Afterlife for Pagans, Transcript

(9) Afterlife for Pagans - YouTube

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Transcript:

(00:03) you and so our topic tonight after life for pagans so just to start at us off you know just thinking about afterlife I went to the Pew Research Center which tends to do all the active surveys for religion in North America in this case the survey is about the United States but in general a lot of these are similar for United States and Canada although usually the United States has a bigger percentages in terms of people who are more active in religion and in any way it'll might be a little bit similar do you maybe not in for Canada this is the u.s. anyways what we have

(00:46) that's four so the question was do you believe in heaven and they define heaven in the survey as where people and after the place in the afterlife where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded and seventy eight percent of Americans of 2014 said yes they believe in heaven do you believe in Hell a place where people who have led bad lights die without being sorry and are eternally punished to 58 percent only but that's still a majority of Americans believe in Hell so the people who believe in heaven the most turns out are Mormons

(01:22) 95 percent of Mormons and 93 percent of historically black Protestant churches members of those churches people who believe in how the most are evangelical Christians and that's probably good because if God made it it's probably mostly for them no I don't know I won't say that I'd already been safe anyway so they believe in it the most mainline Protestants and Catholics are a little more dubious about Hell so mainline Protestants and so that would be like United Church of Canada but in any way method this big Methodist Church is that

(01:59) kind of thing Anglicans 80% believe in heaven only 60% believe in Hell among Catholics 85% believe in heaven 63% believe in hell Muslims are on board more on board with heaven and hell Jews not so much so heaven eighty-nine percent of Muslims hell 76 percent of Muslims heaven forty percent of Jews was 20% of Jews believing in hell so Buddhists and Hindus the numbers here are about 47 percent or 48 percent in 20 you know 28 about the same here very Buddhist and Hindus in terms of heaven and hell and I'm thinking that it also could just simply be all what do they

(02:39) what do they mean by the wording here right because the wording is really about kind of a that is more like a Abrahamic religion question and so yes I'm sorry we have to remember that we need to pass the microphone when those comments yes okay so maybe the Buddhists are meaning that and I'm just thinking that's in general energy in general the question you know like you say they'd have to kind of translate it to themselves and decide okay well I believe in something kind of like that and so that's how it's working and so the survey doesn't exactly apply for

(03:27) them finally agnostics and atheists it may well be that since we're only getting the answer here about yes that agnostics are agnostic to the question except for fourteen and nine percent of them and finally with atheists here five percent of atheists in America believe in Heaven and three percent of atheists believe in Hell and I'm suggesting that that might be confused atheists I don't know okay okay so since the majority of people in North America believe in an afterlife it's worth I think tracing the concepts history right and so we are

(04:08) going to talk about that specifically of afterlife in for pagans in the West and so we really are I'm peg anism is enormous an enormous topic and so we're going to talk a little bit about which pagans were referring to and so specifically we're probably we're not going to really have time to kind of go over where in terms of the actual lecture we can haven't discuss and afterwards modern pagans in terms of the revival specifically I'm going to be looking at pagans in the Roman world and so a little bit about I'll just mention like Egyptians and Etruscans and Romans but largely will focus in on the Greeks

(04:51) I was gonna make this a little more broad but actually once we once I started drilling down there's just so much detail that it anyway so we're going to focus more on Greeks as a result of that because they're more maybe more most influential anyway in terms of our current present-day understanding and where we are at in terms of an afterlife but you know we can have afterwards discussions about all the rest of this and comparative things like that so in terms of what do we mean by paganism we've talked a lot before about how in fact Pagan is itself

(05:24) a late-term and it is a term that pagans themselves hadn't given to themselves and so it was a term that specifically Christians gave and applied to people who believed in the old religions of the greco-roman world and the idea of it was that after Christianity became a state religion of the Roman Empire it controlled it was especially a civic city religion and so the cities were essentially all Christian by a certain point or a Christian or Jewish and so at that point the old religious had retreated out to the countryside which

(05:57) is in Latin the pagani and so it means essentially rural people were you know Hicks or something like that it's actually kind of a slang and so it was originally a derogatory term and so one of the things we sometimes say is call it as polytheism which is just they believe people even multiple gods as opposed to monotheism and we're also going to kind of say here that there are really vast differences pegan ISM is not in any way like where there's once one less we've even seen how much diversity there is in Islam how much diversity

(06:29) there is in Christianity in this case there's an amazing diversity because it doesn't all necessarily have one beginning but rather there's all kinds of different local varieties of paganism that have evolved and then also over the whole course of the history Oracle time that we're talking about from a very early kind of paganism that's we're gonna say here is growing out of what's sometimes called animism to a much more kind of developed paganism that is the kind we sometimes think about and to this time that's coming where we sometimes call these world

(07:00) religions which is to say like the Abrahamic religions like Buddhism but in fact one of the things we don't often recognize is that in the greco-roman world paganism was evolving into its own world religion at the time what we call let's say a world religion at the time that it was displaced and so in a lot of ways when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire when Constantine made it so when his nephew Julian who sometimes called Julian the apostate from by Christians but anyway by but by the pagans he you know we

(07:36) would have been called Julian the philosopher Julian his attempt to essentially create a pagan Church the church would have been very similar to the Christian Church in some ways what he was doing there was all kinds of different ways that even though he was going back to the old myths the old practices in some ways it was also wedded with philosophical ethics and things like that which were let's say derived from pagan philosophy but hadn't been part of the religion in a wedded to form the way that it had also become in Christianity and would have been there so essentially the earliest forms here

(08:12) when we're talking about this kind of undeveloped or animism this is like before there is much let's say organized structure where we have differentiated people where there's an entire priests and temples and things like that there's a sense among the among the the core practitioners here which may be like shamans that all animals and spirits have energy and you are maybe able to capture that energy through rituals including rituals like trance and there is a sense that life is filled with the constant fear of harmful forces that you have to propitiating it gets

(08:51) more very much more developed when we have like I say what the kind of paganism that we think of as the height of let's say greco-roman times we're divine forces are now anthropomorphised as human-like gods and so we have more and more increasingly and the one hand you will have cosmic forces that would be things like death and death is a god things like the sea the ocean the sky the earth are all God's but now we also are having gods that are more a personality - that are not and so we'll have things like Apollo Athena so gods that have a different have a

(09:31) character and personality to them that are also quite anthropomorphised the gods are not ethically predictable and so there may be like the kind of ways that the forces are chaotic in the world in that same way gods you may well be really good with all the different things you've done as a devotee of Athena and yet Poseidon who doesn't like Athena may well get you you know and so you have to be constantly wary of all those sort of things and so you a lot of the activities are about propitiating the gods in general in the greco-roman

(10:08) world outside of Egypt magistrates are essentially leaders are are the people who are the priests so for example in the case of like the city of Rome sort of famously Julius Caesar was a hereditary priests so he was the Pontifex Maximus or the phone and one of the Flom ends or something like that and so in other words in general the sort of regular aristocratic class people who might otherwise be a magistrate like they might be the console or the praetor they're also maybe that same family or maybe even be the same person who is let's say the priests and for Romans it's as easy as when to go between your

(10:48) civic activity where you have the toga that's all like this and you do this with the toga and you put it over your you know drape it over your head and now you're acting as a priest because that's their heads that way in that way that they are doing things like performing rituals such as sacrifice and also auguring and so one of the things that the rituals in the earliest form are trying to do is make sure that all of the all of the things that are supposed to happen in an orderly sense actually continue happening and so one of the

(11:20) core things you're doing is maintenance like making sure that the whole world and cosmic order continue to roll forth and turn and so you want all of the things like the Sun coming up to keep happening and specifically then life is obedience to law through different prescribed behaviors and so there will be different things and rituals that you will need to do for just about everything and so when you cross a threshold you know and so we think of the things that we have to letter left - like crossing your fingers and things like that but there was just an unending list of these things that pagans need to do in the

(11:53) ancient world so then as things continue to evolve and for into whatever becoming more like what we call world religions this doesn't have a great name for how we're gonna differentiate here but essentially there starts to be an idea that there is a single source maybe or a major source of order in the universe so people have begun to let's say do astronomy and actually astrology which are the same things at the ancient world and you were kind of seeing that actually all these things recur and are predictable and so it's much less things

(12:30) are less chaotic than you may be originally thought you also see then that you also have then decide as you start to envision this one however they see it that you imagine then your individual actions are important to the one or often think that in the greco-roman world philosophers are some of the people that are doing this and in this case we've talked about philosophers as actually religious reformers and the modernity we try to tend to think of philosophers as being somehow secular they aren't secular at the time really they are actually engaging with people's essentially

(13:09) religious beliefs they maybe are not traditionalists by any means and certainly Socrates is tried for being a religious reformer that is out of touch with with the traditional gods but anyway they either engaged in all kinds of things that we would now identify as religious and especially now adding ethics to religion and so one of the reasons that's causing this is that there has begun to be a concern for self that is beyond simply your clan and city and it is also then beyond your own concern for the present day life and that's of course getting to what we're talking about in terms of afterlife okay

(13:55) so I'll just start here so let's say we're back in the Mediterranean world we have Joe Pagan here and he has two sheep whoops one sheep dies so now he has a live sheep and a dead sheep so what is the difference between the live sheep and the dead sheep so as he's observing it let's say it may well be seemed that they weigh just about the same the bodies are the same the difference between life and death is not material it's an immaterial thing and so very frequently in antiquity what they're observing is different is breath so the sheep that's live is breathing is able

(14:40) to breathe and the other sheep is not and it's not even air it's actually this idea of breath going in and out and so this brings us these words that are like Numa in greek ruie in hebrew spiritists in Latin and so all of these kind of words become the idea the word spirit and so this is the sense of there's a spirit in the live sheep and there's not one in the dead sheep and so it's not a big leap to then and just have the idea that the death sheep's breath or spirit or ghost is no longer in the Sheep and that's what's happened so you may think

(15:21) then because of the way we operate and how focused we are on the self in our own self that the very immediate thing that you're going to jump to when you're making this kind of observation or you're making this surmise is well what will happen when I'm dead what will happen to my own spirit and then you might quickly jump to the idea okay well maybe there's gonna be if something good will happen or something bad are gonna happen and so that will immediately want leap to those ideas but that's not the case in the earliest form especially of

(15:51) paganism when we're talking about early paganism before it really develops so the future self is really not the top concern that Joe Pagan has you know and what he's gonna be doing and that's a picture of æneas and going through the like essentially it's a it's a Renaissance painting of essentially the greco-roman underworld so that's not his big thing is where his shade is gonna be in the underworld rather what he's really worried about are all of these other spirits that are around and who may well get him or his family or his sheep and so they also these forces have

(16:29) to be propitiated or warded off or not having you know not disturbing you so this is again gonna be there's so many broad ways of how paganism deals with this kind of thing it's very very diverse in general one of the things that that's true is that corpses are source of ritual impurity so if you were around the dead that you will have to go through a purification ritual priests and even gods often are said to avoid coming in contact with the dead and so it's a very different idea than where we are now where priests are performing

(17:10) last rites where priests are doing eulogies and this sort of thing in this in this case in for pagans especially in antiquity this sort of thing the proper disposal of the body whether that's by burial or cremation is essentially a family activity and it's essential for the family to do it depending on their particular branch of paganism for the shade of the departed to be able to find its way to the proper place and if they aren't disposed of properly then they may well be around and hanging out and they're tormented but even worse they're tormenting you so and burial cremation

(17:48) exists kind of both of them exist in general cremate people do burial especially because cremation becomes very expensive when you also as they are deforesting the Mediterranean and so over time it's not very hard to actually cremate you so I can said we're gonna talk just very briefly about some of the different conceptions of it among pagans we know about Egyptians kind of being very interested we're very aware of the Egyptians idea of the dead because of mummies and pyramids and you think that if anybody needs to build a pyramid you've got kind of exaggerated perhaps I think your life but it's not only the

(18:31) Pharaoh who is getting to have that even though the Pharaoh has the pyramid the Pharaoh is not the only one that has an exalted afterlife as the ideas evolved through ancient Egyptian religion Egyptians have essentially a pretty happy conception of afterlife in general for Egyptians death is a transition and their afterlife very much mirrors this life so they are kind of thinking of afterlife where they're gonna be a be in a different land a world of the Dead that is actually quite a happy place but also very much mirrors our world and

(19:02) they include the part of the main portion of their religion is what we we kind of think of as spells but essentially in contagions things that you word that you have properly worded phrases and those code phrases and spells and things like that help the deceased then to get past certain steps and also to recover certain things that they need to be able to have in their afterlife and ultimately they get to this field of reeds which is a blessed place in the afterlife where they're even reunited with lost pets so they got

(19:34) that over and above most Christians even who don't you mean although you've heard that all gods go to heaven a lot of theologians say no but dogs don't do that but anyway they did get to go to heaven in the Egyptian afterlife another people in the Mediterranean that had a really happy afterlife apparently are the Etruscans and so the Etruscans are people that live just a little bit especially their homeland anyway is just a little bit north of Rome and what's called Tuscany now and so Tuscany is the same word going back to the Etruscans and they also saw

(20:09) afterlife as Pleasant and they believed also that the bodies of the deceased required maintenance in tombs and so again you don't want to they make little cities of the dead that are outside the sacred PO Miriam or whatever the city of the living because you don't want the dead to be interactive they're a little place that they're gonna live but they have very nice tombs that they build for the richer Etruscans anyway and this is a tomb painting from one of them the tomb of the diver which is apparently we don't have all of

(20:42) the Etruscan we don't have many Etruscan texts as we would like but as it's been reconstructed people understand this to be a representative of the deceased person who is embarking now on the way to the afterlife and instead of going on a raft like the Greeks you know that Charon is like taking you across the river Styx there's also a ferryman like that in the Egyptian religion that is taking you often the world of the Dead is separated by water and that's even true for example when we did the epic of

(21:11) gilgamesh when Gilgamesh goes off and finds we'd missed him which is to say the Sumerian Noah he's living off beyond the beyond the ocean and so in the same way though the Etruscans dive in there either transformed into dolphins they're riding dolphins they have a bunch of adventures that they get to until they get to their afterlife which is again kind of very much like a good life okay but we're gonna talk now also about the ancient Greek conceptions of afterlife which are far less rosy and still though I think also have influenced some of what still

(21:51) with us so some of the ideas of Hades are still with us in terms of judeo-christian possibly in Islam a judeo-christian hell so according Homer we're all ending up underground in the underworld Homer the other Homer but this is the Homer Homer's underworld does include an ironic torture department which the present conception of how hell does as well I love the scene where Homer is they're gonna try to torture Homer with by feeding him all the donut you will have donut so you're gonna have water grab all the donuts in the world and and

(22:26) then he only is able to have his mouth open because he's been putting so many donuts in and at the end while they reload then he says more so he actually is it puts the poor demons out of business because they don't have enough donuts for him so so in the in that we have in the story of Homer in the this is in the Odyssey Tantalus who is it doesn't actually even explain what Tantalus did it's just something the story that everything Greeks would have known but he's described in hell and so Tantalus his story is that he had fed the gods a banquet of his son and the

(23:07) gods and Ponta for punishing him ironically they set him in such a way that he's not able to actually reach the food or reach the water even though he's up into water every time he tries to get it it goes away and so here's what it says in the Odyssey I saw Tantalus in agonizing torments in a pool of water reaching to his chin he was tortured by thirst but he could not drink since every time he stooped eagerly the water was swallowed up and vanished and at his feet only black earth remained parched by some God fruit hung from the boughs of a tall of tall leafy trees pears and

(23:44) pomegranates juicy apples sweet figs and ripe olives but whenever the old man reached towards them to grasp them in his hands the wind would sweep them off into this jet into the shadowy clouds so again he's eternally tortured with his ironic torture blow also this is a famous one that we probably are aware of the guy who is rolling up the boulder all the way up the hill and so we also saw Sisyphus in agonizing torment trying to roll a huge stone up the top of a hill he would brace himself and push it

(24:15) towards the summit with both hands but just as he was about to leave he bit over the crest its weights overcame him and then down again it came to the plane bounding that pitiless Boulder he would wrestle again and lever it back while sweat poured from his limbs and dust swirled around his head so this an ending torment and finally here's another one from The Odyssey here I saw titty Oh son of glorious Gaea spread out over a hundred yards of ground while a vulture sat on either side tearing his liver plucking at his entrails his hands powerless to beat

(24:50) them away he was punished for his rape of Leto Zeus is honored court consort as she journeyed to pytho through lovely and o pious so this is a similar as one of the Titans and it's similar to the punishment that's given to Prometheus who gave fire live we're getting eaten away so however so even though we have those and we have that sense and that sense gets continued I think in modern-day conceptions of Christian conceptions of Hell for most shades Hades is not really punishment but merely a very shadowy form of life so it's not life anymore but just a shadowy

(25:31) echo of life so here's another one of these stories from this one we don't have the earlier version the best one of his much later so this is a Roman poet Ovid who's talking about Orpheus and Eurydice in the metamorphosis so while the newly wedded bride of Orpheus Eurydice was walking through the grass with a crowd of my adds nymphs as her companions she was killed by a bite on her ankle from a snake sheltering there when Thracian Orpheus the poet of Rhodope mourned for her greatly in the upper world he dared to go down to

(26:13) sticks to go through the gates of tenaris also to see if he might not move the dead so this great poet the son of Zeus is going to go down and he crosses Styx and goes into the underworld so again this river crossing to get at this at the edge of where the actual world is the world of the dead through the weightless throng and the ghosts that had received proper burial so in other words once you are in the for these ghosts to get to Hades they're the ones that actually have had proper burial and still you're only getting

(26:48) into this shadowy after world existence but if you didn't have the proper burial then you're actually your shade is actually in torment wandering around the earth so these ones at least have made it there he came to Persephone and the Lord Of Shadows so Hades and Hades wife's of the king and queen of Hell or Hades he who rules the joyless Kingdom then striking the lyre strings to accompany his words Orpheus sang o gods of this world placed below the earth to which all who created I'm sorry are created mortal descend so

(27:24) everyone is going down there all mortals will to dissent you if you allow me and it is lawful to set aside the fictions of idle tongues and speak the truth I have not come here to see dark Qataris nor to bind Cerberus Cerberus Medusa's child with his three necks so the watchdog the three-headed one all of these images here of the pagan Hades are kind of included in this poem and snaky hair my wife is the cause of my journey a Viper she trod on diffused its venom into her body and robbed her of her best

(27:56) years I longed to be able to accept it and I do not say that I have not tried loved one so he's too much in love to have given up on his wife and he's come down here to try to convince the gods with his amazing poem that's the greatest poet ever all things he says or if iya says to Hades are destined to be yours and though we delay a while sooner or later we hasten home here we are all bound this is our final abode and you hold the longest reign over the human race your energy too will be yours to command when she has lived out her fair span of years to maturity I asked this

(28:34) benefit as a gift but if the fates refused my wife this kindness I am determined not to return and you can delight in both our deaths so essentially you essentially make this kind of a bargain and he went wants to bring her back if he can she's going to come back down here anyway just a few more years of actual life something for so the Bloodless spirits wept as he spoke accompanying his words with music so one of the things that we also kind of have is a sense in the Greek afterlife and all of these shades

(29:04) is that when they aren't able to have most of their activity because they are lacking in something that's vital that have bodies have which is blood and so if you're doing sacrifices where you're trying to talk to the underworld gods or you're trying to animate shades and things like that they actually pour blood into the ground and that's the way you do jith onyx sacrifice or ones that are dealing with the earth earth gods underworld gods so then they're able to be differentiated and kind of revivify a

(29:34) little bit Tantalus did not reach for the ever retreating water so while he's the poem is so great Tantalus has even stopped you know being tantalized by all of his torment exceeds wheel was stilled the vultures did not pluck at Chitti as his liver and Bella Dee's daughter of Danny has left her water jars and used Sisyphus perched there on your rock so Sisyphus stops turning the rock up for once and he actually just sits there and listens because this poem is so amazing and the singing is so amazing then they say for the first time the fates and Furies were wet with tears won over by

(30:05) the song the king of the deep and his royal bride so Hades and Persephone could not bear to refuse his prayer and they called for your dig' so this is met with a favorable response she was among the recent ghosts and she walked haltingly from her wound the poet I wrote up received her and at the same time accepted this condition that he must not turn his eyes behind him until he merged from the veil of Avernus or the gift would be null and void and so this is obviously very much like a lot and his wife you know when you're watching walking away from Sodom and Gomorrah don't look back you know so he's not supposed to look back anyway so

(30:44) then they took the upward path through the still silence steep and dark shadowy with dense fog drawing near to the threshold at the upper world afraid she was no longer there and eager to see her the lever turned his eyes and an instant she dropped back at he unhappy man stretching out his arms to hold her and happy held clutch nothing but the receding air so the chay there's nothing and so dying a second time now there was no complaint to her husband what then could she complained of except that she had been loved she spoke at last farewell she spoke a last

(31:15) farewell that now scarcely reached his ears and turned again towards the same place so she just essentially evaporates so she's nothing so the shades the idea here of the shades is that they're essentially like more or less the person but just in much less and so she even because she's newly dead was even still with had her wound that she'd been bitten with right so finally also for you know we have from homer is so what do we do about this idea that that the Homeric the entire Homeric epics are about you know winning

(31:55) immortality through renowned so the greatest warrior of the Iliad Achilles he also was met in the Odyssey and he is going to explain that he that being a shade even of the greatest hero the best thing you could possibly be in the underworld is is much less than what life is so Odysseus in the underworld the spirit of Achilles now the spirit of Achilles son of Peleus appeared and the ghost footed Achilles and I'm sorry the ghost of swift-footed Achilles grandson of a chaos knew me so this is speaking to Odysseus and he spoke through the

(32:28) tears Odysseus of many resources see on of Zeus son of laertes what could you what could your resolute mind devise that exceeds this to dare to descend to hades where live the heedless dead and the disembodied ghosts have been so he's in some ways you know surprised to see any live guy down there on the other hand if it's gonna be anybody it's Odysseus who's he was the most clever of all of the heroes so so he spoke and I replied Achilles son of Peleus greatest of akkyun warriors I have come to find Theresa us to see if he would show me

(33:05) the way to reach rocky ithaca i have not yet touched a kea not set foot in my own land so Odysseus as you know after the war has been wandering all around and he needs to be able to find his way back so he can go back Ithaca his own home and so he's come to the underworld his purpose in coming in the underworld anyway is to go and meet a prophet who has already died your easiest and that prophet is going to tell him away home but I have suffered endless troubles yet no man has been more blessed than you Achilles so Odysseus knows that Achilles is the most

(33:39) blessed of all of the Greek heroes nor will be in time to come since we are guides considered you of God while you lived and now you rule a power among the unliving do not grieve that Achilles at your death so as far as Odysseus is concerned this is the thing that we were all trying for right in other words we were wanting to have renown because you get or immortality nobody everyone still knows who Achilles is although maybe they think of it because of the heel but in any event he's known anyway still is being played by Brad Pitt you know these words he

(34:11) answered swiftly glorious Odysseus don't try to reconcile me to my dying I'd rather serve as another man's laborer as a poor present without land and be alive on earth than be Lord of all the lifeless dead so the Greeks are not enjoying this afterlife idea that they have give me news of my son instead so he wants to talk and he does talk now about and get news about his son and this also was reflecting this sense in early paganism that you're more worried actually than you're about let's say what your own afterlife is gonna be

(34:45) you're more worried about the fact that you're part of a kin group and that your line is continuing on and you are part of that and so in the same way this is important to Achilles here I am no longer up there in the sunlight to help him my son with the strength that I had on Troy's wide plane where I killed the flower of their host to defend the archives that Greeks if I could only return strong to my father's house for a single hour I would give those who have used him and his honor cause to regret the power of my invincible hands so he

(35:16) wants to be up there to be able to help his family out right his son so anyway even then this other ideas of immortality the immortality of heroic Fame is not doing it for at least in homers poem here so alright so we're kind of talking then about this middle part of developed paganism now well I'm gonna want to switch over and I think I'm gonna talk yeah a little bit about now how these ideas are developing among the Greeks so from that kind of backdrop that we have of just understanding that everybody kind of sees this thing as a shade that isn't

(35:55) cutting it for people at a certain point as they now are starting to worry and hang it have anxiety about their selves and their own future and they are wondering well what's gonna happen to me I'm just gonna be a shade that is gonna be as miserable as Achilles this thing he is so how do you improve your own Africare life so earlier the focus was on survival of your clan and your individual focus then was probably on a long happy life over time increasingly concern for oneself caused anxieties for your personal afterlife and Hades and we

(36:28) also see this we've talked about before even contemporaneously as developing in Israelite religion so and we're the oldest part of the Old Testament when God is coveting the covenant with Abraham Abraham is not getting promised you'll have eternal life in heaven with God instead Abraham's covenant is that you're going to live a long life so you'll live you know the maximum number of years that God lets humans live and your posterity will be numberless as numberless as the sand right and so it's only later when people have additional concerns that the idea of afterlife

(37:04) enters into the biblical text yes I'll let some can you hand that microphone to Valerie the caption of the illustration is Orphic mosaic with all the animals around is that to do with their ideas of reincarnation maybe because they were they did didn't they believe in yeah we're gonna get to reincarnation I'm not sure that it is it could be the idea of it is that Orpheus and the Orphic religion and which was about what we're about to talk about is a it's like Dionysian and so it is talking about some ways it's also talking about like being out in the in oneness with nature

(37:47) so it's a rustic ones like the satyrs and the Fonz running around and that kind of thing and so or fix where the first one here we're talking about and this is a later Roman mosaic about again that Orpheus who we read that long quote from Ovid's metamorphoses about Orpheus and Eurydice and Orpheus there is playing the lyre and he's surrounded again by the animals and it could be like you say representative because they do have the they also have there's an idea of reincarnation we'll get to that so different cultic groups and practices and offer different pagans generally

(38:23) speaking secrets knowledge and practices that will help improve the condition of their future shade and in some ways some of this is related to like what the Egyptians are doing but in some of it is original to the Greeks here so improving your afterlife although we don't have these because they were secret and so people didn't write it down entirely we have some of the things so one of the things is this is a religion here that's called within paganism that's called Orphic religion so rites of Orpheus and so

(38:55) Orpheus the fact that he went into the underworld but also and this is related to the worship of Demeter's and so Demeter's the mother of Persephone's that Persephone goes into the underworld comes back and that's why the seasons change so again I'm kind of a fertility but also an underworld fertility cult and so this is then a tablet that is buried with the deceased that has instructions for the deceased so Orphic cults taught rights and spells for a happy afterlife and they were you were initiated into these you learned more and then these were what you were

(39:29) supposed to say and do as a shade when you are ferried across the Styx differents things you wouldn't recite so for example once when some of these tablets if you would have had them I guess you would the body wouldn't have them but anyways you were remembering them at right up to the last minute now you have died now you have come into being Oh thrice happy one on this same day so in other words the shade has come into being this is now transition they're focusing on this as an afterlife tell Persephone which is to say the

(40:01) Queen of Hades that the Bach ik1 himself Dionysius has released you so in other words you are not to be in this kind of torment or the bad kind of afterlife but instead are going to have a happy afterlife in Hades more famous ones even are the ilis in Ian's mysteries that are also again and promising and improved afterlife they're held at elusive near Athens each year again this is this billet based on the same Persephone and Demeter's story and going into Hades so Hades the king of the underworld abduct Persephone brings her down Demeter the

(40:43) mother who's the mother earth goddess who is in charge of grain and everything like that during that whole winter time then this is why all the plants die off because dammit her is so much mourning her loss of her daughter that she no longer allows everything to grow but then when procession E comes up back back in the is allowed to spend time with her mother during the summer time the growing season then everything is fertile again it comes back and so this is the mythological story anyway for the seasons but it's also then part of the

(41:14) rights that you do in order to make sure that that continues to happen and now also added on to that is how your own life cycle is going to work and your own kind of renewal and afterlife so initiates of this particular mystery they learn secret rites that are representing than that idea of descent and loss that search separation where Demeter is searching for Persephone and then finally ascent so I sent it to a new life learning these secrets of damager and it's also probably based on again grain and the life cycle of

(41:49) essentially how wheat you bury it and then comes back up in the springtime so here we're getting to reincarnation also a thing that's happening is at the same time is there are coming up with alternative ideas as they now the philosophers and others are pondering what are the other possibilities so we have this sort of mythic background that's in Homer that they kind of all sort of understand and have developed but maybe there's other ways that we can see death and rebirth so Pythagoras who's a very early

(42:22) pre-socratic philosopher unfortunately we don't have his his works only we have what other people have told us about what his followers were believing later he apparently however taught that human souls are reborn as humans and other animals and so this is metempsychosis or reincarnation and this is apparently why for example the pythagoreans who are a group of ascetics who are essentially almost like philosopher monks who are living in a kind of a special thoughtful community where they are denying you

(42:53) know the body certain practices but also are very much it's intertwined with understanding of the universe is mathematical and all that sort of thing they are then also vegetarian because of they don't want to necessarily eat animals that could then contain human spirits it's essentially a kind of cannibalism if you're doing that so all those teachings are lost they likely influenced Plato who did go sometime and spend some time over in Italy where the pythagoreans were hanging out and Plato then in at least a couple of his

(43:23) dialogues but especially in this case in the written Republic he creates a an elaborate myth called the myth of Earth where he talks about an afterlife as reincarnation where essentially over time as you die you spend a thousand years in either a kind of a an afterlife where you're getting punished or you're also an afterlife where you're just experiencing pleasure and the problems that you have are that the ones that once you've gone through the whole punishing process you're come out of that a lot wiser but after you've been

(43:58) in the whole pleasure process then you come out a lot dumber and so then when you come out then you pick where you're gonna go next and based on where you are you can you'll pick more wisely or not and essentially the the worst you can be in in Plato's understanding is is if you pick to become a tyrant who was going to then you know leave a city astray and do all sorts of horrible tyranny and things like that and if you pick that then when you come out you don't get to go to a punishment you're just wiped out that's the end of

(44:27) you so then you're obliterated on that one and so essentially it's a it's a path that you either give the good bad and come back and bad and and this kind of thing unless you accidentally go down the chute of the tire in which you're destroyed and so you could be the most blessed guy and you've gone through this really happy happy life you come out you come out dumb you think yeah I want to be a tyrant because he's gonna have all this wealth and money and all power and everything like that you do that you

(44:50) come back and you're obliterated so essentially that's a the idea that he has and is probably a literary idea but what he is presenting because he's trying to present a point about against tyranny and essentially he's trying to it's a it's about the Republic and so he was trying to also show why a philosopher is different from what a tyrant would be so what city should be ruled by a philosopher king as far as Plato is concerned but that play there would be the opposite essentially of what a tyrant would be like anyway one of the ideas here is we're not exactly

(45:21) sure you know to extent how widespread this idea of going back and repeating lives until you get better and better and you get it right but it's one of the things that's rolling around and Plato Plato includes it and but Plato has other ideas and so we've talked about these on a bunch of different occasions but essentially Platonism socrates makes for example a bunch of different arguments about the immortality of the soul in the dialogue called the Phaedo and the Phaedo is the topic really is about the immortality of the soul and Plato's view

(45:56) ultimately is that the body is one of these things that is beautiful and so everything that can be mutable is ultimately in this realm of the corruptible and will ultimately vanish and be destroyed but then he argues them there's this other realm that is totally immutable so the realm of the forms and his core argument is that the soul is from that realm and that realm is more real and that realms eternal and unparished and therefore the soul is and essentially for the people who are lovers of truth people who are of wisdom people who love good or the

(46:34) good for goodness sake rather than wanting a some kind of eternal reward those people will have an afterlife ultimately that's filled of goodness because by affinity the goodness of your eternal soul will want to connect with the good the ultimate good and so essentially it's a spiritual kind of afterlife not a physical kind and that's also running around through Platonism so in these ways the Philosopher's here are adding components to regular paganism that if they were to get widespread adopted would ultimately have made paganism into what's more like a world

(47:11) religion so for example we think of for example Hinduism so Hinduism has retained all of the old gods from India but because of the contact that it had with so our Astraea nism with Buddhism Hinduism has come together and included a lot of these it's also a very diverse religion but in general it has become a world religion because of its contact with the others and so you don't have to necessarily jettison the old gods and also old mythology it just happened that that happened in the Roman Empire if it hadn't we would all now be kind of instead of being in a post-christian

(47:52) world we'd be in a post you know pagan world or whatever post world religion pagan Sheheen would like to make a comment I think that Hinduism was helped in its flexibility by the basic or the foundation idea of the one in everything which is something that Roman polytheism or paganism didn't have and maybe that's why it had to be replaced by Christianity and why Hinduism could reabsorb buddhism and jainism so do you so I'm just going to question did you think it's that's their present at the very beginning before before the contact with the other did I mean I'm not sure

(48:36) how early it that gets adopted because I mean because the reality is that by the time we get to I'm not an expert on Hinduism that we know this is like we always say I it's beyond Persia and so therefore go ahead well what is emerged out of Hinduism and so did Jainism they just happen to be movements that were reabsorbed yes okay and Valerie well the idea of oneness in Indian philosophy as recorded at least as early and I'm not familiar with that body of work as much but the Chin'toka uoq chandogya upanishad it has the famous line that thou art it's a dialogue between a

(49:18) father and a son and the father instructs the son about the true nature of reality and ultimately reality is this you know great one this idea and so so is that 6th century BCE I do believe but what that window just come out of you know come out of nowhere and so yeah yeah and I'm not familiar with the earlier of - shots and and [Music] and the Upanishads were commentaries on earlier writings and so I mean it's a fairly early idea well it wasn't a synchronistic post but is it okay idea yeah whereas probably what we can say is

(50:03) even though even though pagan Roman paganism you know is developing that and so you know a lot of times people will start to think of and identify Zeus let's say as the God and that their idea is that there is essentially like like the the philosophers here so Socrates and Plato and Aristotle have posited that there is essentially one source and they and a lot of people then equate that with Zeus and then they start to see all of the other gods as being lesser emanations or demigods within that that system nevertheless it's more of an add-on you know so if you were to

(50:41) read you know if you're listening to the myths about Zeus Zeus doesn't behave like that at all Zeus is more or less like the one and other of the gods and this may be also one of the reasons why Socrates in the Republic suggests that all the myths should all be gotten rid of as part of the but part of the censorship because they are teaching things about God the gods that are not in keeping with the way the philosophers are understanding them which is to say that gods are supposed to be good the gods are supposed to be ethical and ultimately there is a like 1 1 inch

(51:12) ultimate source of which it's not really described in the myths and so in that sense in the greco-roman world they successfully did that by eliminating the myths and adopting essentially the Christian myths so the Bible becomes the the new source of the of the sacred story as opposed to Homer and all the other like ok that said we're also gonna mention that a bunch of pagans also at the same time also resulted with skepticism and so plenty of the elder who book of natural history is filled with so many wondrous things you would think that the guy is not particularly skeptical since he records all kinds of amazing stories

(52:02) there was usually not a story of us is too amazing for plenty to put into his book nevertheless he's skeptical about all of the stories of afterlife as we'll see so he writes after burial come the different quit ADIZ as to the existence of mayonnaise which is to say spirits of the departed all men after their last day returned to what they were before the first and after death there is no more sensation left in the body or in the soul than there was before birth but this same vanity of ours extends even to the future and the lying fashions to

(52:42) itself an existence even in the very moments which belonged to death itself at one time it has conferred upon us immortality immortality of the soul so we tend to believe that the soul is immortal at one time it has conferred upon us I'm sorry at another time transmigration so there's these other people who believe that plenty is saying and so plenty is living in the and the first century AD he's about he is a scientist who dies during the Vesuvius eruption because he goes to investigate it that's his time frame and another

(53:12) time it has given us some sensation of the shades below and payed divine honors to the departed spirit thus making a kind of deity of him who has just but who has but just ceased to be a man so he's talking then about the sense in the earliest traditions that we have these shades and the shades have to be propitiated and in the same way that lets say Achilles Achilles had been a real person and same way the kid Achilles was honored essentially as a God and had sacrifices to him plenty saying we sometimes do that and these are all just trumped-up lives that were telling ourselves as if indeed the

(53:49) motive a motive breathing with man wasn't any way different from that of other animals and as if there were not many other animals he found whose life is longer than that of man and yet for whom no one has ever priests aged anything like immortality so we don't say we're not thinking about there being let's say pig gods running around or chicken gods or something like that the way chickens would have it if they were actually write about it instead humans envision human gods and/or he knows about the Egyptians but anyway this is a little bit different from that using so for

(54:22) what is the actual substance of the soul when taken by itself of what material does it consist it's a plenty here is of being a materialist which is something that it's very familiar to us in the post enlightenment time period where is the seed of its thoughts how is it to see or hear how to touch and then of what uses it or what can it avail if it has not these faculties so he only can understand how we could I mean what do we what is this shades supposed to be doing how is the soul operating if it was in a motor sortal soul like Plato says where to is its residence and what

(55:00) vast multitudes of these souls and spirits must there be after a lapse of so many ages this is a argument that continues to resound with people if we were gonna have mosquitoes have souls and they're all gonna go up end up somewhere that's a lot of mosquitoes Souls you know all the bacteria in heaven or wherever bacteria go bacterial hell I mean there was an argument that that somebody made that can't remember now who I'm quoting but anyway that one of the things that you could do is if although you put a mosquito heaven could

(55:31) be the same as human hell with all the mosquitoes anyway okay but all these are mere figments of childish ravings plenty says and of that mortality which is so anxious never cease to exist and of that mortality which is so anxious never cease to exist it is a similar piece of vanity to to preserve dead bodies of men just like the promise that he shall come to life again which was made by Democritus who however has never come to life again himself so once upon it what downright madness is it to suppose

(56:08) that life is to recommence after death when he says or indeed what repose are we ever to enjoy when we have been once born if the soul is to retain its consciousness in heaven and the shades of the dead in the infernal regions this pleasing delusion and this credulity quite so that chief good of human nature death and as it were double the misery of him who was about to die by anxiety as to what is to happen to him after it and indeed if life really is good to whom can it be so to have once lived so this is plenty I'm expressing a pretty serious skepticism about all of

(56:47) this and so this is call so kind of dish show and I think that this kind of skepticism about all of these views has been with us also pretty well the whole time and all the way through even though even at the time if they were to do if they had done surveys which they didn't you would find that an overwhelming majority of people in the greco-roman world did believe in some kind of afterlife in the same way that like we saw a super majority of Americans believe in Heaven specifically so in some just be thinking

(57:17) about it paganism offered almost the same options that we have even now and held by people today so here's six contrasting different ideas that we traced through the sources so one is there's an idea that we will have life that is like life only less so so the idea of shades who are almost just an undifferentiated shadow of what they had once been and that they might read it off I to some extent if you pour blood on the ground near them because they want to be able to absorb that and then they can actually recover their memory and talk

(57:53) to you and things like that to some extent but otherwise they would just be in kind of an undifferentiated almost shadow of what they'd been and we have that idea also existing in in the old testament one of the only things about afterlife again contemporaneously in the Hebrew Bible is at a certain point the Saul King Saul wants to talk to in the same way that Odysseus wanted to talk to that prophet Tiresias Saul wants to talk to the prophet Samuel they gets goes to the Witch of Endor she's a necromancer and she reifies the

(58:24) soul of Samuel who's very pissed off that had been woken up because he's again just been a shade it's sleep and now he wakes up any prophesized that Saul will fall like tomorrow so it wasn't a very happy prophecy to have heard from the Prophet likewise then there's the idea that it'll be just like life only a lot a whole lot better and so you might have to spend your whole life building pyramids to make it happen you know but essentially then the inherit an afterlife that is like the field of reeds where your beloved pets will be with you there's

(58:56) another idea then that we saw with Pythagoras and some of some play to Plato and some other folks at the time that there was maybe perhaps a return to life through reincarnation in this world there is an animal or coming back as a human or a return to life let's say which is to say and there when a new world will be formed through resurrection we haven't we didn't hit on that but that was also one of the different options that people have obviously it's an option that is existing in a lot more in the near East

(59:29) so this is the one that is coming through Zoroastrianism and then ultimately through Judaism and Christianity a different order of existence you know so there'll be some completely spiritual way to be have an afterlife sort of like Plato saying where you are at one with the eternal forms and then finally like plenty is saying there's simply no afterlife get over it and so and some of the they're a bunch of Roman tombstones that all sir to that effect we can say she with the Egyptians and with the idea of reincarnation later in Hinduism you have

(1:00:09) the idea of your afterlife being tied to your deeds yes whereas with the Greeks it didn't matter how good you were how bad you were you all ended up in the same site right that's true so different ones of these then are gonna have like these earliest ones here have essentially no ethical component right they have an ethical component the Egyptians okay so this Greek one doesn't have any ethical component at all the Egyptians do to get to the better afterlife this is going to again have depending on what kind of how your reincarnation is going to be whether it's going to be

(1:00:46) as mosquito or whether it's going to be as somebody who's right at the top of the you know we essentially like in the Hindus essentially you're coming back as a Brahmin and you may be very close to ending the whole circle of reincarnation and then this one obviously also very much matters what your you know your ethical life is in the same way that of the philosopher is essentially saying you have to live life as a philosopher in order to have to achieve a great afterlife otherwise you essentially your spirit goes with whatever whatever level

(1:01:18) you know it's at and likewise well depends I mean the resurrection can be resurrection of everybody or just adjust yes oh yeah just simply that's right they're gonna make it or you just you're zero Valerie I just wanted to comment on what initially seems kind of a bizarre note that bizarre notion of Democritus is that he's gonna be a Rhema t realized you know at some point in the future right but it's actually you know concerning the time he was living it it's not that bizarre because uh Democritus was the first well you know he was instructed but he was among the

(1:02:08) first atomists right they believe that reality is made of tiny invisible indivisible little entities called atoms which we now know to be true so and so and so everything is component and then there were different kinds of atoms and so III I can't recall whether but this makes sense you know you know that he would believe this the following in order to you know remit to realize in the future so he believed that atoms are always swirling about and forming into the shapes and the materials that exist and then they break down and swirl around some more and if the universe is

(1:02:52) forever if it's if it's eternal yeah then mathematically speaking the odds are that at some point there will be reconfiguration at some point that's probably what did he also be one of the one because one of the ways I know it's like the Stoics for sure it's like different people thought that when since the universe was all in this cycle and it's not just every it's not it's not just that the heavens come back to one place every year it's after like to get it to the point where let's say every one of the stars and planets the planets

(1:03:24) the six planets that are all moving they all get to that same place that they were again and so in other words that there's a great period of time yeah when it all when that happens and when that happens the whole world will be like it was again in other words that there's a giant revolution and that that's when you come back yeah is it's very much like if you run like a computer program with random numbers like one was gone through one through a zero to nine eventually they're gonna want line up randomly zero one two three four five six seven eight nine right it's totally random it's just the odds are it's gonna

(1:03:54) happen and so democracy is more like that random as opposed to the great cycle coming back you had a question yeah or comment about like the like life only better there are other cultures like in these Scandinavian traditions that you would gain entry into Valhalla and also the summer lands of the Celtic people yeah and I was also thinking when you but the transition into this way of thinking of you know having that you know unity with a greater source I was just thinking back to like the the timeline of alchemy and and the the

(1:04:48) thought of that is that to optimize oneself so it was work on the self and and it was about kind of merging with that the one source and that's something that I remember the the timeline because there's different figures in history like ballerinas and and so forth that had these inspirations Alexander the Great was another one that you know embraced these teachings so it's just interesting how that kind of kept popping up from a one certain time and and then you know you have other traditions that you know have a similar

(1:05:35) concept and nowadays a lot of people kind of refer to you know instead of using the term God it's not like you know the universe or source yeah yeah well in that sense I think that you know some of you know like you're saying the ideas keep popping up in some ways there's only so many different ways that you can kind of conceive of these things and plenty I guess plenty actually you did talk about resurrection even because he was talking about Democritus comes back or Reva fiying at some point or other and

(1:06:08) so will you oh go ahead inference more mostly to Old Testament so the question is what does what's the idea of afterlife in the Old Testament each one if influence is most well in general I mean the afterlife in Old Testament is more like here because there really is not almost any mention of it so the like I mentioned the main thing that we have is of anybody that's a departed spirit is this is Samuel who comes back because a necromancer bring this shade back or wakes a shade back up but the Old Testament is essentially you need to

(1:06:58) honor your ancestors both you find a you make a special grave for them and you want their bones to be able to be in that grave and then then you talk about sleeping with your ancestors so so essentially they're all they're all at rest and so they're more or less because they've been buried properly they're more or less functioning like the analogy as like it's sleep and so there isn't really thought of them having like an afterlife you heavens with God or anything like that and the oldest part of the Old Testament

(1:07:28) over time essentially after the after the Israelites are the Jews are in Babylon the leaders are you know after the destruction of Jerusalem and the and Babylon is obviously a Persian province and then later when they're sent back and they can go back to Jerusalem and rebuild and then Jerusalem is again a Persian province they are influenced you know presumably by Austrian ISM which has a very active idea of afterlife and so then by the time you get to second temple Judaism and later second temple Judaism is very has a lot of focus on afterlife and that's also in like for

(1:08:09) example the Mishnah and things like that but as we've saw sort of in the survey because it's not as much in Torah that has then over time sort of fallen out of rabbinic judaism and so therefore that we saw there was an the percentage of believers who were practicing Jews or made I guess I don't have to be practicing who identify as Jews in the Pew survey a much smaller percentage of them believe in heaven or hell yes ageism dying is for a child to die it's all the same you get the same so you know by the time so in the more it's

(1:08:52) hard to say exactly in the what the difference between people's beliefs and then what we have in the literature so I gave you guys long quotes from like the Odyssey and also from the metamorphosis and another one that's really long as the Aeneid but and so to what extent are these representing the peoples actual beliefs in to what extent is at the poet that is you know kind of describing things and so a lot of times when people like Iniesta go around and they they see that the underworld they see different places where different groups of spirits

(1:09:26) let's say have all kind of come together and so I know for example there's like just the horrible field of suicides and this kind of and so there may be in that something for you know the little kids that died outside of their time but I don't know that there's I'm sorry those are the guys that God's love they die young and so gods wanted to bring them to the underworld okay yeah so it could be that Robert let me guess what as long as you're all mostly still here I want to take a picture if I can cuz he got like you're feeling like every chair so sit

(1:10:12) here otherwise empty chair okay one second sorry go ahead Robert yeah the way I see it you in carnate life incarnation to the baby in the first week but the baby is reinter farm coming up shadows with the work of dark matter dark particles dark energy that's where your shadows and they chose what we just become more part of our life will understand that they somehow retain form stronger than yeah well now so I've listened to twenty years of coast to coast shows every night mm-hmm so now I have a giant backed up people

(1:11:18) dying and coming back and giving more testimony at what's going on who and people bullied I and then sort of indicating that there is another site still going on but it doesn't have more yeah so so yeah I guess what I could say is that one of the things that we have that in terms of this in our past is that this now is part of our let's say deep roots of our culture that has then gone through Islam oh judeo-christianity so we have that as a much more recent thing that's for everyone within all of our backgrounds here in the West whether or not we are part of any organized

(1:12:02) religion at all now and so the ideas anyway then are continuously influenced let's say our movies and then other kinds of things but now when we're in the in the present we're in a place where each one of us is maybe coming through our own you know we doing our own exploration and we are aware of different things like dark matter or any other things and so that that's in forming our own ideas now that they wouldn't have had back then you know and so they are aware of the universes they understood it to the extent that they had it then so that's essentially how we

(1:12:33) conclude and I guess I just want to maybe I'll do one more slide because wasn't necessarily going to but I'll throw it in because we're got to the point where we're talking about as we're making our own conceptions and what may maybe individually ourselves or thinking about afterlife and so this was an interesting analogy that I saw so if fetuses could speculate about life after birth which they obviously cancellous they can't there's only one of them in there at any time or two maybe bit there and they're not they don't communicate but anyway let's say

(1:13:02) that one of them it was a skeptic and say there's no reason to believe there is any life after birth one of them could say it's after birth life is it's gonna be just like this world it'll be just like a bigger womb or darker or they like it and maybe less of a woman or there's another one like it again the platonic guy after birth will be of a completely different order and so all of those are their speculation that they would any evidence about and so with that I think what we'll do is we'll conclude the formal lecture period but we can all stay for snacks and you guys could

(1:13:38) discuss your own ideas and that kind of thing whatever has come up in your thinking about afterlife thank you much [Applause] thank you