It is striking the extent to which the question of survival as a question with a possible “no” answer is ignored by people prior to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reviewing the evidence for the human state of mind, primitive and cultured, in early Rome, Greece, Egypt, Arabia, Judea, India, China, Africa, Polynesia, Mexico, and the Americas, we find always and everywhere very great interest in the state of the human  deceased.  But there is practically no concern with a possibility that the dead have come to a real end, to ‘some kind of psychic and spiritual evaporation’, as in the modern nightmare. As early as 1888 the evidence for telepathy had accumulated to such a point that Henry Sedgwick expressed a hope that the growing evidence would so affect the younger and more open-minded portion of the scientific world  that  there would be a rush of ardent investigators into the field. Alas! the bulk of the scientific world did not want to investigate the facts but only to ignore them or explain them away (Tyrrell, The Personality  of  Man).

It is just assumed by older peoples, both primitive and cultured, that the dead have gone on, somewhere. The only questions  (and they are very live questions) are where have they gone, what is their relationship to the quick, and how should the quick behave toward   them. The notion of proving that the dead survive is of recent occurrence and is in many ways a typically modem idea. Earlier peoples obviously felt that proof was not necessary at that level of the question. Of course we moderns are in the habit of thinking of our forebears  as ignorant and credulous people, particularly in such matters; but we could be quite wrong in this view. However, that may be, survival is widely assumed to be a fact, generally taken for granted with no great fanfare, among humanity everywhere prior to our own era.

In the New Testament account of the after-death adventures of Dives, for example, when Abraham is approached by Dives for permission to appear to his brothers, it is not at all survival of death to which he wishes to testify but the fact that the posthumous state of the greedy is a hard one (Luke 16:  19-31).

Survival of death is taken in a most matter-of-fact way in the Old Testament, too. King Saul, for instance, although he has forbidden necromancy to his subjects, makes use of it himself in a tight pinch in order to consult Samuel, deceased. The appearance of Samuel is dramatic enough, but no one is surprised at the event per se; the drama concerns the tragic plight of Saul, the displeasure of Samuel at being summoned, and incidentally the amazing courage and good-hearted­ ness of the medium, who served an unpredictable and violent king at the risk of her life (I Sam. 28:7-25).

Scripture, great literature, mythology, traditional stories, and folk­ lore abound in interesting and varied descriptions of the condition and doings of people who have passed through death. But it  never seems  to occur to anyone to question the ongoing existence of those who have died.

It is important to realize this most significant fact and  probe  honestly for its meaning. Our job would  be easier if we would  recognize that we are inclined  to project our own  peculiar  state of  soul into  the  past  and to  assume  things  about  other  peoples that  simply  were   not   true  at all.

WAGNER

Pardon! but it is a treat to cast Ourselves into the spirit of the past,  To see what sages formerly  expressed, Then to what noble heights we have progressed!

FAUST

0 yes! Unto the stars on high! The ages of the past, my friend, Are to us a book of seven seals; what you suspected To be the spirit of the times, proves in the end  To be your spirit-nothing more- In which the ages are reflected

—   Goethe, Faust

 

The human race, until recent times, has been certain of man’s survival of death. Why? Because earlier peoples were superstitious wishful thinkers, childlike hopers and dreamers? Because they had more imagination than we have? Because they were less careful of the truth than we? These explanations are given or assumed very commonly, but we have to ask whether they in  themselves  are  not  wishful  thinking, and whether they really do explain anything, or whether on the other hand they merely attempt to explain away some rather insistent facts. There may be other and truer answers.

Rudolf Steiner, for example (a man in an unusual position  to  know) , says that a kind of inner vision remained in a considerable portion of humanity until recent centuries and that our forerunners experienced nature radically differently from the way we do; they saw the physical world less clearly but the inner or subtle worlds much more directly and clearly than we do. If this is true, survival of death among earlier peoples would have been accepted as a fact not so much on faith as on the basis of a commonly and widely shared experience. The dead were seen to survive and known to survive. Questions and doubts about survival could not arise until, as in our times, the vision of the race bad so far changed its focus that this basic factual datum was no longer accessible to fairly common observation.

Whatever the explanation may be, when the available records are permitted to tell their story and not “interpreted” to conform to present­ day views, one thing is clear: The “urge to immortality” which Rank recognizes as basic in human psychology took the form in earlier people of a concern with, not whether they would survive, but  in  what state they would survive. That they would live on after death is remarkably seldom questioned.    ·

Note further how this works out in the New Testament: The facts of survival are assumed in a very routine way  throughout  the Gospels and Acts. Jesus comes walking along on the water, and the disciples take him for a spirit (Matt. 14:24- 27). Their instant reaction to a preter­natural physical occurrence is to think of it in terms of a  posthumous appearance. Lazarus winds up in Abraham’s bosom  and Dives in hell on a most matter-of-fact basis, with no stir at all about their survival and indeed no interest in it as such (the interest is in their state after death) (Luke 16:19-31). Moses and  Elias,  long  dead,  appear  and talk at the transfiguration of Jesus, but there is no comment whatsoever upon their survival as such; it is utterly taken for granted (Matt. 17: 1- 4). Peter, miraculously released from prison,  appears at the door of  the house of some friends, and they, supposing him dead, also suppose the appearance to be a phenomenon  of  the after-death  state–“It  is  his angel”  (Acts 12: 15).  Abraham’s bosom” is not, of course, a reference to  the  breast  of  the  human being Abraham . It is an expression, of Talmudic origin, indicating the abode of Abraham,   a  specific  post-mortem   state,   that  of   the   saved,   or  paradise.

In view of this common and almost casual acceptance of the fact of survival, a most interesting point emerges: The terrific impact of Christ Jesus’ appearances after death can in no wise be accounted for by saying that people were excited because a man had survived death in the usual and everywhere-accepted way as a spook, shade, ghost, “angel,” or “spirit.”

On the contrary, the surviving Jesus went out of His way to show that He was not a ghost but a person with a flesh-and-blood-and-bones body  (Luke  24:37-39)  who  ate  fish  and  honey  (Luke  24:41-43) and who “sat at meat” with mortal men (Luke 24:30). It is made plain that the arisen body of Jesus is radically altered in appearance: Mary  of Magdala does not recognize this body at first sight (John 20: 15-18) and neither do Peter and some of the others (John 21:4-12); furthermore it has new and amazing functions, such as passing through closed doors and appearing and disappearing instantaneously (John 20: 19, 26). At the same time the resurrection body has all of the properties of a living, carnate  not-yet-dead human being walking this solid earth, including the property of eating ordinary men’s food.

The notion, sometimes advanced by spiritists, that the resurrection body of Christ Jesus was a “full-form materialization” seems to me  very  far  from  the truth,  little  as  we  are  able  to  comprehend  what  the  full,  staggering   truth must be. Anyone who (as I have) has seen a variety of the  apparitions  materialized by the process of mediumship should be able to witness that these grotesque creatures must be almost as remote as anything could be from the embodied Reality who arose triumphant over death and  appeared  to men  on  that first Easter morning and afterward. A “full-form materialization” is invariably a kind of larval phenomenon, almost always confined to the dimmed-out or darkened seance room. If that is all the risen Christ signifies,  then indeed,  God help  us! our  faith is horribly in vain.

Christ’s resurrection hit certain of His contemporaries hard. It is universally admitted as a key factor, if not the  key factor, in the power and growth of the movement which subsequently took form around His person and His teaching; it inspired His friends, dismayed His enemies, and quickly began to alter the course of history. But note well what caused the stir: It was not that a man survived death. It was how he survived.

I know that in certain theological circles today it is held that the New Testament cannot be taken as evidence that anything really, actually, and historically happened in such events as the resurrection of Christ but that these accounts must be taken as psychological and mythical structures exclusively. My own view  is  that the theologians holding this theory are in error and that, while psychological and mythical elements are abundantly and significantly present in the Christian scripture, they can by no means be taken to exclude the historical facts or the impact and meaning of those  facts.  That  psychology  and  mythology  on  the  one hand and history on the other must be mutually exclusive areas of human experience –   this is a conclusion I do not fathom and a kind of logic I do not  follow.

So Christ’s survival of death and ordinary men’s survival of death, although they may be related in important ways, are nevertheless two very different subjects, and they should be considered separately. Otherwise a study which is quite difficult anyhow may be unnecessarily confused.

Now therefore the question can be put this way: Quite apart from the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, which is another and deeper and far more exciting question, do the persons of ordinary men and women remain alive after the death of the physical body?

And I shall have to say, in the teeth of much present-day materialistic superstition to the contrary, that the answer undoubtedly is “yes.” This answer is based not at all in the first place upon religious belief or supernatural faith of any kind but strictly and solely upon a very large mass of data which are accessible to observation and investigation.

These data, as already indicated, include not only extra-sensory perception and psychic phenomena, which are open to examination and evaluation by the techniques of physics, chemistry, statistical method, and other modern disciplines, but also a large body of historical and anthropological data which so far have not been very seriously looked into, in the light of the survival question, by historians and anthropologists.

A few pioneering psychologists-notably Freud, Rank, and Jung­ have probed this area with a scientific eye. Jung’s and Rank’s re­ searches have thrown valuable light on the question of immortality. The importance of his achievements in other directions quite aside, Freud’s studies and judgments of these anthropological data, from the standpoint of our present interest, are heavily warped in terms of his own materialistic assumptions. Freud reads himself and’ his century’s prejudices  into these data in a way that seriously  distorts  their   plain original meaning. Freud and others like him proceed upon the un­ critical, unexamined, and evidently unconscious assumption that the people they are studying in these anthropological records have the minds of rather stupid children. It never seems to occur to Freud, for example, that these people, limited as they may be in the technological and mechanical aspects of development which we prize so highly, at the same time may be at least as capable as modern man, and possibly much more so, in the areas of certain biological and psychic insights. The anthropological material, however, speaks for itself. Examine, for example, just the material given in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (pp. 847-856) and in  Frazer’s  Golden  Bough  (pp.  207-225,  341-344, 443, 787-813). (The amount of such material is large. For further references see the bibliographies in connection with the article entitled “Anthropology” in the Columbia Encyclopedia and the article entitled “Anthropology” [bibliographical items 6 and  8] in the   Encyclopedia Britannica.).