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.
Afterlife Beliefs and
Phenomena Index |
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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