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ОглавлениеCultural responses to death anxiety
‘Sorrow has entered my heart! I am afraid of death.’
— The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2100 BC
‘The great leveller, Death: Not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last’
—The Odyssey, 8th Century BC
The dread of death is a problem nearly as old as time itself. From the ancient laments about death immortalised in the epic poems of Babylon and Greece to the desperate attempts at bodily preservation in the Egyptian mummification rituals, fears of death are hardly a modern invention. In fact, themes of mortality and our efforts to cope with death can be perceived as the common thread underlying much of human history and culture. Our awareness of our own mortality, arguably a cognitive capacity unique to our species, has been famously referred to by William James as ‘the worm at the core’ of human existence, lingering in the shadows of our daily lives. Unsurprisingly, then, human societies have employed an array of cultural tools in order to combat this fear of death across the ages, including using art, ritual, literature, religion poetry, philosophy, music and theatre to deal with the ever-present dread of death.
Myth and Ritual
Many ancient myths reveal a fixation on themes of death. For instance, when one reviews the mythology of ancient Greece, for which extensive written evidence is available, themes of mortality and ageing can be seen to riddle this ancient belief system. On the surface, much of Greek myth appears to emphasise the inevitability of death, despite the desperate attempts of individuals to escape it. For example, the goddess responsible for choosing the timing and manner of each individual’s death was known as Atropos, ‘the inevitable’. It is also the immortality of ‘the deathless gods’ that is their defining feature, and it is this immortality which separates them from humankind. Although the Greek gods famously fall in love with many unsuspecting (and often unwilling) mortals, even they cannot prevent the eventual death of their beloved humans. The goddess Aphrodite herself is said to grieve the mortality of one of her mortal lovers, lamenting: ‘Old age will soon enfold you, remorseless, the same for everyone, for it stands one day at the side of all human beings, deadly, dispiriting – even the gods abhor it’ (Homer, Cashford, 2003, p. 95). The mythology of ancient Greece is also teeming with examples of mortals who have tried and yet failed to cheat death. Most notably, the mythical musician Orpheus was famously unsuccessful in his quest to rescue his beloved wife Eurydice from the underworld after her death.
While these and other ancient myths emphasised the inescapable nature of death, many rituals appear to offer the hope of immortality. One such ritual is that of Egyptian burial rites, or mummification, which serves as a vivid example of the attempt to cheat death. The process of mummification was incredibly lengthy and intricate, centering on elaborate mortuary procedures. Spanning 70 days, the process involved removing organs, casting spells to prevent decay, and various techniques to ensure the corpse remained lifelike in appearance, such as filling the body cavity with sawdust or inserting artificial eyes. These Egyptian mummification rituals represent a desperate and ambitious attempt to prevent any decay of the body and thus ensure the successful revival of the individual in the afterlife. The Egyptian belief in the immortality of their pharaoh, such that each pharaoh is viewed as a literal incarnation of their predecessor, highlights a similar desire to elude the inevitable.
Of course, the Egyptians were not the only early society to deny their mortality. Despite the emphasis on the inescapable nature of death in the ancient Greek myths, a closer examination of their rituals reveals some interesting loopholes in this supposed inevitability. While exploring ancient burial sites across the Mediterranean, archaeologists have unearthed numerous golden tablets, inscribed with guides to the afterlife. These tablets were given to devotees of the mythical figure of Orpheus — who, as mentioned above, famously tried to cheat death — and act as a form of ‘golden ticket’ to paradise. By being armed in death with crucial passwords required for entry (such as ‘I am the son of Earth and Starry Heaven. But my race is heavenly’) and being equipped with this engraved GPS of the underworld (‘You will find to the left of the house of Hades a spring, and standing by it a white cypress. Do not even approach this spring!’), the wearer may access the most elite spaces in the underworld.
The Eleusinian mystery festival serves as a similarly intriguing example of the ancient attempts to secure immortality. Although breaching the code of secrecy surrounding the festival carried the penalty of death, historians have fortunately extracted several key features of the rites. The festival attracted thousands of attendants each year from across the Mediterranean, and was devoted to celebrating Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. Initiates who participated in these rites did so with the guarantee of a better lot in the afterlife and were promised access to a privileged position in the dreary land of the dead. Participating in the Eleusinian mystery also allowed initiates a form of practice for their own death, as the rituals also involved an enactment of one’s moment of death and journey to the afterlife. These significant benefits in the afterlife made the festival so popular across the ancient world that Cicero, the famous Roman politician, considered the Eleusinian mysteries to be the greatest contribution to society that Athens ever produced. Despite the endless list of innovations to emerge from Athens, including the Olympic Games, theatre, and democracy itself, what could be better than eternal life?
Religion
In addition to myth and ritual, religion offers yet another clear method by which humans have attempted to deal with the dread of death across history. This strong focus on allaying death anxiety across centuries of religious texts and ideologies has led some theological theorists to argue that fears of death lie at the heart of most, if not all, of religion. Many of the earliest religious cults, emerging from 4th Century BC, were based on heroes who were said to have cheated death, with the promise of eternal life for their followers. The Abrahamic religions, including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, emerged alongside such cults and similarly offer literal immortality to devout adherents. Although these three religions address fears of death through this promise of eternal life, other religions are not always so black and white in their perspectives on death. For instance, Buddhism places a heavy emphasis on accepting one’s own impermanence and the inevitability of death. Buddhist scriptures repeatedly encourage adherents to contemplate their transient nature, and even to meditate for long periods on the image of their own corpse, or that of a loved one, decomposing. In fact, some Buddhist practitioners choose to meditate in front of human remains in order to drive home the inevitability of their own death. It is not uncommon for meditation halls to feature human skulls or skeletons.
Despite this clear emphasis on death acceptance in Buddhism, some lesser known practices highlight the universal human striving to conquer death, even in the face of religious scriptures which are emphatically advising the opposite approach. In Japan, the unusual and ambitious practice of ‘self-mummification’, a deliberate method of dying with the aim of living forever, is one such example of this. Self-mummification involves the monk limiting their diet to berries, twigs, and bark for at least five years, in order to reduce their body fat. For the next thousand days, the individual consumes a tea made from a poisonous substance to protect the body from being defiled by insects after death. Finally, they are buried alive and remain in a seated meditative position until their eventual death. Years later, the tomb is re-opened. Monks whose bodies were successfully preserved after death are honoured as a ‘sokushinbutsu’, or ‘living Buddha’. In the majority of cases, however, the desperate efforts at self-mummification failed, and followers would be greeted with the sight of their leader’s decayed corpse. In fact, only around 20 individuals have been able to achieve this difficult feat. Kōbō-Daishi, a famous Japanese monk and poet is one such example of a successfully-mummified sokushinbutsu. Despite being buried alive in a cave in 835, Kōbō-Daishi’s followers continue to prepare daily meals for him today, which are brought into his cave by the high priest, in the belief that their leader still resides inside, alive and well.
Ironically, despite the lengthy attempts at self-mummification being a clear denial of death, the remains of individuals who have resisted decay continue to be displayed in temples all around Asia in an effort to remind visitors of their own impermanence. Buddhism is not alone in this regard, with the worship of preserved bodily relics and display of corpses being common in Catholicism. So, although religious texts may attempt to assuage believers’ fears of death through the promise of eternal life, or the emphasis on accepting death, the practices observed at religious sites across the world reflect a more complex struggle to embrace our own mortality than that painted for us in the scriptures.
Literature and Art
Across at least 4000 years of human history, fears of death have played a significant role in literature. Most notably, the oldest surviving great work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, is centred entirely on one man’s struggle to cope with loss. Written in 2100 BC, the Babylonian epic poem tells the story of King Gilgamesh, who is devastated after witnessing the death of his close friend Enkidu. This moment has a powerful effect on Gilgamesh: Not only has he just lost his dearest friend, he has suddenly realised that he too will inevitably suffer the same fate one day. Gilgamesh laments:
‘My friend, Enkidu, whom I loved, has turned to clay.
Shall I not be like him, and also lie down,
never to rise again, through all eternity?
…Sorrow has entered my heart! I am afraid of death.’ (George, p. 77–78).
This prompts him to begin an ambitious quest to find the secret of immortality. Of course, he fails to do so and eventually is forced to accept that mortality is simply his lot in life, as it is for all of us. While the epic story of Gilgamesh is famous for its portrait of humankind’s struggle with death, various cultures have similarly dealt with themes in their literature. The plays and poems of the ancient Greeks and Romans were riddled with such themes, and medieval European literature even developed entire genres focused on death, such as the memento mori genre of poetry (translated as: ‘remember, you will die’).
Lived experiences of loss and death have also prompted some of literature’s most famous tales. James Barrie, who went on to write the famous children’s book Peter Pan, was heavily inspired by a family tragedy in his childhood. When James was just 6 years old, his 13-year-old brother died after cracking his skull while ice skating. His mother was devastated at the loss, and James did all that he could to replace the hole that his brother’s death had left, even dressing up in his deceased brother’s clothes and whistling in the same manner that he used to. James’ mother was reportedly comforted by the fact that her favourite son, now dead, would remain a boy forever. It is no coincidence that the full title of Barrie’s famous book is: Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. English novelist Mary Shelley, who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein, seems to have been similarly inspired by loss. In 1815, Mary suffered the death of her newborn daughter, whom she had birthed prematurely just two weeks prior. She was haunted by this death, experiencing visions of her baby, and suffering an acute depression. Only one year later, on discussing ghost stories with friends, Mary wondered whether ‘Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated’. She immediately began to pen her first novel, Frankenstein, which famously tells the story of a young scientist’s decision to resurrect a human corpse, after immersing himself in his experiments to deal with the grief of his mother’s death. Outside of her work, Mary Shelley’s own life tells a similar story of fixation with death. On the first anniversary of Mary’s death, her son opened her keepsake box, finding enclosed locks of her dead children’s hair, and the remains of her husband’s heart, alongside some of his ashes. The bestselling novel Interview with a Vampire, which went on to be made into an Academy Award nominated film, has an eerily similar backstory to that of Frankenstein. Its author, Anne Rice, wrote the novel in just five weeks, while grieving the death of her 4-year-old daughter. Her daughter went on to inspire the character of Claudia, the 5-year-old immortal vampire girl, who, like Peter Pan, will never grow up.
In a similar vein, art has been used for centuries as a way of grappling with mortality. In addition to two genres of art which specifically depict images of death (the Danse Macabre and ‘vanitas’ artwork, popularised in the 15th and 16th Centuries), almost all of the great artists have depicted death in some form, including Gustav Klimt, Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, M.C. Escher, and Edvard Munch. The motifs of crawling ants that famously typify Salvador Dali’s work are intended to represent decay and death, and to remind the viewer of their own impermanence. And, if one wants to see the terror of death immortalised in art, one need only look up Pablo Picasso’s final well-known self-portrait before his death, aptly titled Self Portrait Facing Death.
The Future of Death: Embrace the Inevitable, or Dream of Immortality?
Today, developments in technology are set to rapidly change our relationship with death. Creative ways of holding onto the physical remains of loved ones are becoming increasingly popular, and include the option of having their cremation ashes mixed with ink to be tattooed onto one’s skin, made into a diamond and worn as jewellery, or even pressed into a vinyl record, which can be created to play the favourite song of the deceased, or even a recording of their voice. Further, living in the digital age has led some individuals to design technology which offers a virtual life after death. After the death of a close friend, Eugenia Kuyda developed a program which uses data from a deceased individual’s online profiles and message history, so that a user may simulate conversations with their loved ones long after their death. Although the program is not currently available for public use, its development in 2015 shines a light on the direction that modern technology may be leading us when it comes to dealing with death. But do such programs truly help people grieve, or are they one of many ways in which we continue to try to deny mortality?
While the development of such apps offers some sense of, albeit artificial, continuity after death, other technological advancements provide a more literal promise of immortality. One such example is that of cryonics, a procedure involving the preservation of a human corpse at low temperatures in the hope that it may one day be completely revived. Despite the high cost (averaging between $28,000 to $200,000 USD per body) and the absence of any scientific evidence that the procedure will actually work, nearly 2000 people have already signed up for cryonic preservation. These individuals, based primarily in the United States, hope for ‘a second chance at life’, as the promotional video of one major cryonics organisation optimistically offers, before adding: ‘Considering the alternative, which is certain death, cryonics is the rational scientific wager.’ But is investing in what may be considered the modern equivalent of mummification, rather than becoming comfortable with the inevitability of death, truly the ‘rational’ choice?
Fortunately, alongside this technological push to deny death through any means possible, the last decade has also seen an upsurge in the ‘death positivity’ movement, which hopes to foster societal acceptance of mortality. ‘Death cafés’ represent one increasingly popular manifestation of this movement. These informal gatherings involve a group of people, often strangers, who meet over coffee and cake to discuss death and dying in a non-judgmental and relaxed setting. At present, nearly 9000 death café meetings have been held across 65 countries, suggesting an encouraging degree of success in the movement’s aim of breaking the silence surrounding death, ‘to help people make the most of their (finite) lives’. So, although some modern developments may increasingly lure people into denial, the death positivity movement appears to be fighting back, armed with funeral-planning apps, eco-friendly burial options, and death-themed board games and activity books. The increasing popularity of all of these offers some hope that society may strive to accept death and make the most of our precious moments on this earth, instead of fighting off the inevitable.
The Psychology of Death Anxiety
Terror Management Theory
One leading theory in psychology, Terror Management Theory (TMT), offers a comprehensive account of how our fears of death impact a large number of our behaviours. TMT is largely based on the book The Denial of Death by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, for which the author won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. In his groundbreaking book, Becker proposed that the human motivation to survive, coupled with our awareness that death is inescapable, has the power to produce crippling fear. Emerging from this idea came TMT, a theory which argues that humans have developed two buffers to help us manage this paralysing fear. The first of these two buffers are ‘cultural worldviews’, such as identifying with particular cultural values, supporting a particular political party or sporting team, believing in an afterlife, or pursuing financial or academic success. According to TMT, by endorsing a cultural worldview, such as advocating for a preferred political party, one gains a sense of meaning and permanence, in the belief that by doing so one will ‘live on’ symbolically after one’s own death. The second buffer proposed by TMT is self-esteem, which we obtain by living up to the various values and expectations of our cultural worldview. For example, if my culture promotes materialism and attaining status via financial achievements, then purchasing a new designer handbag or Lamborghini will increase my self-esteem, give me a sense of permanence and meaning, and protect me from anxiety about death.
Hundreds of studies have been conducted over the last four decades which support the central ideas of TMT. By reminding participants of death in various ways in the laboratory, ‘mortality salience’ studies have shown the broad range of ways in which death anxiety may drive human behaviour. For example, one fascinating early study examined the impact of thoughts of death on decision making among a sample of municipal court judges (Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszcynski, & Lyon, 1989). The judges were assigned to one of two conditions: In one condition, they were asked to write about their own death and the emotions that arise surrounding this, while those in the control condition were not. All participants were then given a brief description of a woman who had been arrested for prostitution (that is, an individual who was arguably deemed to have violated cultural worldviews regarding society norms around morality), and asked to assign her bond. The experiment revealed that the judges who had been reminded of death assigned an average bond of $455, relative to the $50 average bond assigned by judges in the control condition. That is, merely thinking of death for a few moments was sufficient to lead these municipal court judges, arguably pillars of reason and justice in our society, to assign a bond that was more than nine times greater than that considered fair and appropriate by their peers. Importantly, this all happened outside of their conscious awareness, suggesting that all of us are vulnerable to the effects of death anxiety without us even necessarily realising it.
Of course, the effects of death anxiety are not limited only to municipal decision making. Rather, hundreds of studies have shown that reminders of death drive a large array of human behaviours. These include spending behaviour, interracial conflict, aggression towards outgroup members (e.g., those with a different religious faith, or differing political views), driving behaviour, religious practice, and even sun tanning. A vast number of everyday behaviours appear to be driven by fears of death, building increasing support for Becker’s suggestion almost half a century ago that death anxiety lies at the heart of much of human action, including procreation, the creation of art, music, and literature, the pursuit of meaningful relationships, and striving for success in our workplaces and day to day lives.
The Dread of Death in Mental Health
While decades of TMT research have taught us much about the role of death anxiety in normal human behaviour, far less is known about the role of death fears in abnormal behaviour. Despite this, there is mounting evidence that death anxiety may, in fact, underlie many manifestations of mental health difficulties. The frequent appearance of the dread of death across the spectrum of mental health conditions and diagnostic categories has led researchers to argue that death anxiety should be considered a transdiagnostic construct, underpinning numerous disorders (Iverach, Menzies, & Menzies, 2014). Although some coping strategies to manage death anxiety may be adaptive, such as pursuing meaningful achievements or building relationships with others, fears of death may also drive unhelpful coping mechanisms, such as avoidance and other maladaptive behaviours. These behaviours, which are intended to protect the individual from their fears of death, may, in fact, play a central role in the development and maintenance of a variety of mental health conditions.
As a result, death anxiety has been implicated in a number of mental illnesses. For example, individuals with panic disorder commonly fear that they are suffering a heart attack, and may seek out medical expertise and appointments with cardiologists in an attempt to keep such worries at bay. Similarly, within illness anxiety, individuals will frequently check their body for signs of disease (including checking their own stools, urine, breasts, heartrate, and anything else that could forewarn death), interpret benign symptoms as threatening, and make repeated requests for medical tests. When turning our attention to the specific phobias, it becomes clear that most, if not all, of the most common phobias (e.g., spiders, heights, flying, water, snakes) centre on feared objects or situations that could directly result in death. Within agoraphobia and post-traumatic stress disorder, an experience of a life-threatening event, such as exposure to a physically threatening event or the loss of a loved one, often precedes the onset of either disorder. In obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), patients will commonly report that their compulsive washing is done in a desperate effort to protect themselves from germs, and the resulting life-threatening illness that could occur. In a similar vein, those who engage in compulsive checking of locks, stovetops, and electric powerpoints likewise ascribe their efforts to attempts to prevent death via household invasion, fires, or electrocution. Death anxiety, alongside other existential concerns such as meaninglessness, has additionally been argued to play a role in depression.
Among all of the aforementioned disorders, scores on measures assessing fears of death have been shown to predict psychopathology, such that higher death anxiety has been proven to predict greater severity of symptoms. Similar results have also been found for conditions as diverse as alcohol use disorder, eating disorders, generalised anxiety disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, and separation anxiety disorder. However, while these proven correlations build support for the idea that death anxiety contributes to these disorders, experimental research is needed to show that the dread of death does indeed cause these conditions, rather than merely being associated with them.
To this end, although only a handful of TMT studies have explored the impact of death anxiety on abnormal or clinically-relevant behaviours, the results are promising. In support of the theorised role of death anxiety in phobias, one study found that mortality salience (in the form of asking participants to reflect on their own death) increased avoidance and perceived threat (e.g., the estimated likelihood that a given spider is dangerous) among spider phobics (Strachan et al., 2007). Interestingly, the same researchers found similar findings regarding social anxiety, a condition with less obvious connections to mortality. Thoughts of death led to participants high in social anxiety spending more time avoiding a subsequent group discussion. This added weight to the argument that death anxiety drives unhelpful avoidance behaviours which maintain anxiety. In a different study, reminders of death led women to restrict their consumption of fattening foods in a subsequent ‘tasting task’, and to perceive themselves as being further from their ideal thinness, suggesting the possible role of death anxiety in eating disorders (Goldenberg, Arndt, Hart & Brown, 2005).
Similarly, one recent study used the mortality salience design among a large sample of participants with OCD (Menzies & Dar-Nimrod, 2017). Reminders of death were found to lead participants to spend twice as long washing their hands, relative to those in the control condition, suggesting the central role of death anxiety in driving compulsive washing in OCD. Again, like the municipal court judges described above, these participants were completely unaware that the reminders of death they experienced earlier in the experiment had any effect on their washing behaviour.
Conclusion
Death anxiety is a central part of the human experience, and can be traced throughout 4000 years of human history. While our awareness of our own mortality is something that we must all grapple with, perhaps through bolstering buffers such as adherence to cultural worldviews and heightened self-esteem, this issue appears to plague some individuals more than others. In fact, increasing scientific evidence suggests that fears of death lie at the heart of a multitude of mental health conditions, and may drive numerous clinically-relevant behaviours. If this is indeed the case, what can we learn about confronting mortality from the tales of individuals who have been gripped by mental illness and the dread of death? Part Two of our book explores the fascinating journeys of ten individuals in facing their existential fears.
