end the material world
would fall apart after all souls had departed.
For the latter, Satan would be captured,
and the proper order of all things would
be reestablished.
Manichaeism
Manichaeism
was a religious movement that arose in the
third century and spread across the Mediterranean
world. Founded by Mani (a Persian born into
a Christian and Jewish community in AD 215),
Manichaeism was a mixture of Gnosticism,
Zoroastrianism, and Christianity that spread
across the Western world and lasted for
the better part of a thousand years (it
may even have lasted until the twentieth
century in China). Its central teaching
was a severe dualism between spirit and
matter, soul and body. St Augustine, the
most influential of the church fathers,
converted to Christianity from Manicheism,
and some have said that Christianity's antagonism
toward the flesh was influenced by Augustine's
former religion. Although this movement
died out during the Western Middle Ages,
the term Manichaeism continued to be used
to refer to any sect or teaching that seemed
to overemphasize the struggle between good
and evil.
Mani began preaching
his new religion at age 24. He was eventually
executed by orthodox Zoroastrians around
the year 276 AD. Mani's extreme dualism
was similar to certain strands of Gnosticism,
which emphasized the antagonism between
the body and the soul. The soul was a fallen
divine spark from the realm of light, while
the body was the creation of the evil god
and his associates, the archons. Also as
in Gnosticism, Mani saw human beings as
trapped in a cycle of reincarnation that
not even suicide could end. Manichaeism
preached a rather severe asceticism, especially
with regard to the sexual instinct.
Through ascetic
living and following Mani's teachings, the
elect were thought to be able to ascend
directly into the light. Everyone else reincarnated
until they completely purified themselves.
However, at Christ's return, the unrepentant
were to be thrown into flames that would
engulf the material world.
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