Hero’s, Shades and Myths - The Starting Point
Hero’s, Shades and Myths - The Starting Point
Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife - Bart D. Ehrman
Gilgamesh ( written between 2000 BC – 1001 BC )
Gilgamesh was a hero in ancient Mesopotamian mythology and the protagonist of the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem written in Akkadian during the late 2nd millennium BC. He was possibly a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, who was posthumously deified. His rule probably would have taken place sometime in the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period, c.2900–2350 BC, though he became a major figure in Sumerian legend during the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 – c. 2004 BC).
The epic of Gilgamesh is the longest literary composition in Akkadian (Old Babylonian – Modern day Iraq) and one of the oldest narratives in our literary canon. The epic was unknown for many centuries until unearthed on clay tablets in the mid-nineteenth century, discovered in archaeological excavations of Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria. The tablets, composed in cuneiform script and dating from the seventh century BCE, created an international sensation, in no small measure because, once deciphered, they were recognized as preserving a “flood narrative” from centuries before the biblical accounts of Noah.
In the story, the god Ea orders the king of the underworld to send the ghost of Gilgamesh’s close friend Enkidu up to meet with Gilgamesh:
You must open up a hole in the Earth now,
So that the spirit [of Enkidu can come out of the Earth like a gust of wind].
[And return…] to his brother [Gilgamesh]. (Gilgamesh, Tablet XII, iii)
He does so, and Enkidu gives his friend an account of what it is like to reside in the realm of the dead. It is a gloomy prospect indeed.
And the spirit of Enkidu came out of the earth like a gust of wind.
They hugged, and kissed…
They discussed, they agonized.
“Tell me, my friend, tell me my friend,
Tell me Earth’s conditions that you found!”
“I can’t tell you my friend, I can’t tell you!
If I tell you Earth’s conditions that I found,
You must sit (and) weep!…
Homer (8th century BC)
In the various reflections on death in the books by Homer, one point is crystal clear: death is uncompromisingly final. There is no coming back. The point is made already in the Iliad by its central figure, Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors, who laments what he has seen on the battlefield:
But a man’s life breath cannot come back again—
No raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
Once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth. (Iliad, Book 9, lines 495–97)
The Greek term rendered here as “life breath” is psychē, often translated by the word “soul.” It may be related to the verb psychō, which means to breathe. When a person stops breathing—that is, dies—the psychē, the “life breath” or soul, leaves the body through the mouth, never to return.
But where does the life force go? For Homer and other ancient Greek authors, it goes to the underworld, where souls (psychai) have the form but not the substance of human life, and none of its goodness. The soul appears in the shape of the human it had left—bodily defects and wounds included. But there is nothing substantial or tangible about it. In that state, forever and ever, it does not experience any physical torment or pain—or pleasure either. Instead, the psychē exists as a mere “image” or “shade” of the person.
In the story of The Odyssey, Tiresias is a famous but deceased prophet, and Circe is telling Odysseus to learn from him how he can successfully complete his voyage. In doing so, she provides an apt description of the dead. Apart from Tiresias, they are all “empty, flitting shades.” Everyone, with very few exceptions, is the same. There is no differentiation between the wicked and the righteous, religious and nonreligious, valiant and coward.
One of the overarching points made throughout the scenes that follow is that the afterlife is not life. It is death. Those who have departed life are joyless, bodiless shades, with no possibility of pleasure or vibrancy of any kind. Tiresias calls the underworld “this joyless kingdom of the dead” (Odyssey, Book 11, line 105). Achilles later says that it is “where the senseless, burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home” (Odyssey, Book 11, line 540). It is the realm of the “breathless dead.” Shades have no bodies, no strength, no knowledge of anything happening in the world above.
To speak of an “immortal life” of these souls, as scholars both ancient and modern have done, is incorrect. They can hardly be said to live even, any more than the image does that is reflected in the mirror.… The psyche may survive its visible companion, but it is helpless without it.
Odysseus tries to embrace his beloved mother, but to no avail. She is an immaterial shade:
Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her,
three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away
like a shadow, dissolving like a dream, and each time
the grief cut to the heart, sharper… (Odyssey, Book 11, lines 235-38)
After death there is no flesh, there are no bones, or there is no body. What survives is simply the “breath,” the “soul” [psychē], which escapes the body and lives on as a shade. It rustles and flitters like a dream in the appearance of the body but with no possibility of physical sensation or pleasure of any kind.
Achilles protests with the most memorable and moving words of the entire chapter:
“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.” (Odyssey, Book 11, lines 555-58)
It would be better to be the lowest, most impoverished, slave-driven nobody on earth than to be the king of the dead in gloomy Hades. And there is no turning back and no way to improve one’s lot. That is the fate of virtually all who die.
Death is awful, but even worse is dying and being caught in a no-man’s-land between the living and the dead. Only the properly buried are fully dead. Those who are not are in eternal agony, displaced forever.
In the underworld, there are only 3 people that are recorded as suffering any punishment. Possibly the three stand in for everyone who fits that rather dire category. They are
- Tityus, the Titan who had tried to rape the goddess Leto, and who is sprawled out over nine acres while vultures eternally eat his liver;
- Tantalus, who had sacrificed his own son and cooked him in a meal provided to the gods, who for his torment has lovely food and drink kept barely outside his reach forever and ever; and
- Sisyphus, who had captured Death when it had been sent to him and locked it up, preventing people from dying, and who, as punishment, is compelled to push a boulder uphill only to have it roll down again over and over and over again without stopping.
These three will become the prototypes of hell as it develops later in Western traditions.
In particular, the views of the afterlife propounded by Homer were massively influential for centuries to come.