Peter Stanford - Heaven - A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country

For those who are left behind by the death of a loved one, the message is clear: you’ve got to put it behind you, as I was told, countless times, by well-meaning souls in the weeks and months after my mother’s death. The subtext, I see now, was ‘for God’s sake don’t make us think about death’. Any suggestion that I didn’t want to rush to forget was taken as a sign of morbidity of Queen Victoria-like proportions and eventually prompted a referral to an analyst. Mourning is now considered perverse if it lasts more than a week. Twenty years ago we would not, for instance, go out to the cinema or the theatre or dinner if a close relative had just died. Today we are cajoled into outings on the grounds that they will be a comfort. Some comfort.

A hundred years ago we had great public funerals and private sex – one to do with the cult of death, the other with, inter alia , the hope of life. Now we have the opposite. And so with death, even among the rituals of a Christian funeral, we refrain from pressing our noses against the smell of our own physical corruption, from seeing, touching or holding a dead body. We rely on undertakers and hospices to maintain a cordon around the unpalatable reality and save our most flamboyant grieving for those we know only through the media and therefore can’t touch: for the British it was the Princess of Wales, for the Americans, John Kennedy Junior, when he dropped out of the sky.

Yet I sense a welcome reaction against this sanitisation of death, another Gothic revival. The literature of AIDS, as the historian Jonathan Dollimore has noted in his study Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture , has brought us back into touch with the trauma of death, questioning what happens next for so many promising lives which have ended prematurely. In Jim Crace’s Booker-shortlisted novel Being Dead , the intimate link between the physical horror of violence, sexuality and death dominates the narrative.

I hope that this very personal quest for some sort of heaven, wherever it may be, marrying the religious and the secular, the real and imaginary, will in its own way add some small momentum to this movement to reconnect us with death. If we ignore the pain and gloss over death, then we will spend correspondingly little time on heaven. To live fully we have to think about death when we are fully alive.

My atheist and scientist friends tell me that the notion of an immortal soul is absurd. What I’m really talking about, they say, is the mind and the personality, which are located in the brain. When the brain dies, they perish; nothing is left. When I tell them about the thoughts that cross my mind as I sit, cradling my daughter, the most they will concede is that a predisposition can be passed down from one generation to another. Mozart was good at music because it ran in the family. He might have been good even if it hadn’t, but they will accept that his genius might be down to more than nurture or chance.

When I try out this theory, as I lie half awake in the morning with my baby daughter and my dreams of reincarnation, I see it as a starting point, somewhere science and religion, psychology and faith, all touch. So though I make no promise at the outset of reaching my destination, there is, I venture, a glimmer of hope.

Christianity, the arch-promoter of heaven, is the second-hand rose of world religions. Nearly every item in its bulging wardrobe has been begged, borrowed or stolen from a previous owner, be it from the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans or various Near Eastern belief systems. What enabled Christianity to flourish in the West was a combination of inspired leadership, the tremendous passion it managed to generate, and, most of all, its unique synthesis of time-honoured ideas into a code that had both a universal resonance and a simplicity. In its early days, Christianity was happy to acknowledge its debts. Newness and originality were not regarded as a plus in religious terms at the time. Continuity was more important. Radical departures were regarded as impious, while the cloak of antiquity conferred many advantages. It was only much later, when at the height of its powers, that Christianity began to rewrite its past and edit out those who had influenced it.

This wider pattern is clearly seen in the development of the idea of heaven. The Christians were by no means the first travellers to hit on paradise as a destination where all the stresses and strains of this world would waft gently away amid clouds, soothing music and the omnipresence of the ultimate guide. Nevertheless, they realised to the full the potential appeal of such a place as an antidote to what for most was a miserable life on earth, and so promoted it with a vigour hitherto unseen. It proved an effective way of wooing waverers into their fold and, when heaven was twinned with hell as a carrot and stick, keeping them there. However, the origins of this paradise in the sky predate the birth of Jesus by many centuries.

From earliest times, there had been an interest in the concept of a destination to which the dead travelled. For many, this was a collective experience and involved no system of judgement. The Dieri of southeastern Australia are an aboriginal people whose customs have not changed since the Neolithic age. They envisage the dead as going to what they call the River of the Sky, located in the stars of the Milky Way. Although they have a fine time there, they do continue to communicate with those left behind and occasionally return as spirits to haunt their relatives’ sleep.

Others, however, evolved more complex and judgemental systems. In Egypt, the civilisation that thrived along the Nile and its delta from the fourth millennium BC until the time of classical Greece and Rome, had unusually well-refined notions of an afterlife, even if religion was not organised in any institutional form. They were an integral part of Egyptian life, as much taken for granted as the ebb and flow of the Nile. The Egyptians searched in their religion for something collective beyond the cycles of everyday existence, for a timeless, unchanging cosmos. The afterlife was part of that search, as the mummies and artefacts in the death chambers of the pyramids make abundantly clear.

They believed that a part of the body, thought to be either the heart or the stomach, and roughly equivalent to what we now call the soul, left the body at death and remained active on earth. It was often depicted as a human-headed bird, the ba, and was acknowledged to have physical needs, occasionally returning to the corpse. Hence the advanced art of mummification, so that the body would not rot, and the supplies of food that were left in the grave, along with a route out of the burial chamber or pyramid. The Egyptians also believed in the ka – the intellect and spirit of the person. This in turn had two parts – one which was effectively the body’s double and which stayed with the corpse in the tomb, and another which was the part that soared to a new world.

The Egyptians labelled this place the kingdom of the god Osiris, the lord of the dead and the judge of souls in afterlife. Osiris was based on a historical figure, the first pharaoh, who, after his own death, became ruler of the world beyond. The ka would be ushered into Osiris’s court by Anubis, a jackal-headed god. The candidate would then be put on one side of a set of scales. On the other was an ostrich feather. Since goodness was deemed to be very light, if he or she had been good they would not tip the balance and would be welcomed in to an eternal pleasure dome of banquets, contests, dancing and fun, where there was no illness, hunger, sorrow or pain. If they tipped the scales, they were consigned to an ill-defined underworld of monsters. The verdict was recorded in a court record by Thoth, Osiris’s son.