Book of the Dead

A few years ago, the British Museum had a large exhibition for the Egyptian Book of the Dead. According to John Taylor, the curator of the exhibition, it's a practical guide to the next world, with spells that would help you on your journey:

• spells for controlling your own body after death;
• spells for protecting yourself from attack;
• spells for satisfying the gods and demons guarding the gateways you must pass through.

We bought a jigsaw puzzle at the time, which we finally got around to solving this Christmas. The jigsaw at least we solved. But what about the meaning of the picture?

Page from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer, c. 1275 B.C.E., 19th Dynasty, 45.7 x 83.4 cm, Thebes, Egypt © Trustees of the British Museum

The picture shows a ceremony called the Opening of the Mouth. This is a ritual performed on a mummy (in this case, Hunefer) to enable the dead person to breathe, to speak, and to consume ritual offerings. The priests are waving the foreleg of a bull calf over the heads of Hunefer's grieving wife and daughter.
 
But the spell has already been cast, so why would Hunefer need to know the spell? To my mind, the purpose of this particular page doesn't seem like practical guidance at all, but more like bureaucratic compliance. It is a certificate (audit trail) to prove that the Opening of the Mouth ceremony has been correctly cast. One might imagine an official in the Egyptian afterlife scanning the document, rather in the same manner as a US immigration official checking your visa waiver and customs declaration form. 

So the Book of the Dead seems to conflate and confuse the functions of guidebook and logbook. John Taylor acknowledges that parts of the Book don't make sense to the modern mind, and speculates:

"Perhaps there was a box-ticking mentality going on here: you should have one of these in your tomb so you get it and it doesn’t really matter if it’s completely accurate or not. You’ve got it, it’s there, it’s in the tomb, and it has got the right spells on it. It’s a part of the burial kit you must have."

Box-ticking? From one of the most bureaucratic cultures in the Ancient World? Surely not!

---

Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Exhibition at the British Museum, November 2010 - March 2011.

Page from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer, 1285 BC (Google Cultural Institute, retrieved 2 Jan 2016)

Hunefer, Book of the Dead (Khan Academy, retrieved 2 Jan 2016)

John Taylor, What is a Book of the Dead? (British Museum Blog, September 2010). A bit of afterlife admin? (British Museum Blog, December 2010).

Wikipedia: Ancient Egypt, Opening of the Mouth Ceremony

Death or Dentist

@sciencenow (via @jchyip) claims that Fear of Death Makes People Into Believers (of Science) (June 2013)

The article reports on a British experiment in which researchers invited subjects EITHER to contemplate their own death OR to contemplate dental pain. But contemplating death is not the same as fear of death. As I have pointed out on this blog before (a) the contemplation of one's own death is a standard meditative practice, and (b) contemplating dental pain is probably a lot more realistic and unpleasant than contemplating one's death.

So why do researchers persist in constructing a dubious comparison between death and dental pain?


Mortality salience and the spreading activation of worldview-relevant constructs: exploring the cognitive architecture of terror management
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2002 Sep;131(3):307-24

From terror to joy: automatic tuning to positive affective information following mortality salience
Psychol Sci. 2007 Nov;18(11):984-90

---

Sex and Death (October 2011)
Wikipedia: Mortality Salience

Sex and Death

Evolutionary psychologists have found another link between sex and death. Apparently death makes men more interested in sex.

Researchers at the University of Kansas told men to think about their own deaths, and found that men responded more vigorously to sexual pictures and had increased heart rates when viewing them, compared to when they thought about dental pain. Apparently this proves that men with low life expectancy are likely to shag anything that moves, in the hope of passing on their genes. Oh, for intercourse sake!

The researchers believe that contemplating one's death mimics conditions of 'low survivability'. It obviously hasn't occurred to them (a) that the contemplation of one's own death is a standard meditative practice, and that (b) contemplating dental pain is probably a lot more realistic and unpleasant than contemplating one's death.



(Contemplating one's own death may actually result in a longer and happier life, and we might imagine that women would prefer to get pregnant by men with better life chances. We might also imagine that the total quantity of sexual activity is influenced by female psychology as well as male psychology, but that's probably too complicated for Omri Gillath and his colleagues to work out.)

Bad Economy Means More Sex For Men (Science 2.0, October 2011)

See also Wynne Parry, Why thoughts of death may be good for you (LiveScience, 4 May 2012)

Death as POSIWID 4

In the flurry of articles and blogposts following the sad but inevitable death of Steve Jobs, many journalists and bloggers have found apposite quotes from his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. I'm about to quote something from it myself, which continues a discussion we've been having here about the purpose of death.

"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

[Stanford University, June 2005]

Steve Jobs is here following the Buddhist way of thinking.

"Death, far from being a subject to be shunned and avoided, is the key that unlocks the seeming mystery of life. It is by understanding death that we understand life; for death is part of the process of life in the larger sense. In another sense, life and death are two ends of the same process and if you understand one end of the process, you also understand the other end. Hence, by understanding the purpose of death we also understand the purpose of life." V.F. Gunaratna, Buddhist Reflections on Death

"As long as there is fear of death, life itself is not being lived at its best. So one of the very fundamental reasons for contemplating death, for making this reality fully conscious, is that of overcoming fear. The contemplation of death is not for making us depressed or morbid, it is rather for the purpose of helping to free us from fear." Ajahn Jagaro, Death and Dying

"By understanding the purpose of death we also understand the purpose of life."

Now please go and watch Steve Jobs' whole speech. [Stanford University, June 2005]

Death as POSIWID 3

December 6th 2007. Melvin Bragg hosts a discussion on Genetic Mutation for the BBC Radio series In Our Time.

At one point in the discussion, someone observed that natural selection doesn't select against those individuals who die in middle age after having produced heirs. But what wasn't mentioned was the idea of death as a useful evolutionary mechanism - since excessive longevity might reduce the turnover of generations and thereby reduce the effective rate of evolutionary change.

Meanwhile, aging parents may produce offspring with a larger quantity of genetic mutations.

Evolutionary biologists are usually careful to avoid making overly teleological statements about the "purpose" or "purposes" of nature, but there is certainly an idea that some things are there because of their evolutionary effect. In this sense, there may be an evolutionary "purpose" for ageing and death.

Humanism Rocks

In March 2007, a US politician "came out" as an atheist:

• Stark's atheist views break political taboo (San Francisco Chronicle, March 14th 2007)
• Humanists Praise Pete Stark for “Coming Out” as a Nontheist (American Humanist Association)
  

The following day, the American Humanist Association ran an advertisement in the Washington Post, congratulating Stark and identifying a number of other prominent humanists including their former honorary president Kurt Vonnegut (pdf).

Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11th, 2007.

With those selected facts, it would be easy to construct a superstitious explanation for Vonnegut's death. But Wikipedia identifies two other people who died on the same day as Vonnegut: Roscoe Lee Browne (son of a Baptist minister) and Ronald Speirs (US Army officer who is rumoured to have killed several German prisoners and one US sergeant). There is only one pattern here.

Scissors Paper Stone 2

Speaking on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Labour MP Gwyneth Dunwoody wondered why anyone would use Polonium 210 to assassinate a Russian dissident, it being much easier and cheaper to use a gun.

All depends on your purpose. If you want a nice quiet murder, best use a method that doesn't get into the papers, like a pre-arranged car crash. (Of course this method won't keep you out of the papers if your victim is some rich bloke's son with his pregnant girlfriend.) For all I know, there are hundreds of dissidents from various countries being quietly bumped off.

But if you want to put the fear of Stalin into the survivors, then you need something dramatic - like a poisoned umbrella, or perhaps leaving the body hanging from Blackfriars Bridge. An obscure isotope probably comes into this category. [note 1]

Meanwhile, Dr Alex Pravda [note 2] warns that if the Russian people think that Western media are unjustly blaming the Russian authorities, then this will benefit Putin domestically [BBC News, November 22nd]. But there is nothing like a good mystery with political overtones to keep the British public entertained.

Note 1: I am not saying that all these mysterious deaths were organized by the same people, merely that they seem to follow a similar pattern.

Note 2: Yes there really is an Oxford academic called Dr Pravda. He is a Fellow of the Russian and East European Centre at St Anthony's College, Oxford.

Technorati tags: POSIWID

Death as POSIWID 2

In my earlier post Death as POSIWID, I wrote:

Many public figures end their careers in failure and disgrace (because they have no other way to quit), and this makes space for the next generation of public figures.

A journalist commenting on today's resignation of David "Blind Trust" Blunkett recalled something Enoch Powell once said:

"All political careers end in failure"

But each failure is different, and provides an interesting and sometimes ironic coda to the political career it terminates. Blunkett brought down by biometrics and DNA, Clinton brought down by charm and sexual hunger. And of course Powell himself, an intellectual whose conscience seemed stronger than his ambition, and who was commonly regarded even by his enemies as the most intelligent man in politics, who was brought down (or perhaps set up) after making the infamous Rivers of Blood speech, despite claiming innocence and surprise about its possible interpretation by the Far Right. 

But these are not failures of politics but successes. It was quite correct for Powell to be denied high office, and it is quite correct for Blunkett to be hauled over the coals by the media for getting so closely involved with a company whose commercial interests interact so obviously with his ministerial duties. This shows that the system works, eventually, towards the correct outcome.

Death as POSIWID

Aidan asks whether death can be a POSIWID.

There is a nice ambiguity about the word "end", which can mean either purpose or death/ending. Thus Hegelians (from Marx to Fukuyama) discuss the "end" of capitalism or the "end" of history, and Freudians (including Lacan) talk about the "end" of psychoanalysis.

There are many entities whose ending is in exhaustion and/or structural collapse. A car runs out of fuel and into a tree, and a tree falls down in a high wind. What (if anything) does that tell us about the purpose of the car or the tree?

We can understand the car within a fuel consumption system: the purpose of the car is to consume fuel (with a obvious effect on Middle Eastern politics). We can understand the tree within the political economy of forestry: the purpose of the tree is to create wood for furniture. Obviously there are many other ways of understanding both cars and trees.

Many public figures end their careers in failure and disgrace (because they have no other way to quit), and this makes space for the next generation of public figures. In biology, we can understand death as a purpose only when we pay attention to the genotype rather than the phenotype. This involves shifting the system frame.

Some public figures even seem to hasten towards failure and disgrace, by getting caught behaving in ways that are grossly incompatible with their public persona.

In order to use POSIWID as an explanation for apparently death-seeking behaviour, we are forced to find a system frame in which this makes sense. If large organizations have a death-wish, perhaps this helps to create space and energy for the generation/emergence of small organizations, or different kinds of organization. The widespread existence of the dreadful organizations Aidan describes is a strong motivator for decent managers and consultants, urgently trying to create something better.