Tag: death

Consciousness after Death: “Neurologically Inexplicable”?

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments

Doctors performing “resuscitation medicine” keep finding people living longer after they are clinically dead — and talking about it:

New techniques promise to even further extend the boundary between life and death. At the same time, experiences reported by resuscitated people sometimes defy what’s thought to be possible. They claim to have seen and heard things, though activity in their brains appears to have stopped.

It sounds supernatural, and if their memories are accurate and their brains really have stopped, it’s neurologically inexplicable, at least with what’s now known. Parnia, leader of the Human Consciousness Project’s AWARE study, which documents after-death experiences in 25 hospitals across North America and Europe, is studying the phenomenon scientifically.

Read the whole thing.

Necrophilia: An Ancient Egyptian Tradition?

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

This may be the worst sort of environmental determinism, but what is it with Egypt? Is there something in the Nile water?

For centuries Egyptian Paganism seemed to function—on one level—as as sort of post office of the dead. All those mummified cats, ibises, crocodiles, etc. neatly stacked in little p.o. boxes. What’s with that?

And of course there was the elaborate bureaucratic ritual that accompanied the mummification. The Greek historian Herodotus (a bit of a gossip) commented,

The wives of men of rank are not give to be embalmed immediately after death, nor indeed are any of the more beautiful and valued women. It is not until they have been dead three or four days that they are carried to the embalmers. This is done to prevent indignities from being offered them. (Link is to a different translation, but quite similar.)

Then, for several centuries, Egypt was mostly Christian. Christians liked to store the body parts of saints in their churches, which is why the Emperor Julian (PBUH) referred to them as “charnel houses.” What went on in the funeral business I do not know.

Today, in majority-Muslim Egypt, the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television network reports that Egyptian women’s rights campaigners (there are some) are protesting two laws proposed in the “Islamist-dominated parliament”:

She was referring to two laws: one that would legalize the marriage of girls starting from the age of 14 and the other that permits a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death. . . . . Egyptian prominent journalist and TV anchor Jaber al-Qarmouty on Tuesday referred to [cleric] Abdul Samea’s article in his daily show on Egyptian ON TV and criticized the whole notion of “permitting a husband to have sex with his wife after her death under a so-called ‘Farewell Intercourse’ draft law.”

Because nothing expresses grief over losing one’s spouse quite like that.

UPDATE: Another source says that no such law was proposed. Was Al-Arabiya fooled?

Do the Living Outnumber the Dead?

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments

Did you ever get into a discussion of the possibility of reincarnation only to have someone announce, “Reincarnation is impossible because there are more people alive now than have ever lived”?

And then they sit back smugly. Or perhaps they quote George Carlin, the favorite sage of the Barstool Philosopher.

Not so fast, bubba.

It is true that if you delve back into the mists of time, the population of Earth was tiny in comparison to today and logically it might seem plausible that the living outnumber the dead.

Picking the right starting point seems to be crucial, and there is a certain amount of hand-waving involved, but see for yourself.

Cemetery Theory in the Upland South

On By Chas S. Clifton

From a blog about the archaeology of American cemeteries:

There are cemeteries that are formally laid out, for example, most city cemeteries (many of which follow the ideas of the Rural Cemetery movement, but that’s a topic for another day), then there are the folk cemeteries – those that follow a folk, or vernacular, pattern. The distinction is roughly analogous to that between Landmark Architecture (created by professionally trained and schooled architects) and Vernacular Architecture (everything else – often applied to barns, houses, and other structures). Like Folk/Vernacular Architecture, Folk Cemeteries follow a cultural pattern developed through tradition and practical experience. There are many different traditions in cemeteries, one of which is the Upland South Folk Cemetery as defined by D. Gregory Jeane. I’m going to prevent a sort of thumbnail sketch of the Upland South Folk Cemetery (USFC), if you’d like to know more check out suggested reading at the end of this post.

Fascinating reading.

 

Wiccan Green Burials Make Headlines

On By Chas S. Clifton4 Comments

The Chicago Tribune’s Pagans-at-Halloween story focuses on formaldehyde-free “green burials” at Circle Sanctuary in Wisconsin.

“The thought of getting filled up with formaldehyde and being placed in a sealed, laminated casket and put into a cement box in the ground is not in keeping with preserving Mother Earth,” said [Ana] Blechschmidt, a volunteer chaplain at Northern Illinois University.

“We believe the soul is eternal and immortal. So we want to leave as small a physical footprint as possible. If you honor the Earth you live on, how can you desecrate her and still honor the person you’re burying?”

I absolutely agree. But I still don’t like the C-word: “church.” I don’t like the expectations of active clergy/passive congregation-with-a-rectangular building that it carries. I don’t know if the writer applied that term or if the Circle folks used it.

Gallimaufry with Forbidden Phrases

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

• According to John Rentoul of the British newspaper The Independent, these phrases should be banned due to overuse. He tips his hat to George Orwell, all well and good, but someone in the comments notes that the Irish satirist Brian O’Nolan also eviscerated bureaucratese in his day, which was even earlier.

• Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” is a staple of introductory psychology classes. But Gary Lachman (a/k/a Gary Valentine of Blondie, etc.) at The Daily Grail notes that it can take some odd twists in the world of the esoteric: “Maslow’s vision of a kind of Brahmin caste of ‘self-actualizers,’ uninterested in the kind of material gratification that most people desire, and oriented toward more ‘spiritual’ concerns, is a recurring fantasy in the world of occult politics.” Read the rest.

• If you have a book proposal in mind, does it include zombies? Get on the zombie bandwagon! Consider this one: “Christ, mythras [sic], and Osiris as zombie archetypes – a new spirituality for a new age…”

• Odd manners of dying in sixteenth-century England.

Practical Magic, a Blogging Roundup

On By Chas S. Clifton

• From Lupa at Therioshamanism, “How to Talk to Dead Things.” Dead animal things, that is.

• From Strategic Sorcery, on why setting goals is not the same as accomplishment.

• From Gangleri’s Grove, thoughts on working with ancestors and a ritual for “elevating” them.

• From Witchful Thinking, a reminder about the basics of Moon phases in practical magic.

An Old-Fashioned Funeral

On By Chas S. Clifton4 Comments

In the southern Colorado town of Crestone, a woman gets an old-fashioned funeral.

Belinda Ellis’ farewell went as she wanted. One by one, her family placed juniper boughs and logs about her body, covered in red cloth atop a rectangular steel grate inside a brick-lined hearth. With a torch, her husband lit the fire that consumed her, sending billows of smoke into the blue-gray sky of dawn.

People do still occasionally light funeral pyres. The Pagan Book of Living and Dying (1997) describes one such in Texas. When I read that chapter, I suddenly understood references in Classical texts to “funeral games.”

It takes hours for the pyre to burn down, so what do you do in the meantime? Race your horses? Play volleyball?

But disregard the next-to-last paragraph in the Yahoo article—the legendary stuff.  Crestone is a quirky place—and people work to keep it that way—but overall there  is more “fakelore” generated about the San Luis Valley than about anywhere else in Colorado. People even say that I was born there.

Around the Pagan Blogosphere

On By Chas S. Clifton5 Comments

• Ways of leaving offerings for land wights, at Golden Trail.

• Hermes versus the Internal Revenue Service (and a great poem) at The Alchemist’s Garden.

• “Animist Human Diplomats”  at Adventures in Animism. Are you asking more than you are giving?

• Still on the theme of place: Dealing with a psychically hostile place of the dead, from Three Shouts on a Hilltop.

The Revenants’ Tales and What They Tell Us

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments

A few key ideas hold the promise of keeping Pagan religions distinct from the people who go around claiming the “all Truth is one” etc. (When I hear that, I also hear “You will be assimilated.”)

An obvious one is polytheism.

Another is the concept of the multiple soul, which wends its way through Claude Lecouteux’s The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind, published by Inner Traditions.

Focused mainly on Indo-European traditions, this attempts to illuminate a “complex belief system at whose heart reside the fundamental beliefs touching upon the soul, the beyond, and ancestor worship” (vii).

Lecouteux, a retired French medievalist, relies heavily on old stories and sagas and a little bit on archaeology  to seek the premodern “Pagan” experience of ghosts, the virtuous dead, the unquiet dead, and other revenants—those who return from the dead for whatever reason.

Not surprisingly, the increasing influence of Christianity led to changed attitudes, with a little top-down guidance:

The notion of suffrages [prayers, petitions] helpful to the dead gave birth to the directives serving to eliminate worship of the dead, a core feature of paganism. It was adulterated and recuperated with great subtlety and wherever possible, the saints replaced the good ancestors—the objects of a cult connection to the [Indo-European] third function (fecundity/fertility)—and liturgical feasts replaced the pagan festivals (50).

Naturally, the concept of multiple souls familiar to more shamanic cultures had to be dampened down to the Christian norm, although some ideas of “the double” lingered.

Nonetheless, both these early-medieval  European Christians and their Pagan ancestors shared a pre-modern world view that was more alike than ours with theirs. In the author’s words, they participated in “a divine cosmogony: [where] perpetual motion animated the world, pulling men and things; everything fit inside a perfect circle encompassing the visible and the invisible; human beings and gods; the real and the possible; past, present, and future” (153).

We try to return to what we imagine that pre-modern “wholeness” felt like. Indeed, such a return has been a theme of art and religion for several centuries. Through ritual, magic, entheogens, or extreme experience we cross the divide going backwards, but it is very very difficult to stay.

Perhaps that longing for the “perfect circle” is why one colleague argues that in contemporary Paganism, the calendar—the wheel of the year—is more important than the gods.

One digression: through reading The Return of the Dead, I understand better why people being executed are often given hoods or blindfolds. It is not to spare their feelings, nor even is it just to depersonalize them and make the the executioners’ job easier. It is to prevent the dying person from casting the Evil Eye upon the living.

I am keeping this book at hand for reading on winter nights.

(For the grammarians reading this: The vague pronoun reference in the post’s title is deliberate.)