Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  Conditions for mummification were far from sterile—maggots, beetles and even mice have been found caught in the linen wrappings—and the priests were far from always trustworthy: the Greek historian Herodotus reported that the bodies of young women were not handed over until they had decomposed a little, to discourage frisky embalmers from abusing their privileges. The whole process took seventy days and climaxed with the “Opening of the Mouth” ceremony, in which the deceased would be magically reanimated (though their realm of action was confined, of course, only to the Otherworld). The pyramids—which were only built for a relatively brief period early in Egypt’s history, as they proved too attractive to tomb robbers—were constructed in alignment with where the Egyptians believed this Otherworld to be, so helping the inhabitant to launch into the next phase of life.

  But the Egyptians did not put their faith in body alone: they also had a version of the third narrative, Soul. Like many ancient peoples, they believed in multiple souls, most important of which was the ka, or life force. Breathed by the gods into each person at the instant of birth, the ka was what enabled a person to produce a child—something like sexual potency, or what blues singers call “mojo.” After death, it was thought to continue to live in the mummy and required a steady supply of sustenance. It was therefore crucial that friends and relatives of the deceased brought food to the grave upon which the ka could feast—consuming of course only the spiritual life force of the offerings, not the physical stuff, which would be conveniently left for the priests.

  We have seen that the final punishment meted out to Nefertiti was the attempt to wipe her from history—what the Romans called damnatio memoriae. This is because the Egyptians also regarded the fourth narrative, Legacy, as crucial to their survival. They believed that a person’s name and reputation were fundamental parts of them; for a person to live fully in the next world, these had to be preserved too. They therefore took great care to keep their names alive, inscribing them, like modern-day graffiti taggers, on almost anything they could find, from tomb walls to pots and combs. But most important, their friends and family were expected to continue to remember them, chanting their names when bringing food for their ka. If your name was spoken and your monuments still stood, they thought, then at least a part of you still lived.

  If all these components came together, then the ancient Egyptian expected a glorious and eternal second life. But if they were all destroyed, neglected or forgotten, then the deceased would be condemned to utter, final extinction—the “second death” that all Egyptians dreaded. This was the sentence that Horemheb imposed on Nefertiti and her husband, the pharaoh Akhenaten. Their crime? To hijack Egypt’s ancient immortality system for themselves.

  WHEN the archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt found Nefertiti beneath the desert it was in the form of a full-color life-sized bust of the great queen in her prime. Her neck rises long and slender from an elaborate necklace sculpted in exquisite detail; her lips are full, and her eyes are large and seductively lidded. Her face is framed by a unique blue crown that continues the lines of her cheeks and jaw. She radiates authority and ease; she appears both resolved and inscrutable. It is an image of power and beauty as potent now as when it was cast over three thousand years ago.

  That was around 1340 BCE, and she enjoyed a status and influence unprecedented in Egypt’s long history. Nefertiti, whose name means “a beautiful woman has come,” was not only the pharaoh’s great queen, his foremost consort and mother of six daughters by him—she was his equal, portrayed smiting enemies, riding chariots and worshipping alongside him.

  The pharaoh, Akhenaten, on the other hand, was a freakish figure, spindly limbed and potbellied, far from the Egyptian ideal of the broad-shouldered warrior. As head of state and religion—the two were inseparable—he played a crucial role in the immortality narrative: he was expected to lead the rituals and ceremonies that kept the cosmos in balance, ensuring for his people safe passage through this world and into the next. But he and his bold and beautiful wife had other ideas.

  At first they merely neglected the other gods, building instead vast temples to the previously obscure deity Aten, associated with the sun disc. After five years on the throne, they broke with the old ways completely and abandoned the historic seat of Thebes for a new capital, which they called Akhetaten—“horizon of the Aten.” Rising from a dusty plain in a just a few years, this sparkling city was filled with images of Akhenaten and Nefertiti bathing in the light of the sun, their god, its rays reaching out to offer them an ankh, the cross-shaped symbol of eternal life; underneath, inscribed in hieroglyphs: “may they live forever.” But even this was not enough, and once established in their new palace they announced that the old religion was dead—that there was no god but Aten and they were his prophets. They had launched the first recorded monotheism in history, with themselves as its sole ambassadors on earth.

  This shook Egypt to its core. All good Egyptians were raised to respect the many deities that governed every aspect of life on the Nile. They turned to the goddess Isis when sick and thanked falcon-headed Horus for keeping Egypt’s borders strong; they prayed to the mummy-god Osiris to ensure safe passage for their loved ones in the life to come. For Egypt’s already ancient and conservative society this was a revolution far more dramatic than Christianity’s Reformation—more akin to the Pope today declaring himself the incarnation of Horus and swapping the Vatican for a pyramid. Not only must this blasphemy have filled ordinary folk with dread of divine retribution, but they would have believed, with the temples closed and the ancient rites banned, that their route to the next world was barred.

  BUT such a powerful narrative as that of the old gods, so deeply embedded in the institutions and habits of Egyptian civilization, could not be so easily overturned. After fourteen years in power, one by one, the living embodiments of the Aten began to disappear. First, three of their daughters fell to a plague. Then, quite suddenly, Nefertiti herself vanished from the records. Two years later, Akhenaten also simply disappeared.

  Their dynasty was not quite over: one of their daughters was married to her half brother, the nine-year-old Tutankhamun, Akhenaten’s son by a secondary wife. Together these children were permitted to rule while the old guard—the priests and generals—slowly dismantled everything their parents had done: the capital was moved back to Thebes, the temples reopened, Aten marginalized. When this young pharaoh died he was briefly succeeded by an aging adviser, before Horemheb, who had been commander in chief of the army, seized power and set about destroying all trace of the heretic and his dynasty. Ironic, then, that thanks to the discovery of his intact tomb, Tutankhamun is better known now than he was in life.

  Scholars speculate about what happened to Nefertiti and Akhenaten, but the destruction wrought by Horemheb left little firm evidence. One theory is that Nefertiti changed her name in order to first become full coregent with her husband, then (briefly) to succeed him and rule alone. As to Akhenaten himself, some scholars have speculated that he was driven out of his own land and continued in exile to preach his monotheistic creed. It is indeed striking, as Sigmund Freud pointed out, that the Bible records a tale of an Egyptian prince—Moses, which in Egyptian mean “child of”—who around this time led believers in the one true god out of Egypt to a promised land.

  We do not know how the Aten’s reign was brought to an end, whether a full-blooded rebellion, an assassin’s poison, or some more subtle pressure. But brought to an end it was. Osiris was put back on his throne in the Otherworld, and the mummifiers were put back in business. The city of the Aten, with its palaces and temples, was abandoned and left to sink back into the desert sands, ready to be discovered by intrepid archaeologists millennia later. Branded as “heretics” and “enemies,” Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children were expunged from the records, their hieroglyphs excised from the monuments and their images everywhere erased. They were to be cut off from the land of the living; their spirits were not to be fed, and their names were not
to be chanted.

  They had usurped the immortality system that gave order, meaning and hope to their people, and that system had its revenge. With remarkable speed, Egypt’s ancient society healed its wounds and resumed the business of preparing for the next life—but the great queen and her heretic husband were to be forever excluded from it. Those who followed did their work so thoroughly that, for millennia, no one knew that this royal couple had ever existed. The vengeful priests must have believed Nefertiti had been destroyed for good. But they were wrong, for beneath the shifting sands of her ruined city, she was waiting.

  THE WILL TO LIVE (FOREVER)

  “GROUPS are always collectively seeking modes or combinations of modes of immortality and will celebrate them endlessly, fight and die in order to affirm them or put down rivals who threaten their immortality system,” wrote the psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton. So it was with Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who, despite having all the power and wealth of the royal house, were swept away by the currents of Egypt’s ancient immortality system.

  But what is it that drives us first to create such systems and then to fight and even die to defend them? The sheer universality of immortality narratives, the fact that they seem to be central to every culture, suggests that the root is in human nature itself. Indeed, it is deep in the nature that we share with all living things: the urge simply to live on. But we alone of animals—at least, as far as we know—have developed religions, artistic traditions and honor systems that give expression to this urge and transform it into sophisticated narratives. These are the result of the very particular way that we, with our outsized minds, regard life and death—a way that is deeply paradoxical.

  SOME are skeptical when they first hear the claim that a will to immortality is the underlying driver of civilization; it sounds too metaphysical to be the instinct behind our everyday actions, too mystical to explain the behavior of a creature evolved from the apes. But the origin of our eternal longings is neither mystical nor metaphysical—on the contrary, nothing could be more natural. That we strive to project ourselves into the future is a direct consequence of our long evolutionary legacy.

  This determination to survive and reproduce—to extend into the future—is the one thing that all life forms have in common. The mightiest mountain passively allows its own erosion, no different from the grain of sand washed over by the sea. But the tiniest organism will fight with all it has against the assaults of elements and predators—against the descent into disorder that otherwise characterizes the universe. Living things are by their very nature dynamic systems for sustaining themselves against the odds. Whether dogs, worms or amoebas, they continually struggle with what seems to be a single purpose: to just keep going. This striving to perpetuate is the essence of life. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins put it, “We are survival machines, but ‘we’ does not mean just people. It embraces all animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses.”

  This has become a truism in modern biology—the preservation and reproduction of self in some form belongs to all definitions of what life is. The process of evolution by natural selection tells us just why this should be so: in a varied population, those creatures best able to survive and reproduce are those that will pass on their genes to the next generation. Every cat, tree and dung beetle that we see around us exists only because its ancestors were the best at preserving themselves and their offspring. Successfully projecting themselves into the future, through surviving and reproducing, is therefore exactly what distinguishes evolutionary winners from losers.

  To make this clearer, just imagine for a moment the opposite: a life form indifferent to its own future prospects. The apathetic mouse that makes no effort to hide from snakes and owls would quickly be gobbled up, and its lugubrious germ line would die with it. We would never meet such indifferent creatures because their genes would never have survived. Its striving cousins, on the other hand, who do everything to live on and fill the world with their offspring, would pass on their striving genes. Soon enough, the world would be full of only those mice with fighting spirit. Natural selection produces self-perpetuators.

  As a consequence, as the sociologist Raymond D. Gastil wrote, “all forms of life behave as if persistence into the future—immortality—were the basic goal of their existence.” Everything that living things do is directed toward this goal. The leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown that gut feelings, complex emotions and our sophisticated reasoning processes all exist to contribute, directly or indirectly, to the aim of survival. The biological anthropologist James Chisholm deduced further that all values—all ideas of good and bad, right and wrong—arise from this single goal, as he put it, “the complex action for the sake of which bodies exist: indefinite continuance.”

  The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called this primal urge simply “the will to live.” Given, however, that it is not limited in time—that, as Chisholm said, the continuance we desire is “indefinite”—we should instead call it the will to live forever, or the will to immortality.

  This drive can explain a great deal of what we do, including much of civilization. The first of the four basic immortality narratives—Staying Alive—is simply the will to live forever in its basic form, and staying alive is something we humans have become very good at, spreading across the globe to countless different climates and habitats, where we enjoy, by mammalian standards, exceptionally long lifespans. But the other three forms of immortality narrative go far beyond the animal urges to flee from fire or store food for the winter—and, indeed, sometimes run contrary to them. Although motivated by the will to immortality, these narratives are the products not only of what we have in common with other living things but also of what sets us apart.

  THE MORTALITY PARADOX

  WHAT sets us apart is, of course, our massive, highly connected brains. These too have evolved to help us perpetuate ourselves indefinitely, and they are enormously useful in the struggle to survive. Our awareness of ourselves, of the future and of alternative possibilities enables us to adapt and make sophisticated plans. But it also gives us a perspective on ourselves that is at the same time terrifying and baffling. On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living things around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This I will call the Mortality Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization.

  Both halves of this paradox arise from the same set of impressive cognitive faculties. Since the advent some two and a half million years ago of the genus Homo, the immediate ancestors of modern humans, our brain size has tripled. This has come with a series of crucial conceptual innovations: First, we are aware of ourselves as distinct individuals, a trait limited to only a handful of large-brained species and considered to be essential for sophisticated social interaction. Second, we have an intricate idea of the future, allowing us to premeditate and vary our plans—also an ability unseen in the vast majority of other species (one of the rare exceptions being the case of the chimpanzee in Furuvik, Sweden, who collected stones by night to throw at zoo visitors by day). And third, we can imagine different scenarios, playing with possibilities and generalizing from what we have seen, enabling us to learn, reason and extrapolate.

  The survival benefits of these faculties are obvious: from mammoth traps to supermarket supply chains, we can plan, coordinate and cooperate to ensure our needs are met. But these powers come at a cost. If you have an idea of yourself and of the future and can extrapolate and generalize from what you see around you, then if you see your comrade killed by a lion, you realize that you too could be killed by a lion. This is useful if it causes you to sharpen your spear in readiness, but it also brings anxiety—it summons the future possibility of death in the present. The nex
t day you might see a different comrade killed by a snake, another by disease and yet another by fire. You see that there are countless ways in which you could be killed, and they could strike at any time: prepare as you will, death’s onslaught is relentless.

  And so we realize, as we see the other living things around us fall one by one, that no one is spared. We recognize that death is the real enemy; with our powerful minds we can stave him off for a while with sharp spears or strong gates, full larders and hospitals, but at the same time, we see that it is all ultimately fruitless, that one day we not only can but surely will die. This is what the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously described as “being-toward-death,” which he considered to define the human condition.

  We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. “Man has created death,” wrote the poet W. B. Yeats. Other creatures blindly struggle on, knowing only life until their moment comes. “Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death,” wrote the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. But we bring death into life: we see it coming for us in every storm or forest fire, snake or spider, illness or ill omen.

  This is a central theme of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortals. It is represented in that most ancient and influential of stories, the book of Genesis: if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are told, they will die—mortality is the price of knowledge. Since we attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, “death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.” No matter what we do, no matter how hard we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose.