This Christmas I decided to do something I don’t normally do. I attended a midnight mass. The establishment of choice was a parish church, convenient for its proximity and appealing for its Romanesque Revival architecture replete with stained glass windows, rounded arches, pipe organ and gilded altar. The liturgy is traditionally high Anglican, paying homage to King Charles and asserting the creed of the Catholick and Apostolic Church. I can appreciate a good sermon, especially when the representative of Christ Saviour can contextualise the meaning of the Gospel to a contemporary audience, which the vicar did to good effect. The gist of his message was that although there is much darkness and suffering in the world, from Gaza to Syria to Ukraine, it is the darkness within that we must be most wary of, the darkness that sees the light but does not comprehend it. It is tempting to seek solutions in extraneous sources, political causes, career, relationships, hedonism and escapism, but the shadow of the darkness persists. It was at this point that I contemplated the possibility that religion itself could be such a distraction if one did not internalise its purpose and meaning and just turned up for a midnight mass because it was Christmas Eve and I was among family and friends whose religious commitment was as negligible as my own.
While I am not affiliated with any religion, I regard all sentient beings as spiritual, meaning that they have a soul, which is the animating principle and essence of life, the Latin anima, the Greek pnuema, and the Egyptian Ka. Christianity inherits the idea of the soul from its Jewish as well as Greek origins, but it is important to emphasise that the Christian faith, at least in its dominant Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant iterations, refers not simply to the immortality of the soul but to the resurrection of the body, the two being symbiotically contiguous. When the body dies, the soul departs, as the body lies in state, awaiting its transfiguration on the Day of Judgement. Christ returns to judge the quick and the dead. The soul of the saved is reunited with the body, a transfigured body that resuscitates the dead, who is raised as Christ was raised, cleansed of sin, perfected and restored to a purity that they never had on earth, having inherited the sins of their first parents in the Garden of Eden.
Taken literally, a real, actual, corporeal and not simply spiritual transformation occurs when the soul is saved. It is a body that is raised, the corpse transmuted, which is one of the reasons why burial and not cremation is the prescribed rule of internment. A burnt body is damaged beyond repair, the soul an orphan to the dissolved vessel of its embodiment. If it is the soul that animates the body, it is to a body that it must be reconsecrated. The body, though contaminated by the sins of the flesh, is part of the eschatological reflorescence of a resurrected life. In this respect, Christian salvation has much in common with a much older faith, not its Jewish antecedent, which also posits a bodily resurrection (albeit for Jews alone) but the rites of ancient Egypt where the idea of the soul was completely contiguous with that of a body, the physical embodiment of the soul without which it has no life or afterlife. This explains the embalming of the corpse, the removal and preservation of the organs, and the accompanying ritual ornaments that represented the culture of an Egyptian, particularly the Pharaohs whose life in the otherworld reflected their earthly existence, which in turn reflected the higher world from which they came. Thebes, Luxor and Memphis were not just cities built around a necropolis. They were places dedicated to the spiritual realm of which the physical was an incarnation. The body itself had a double, the Sah, which, if disturbed, could return from the dead to haunt the living. Without a body, the soul was lost. It remained with the body, part of its double nature, spiritual and physical, preserved intact, the heart placed on the golden scales against the feather of Maat (truth) on the day of judgement when Osiris would determine if it remained in the underworld or sailed on to the stars. The similarity between Osiris and Christ is mirrored in that of Mary and Isis, the death and resurrection of Jesus as Emmanuel prefigured in the rebirth of Osiris as Horus. In each case, a bodily transfiguration occurs, the dead raised, the soul saved, and the mortal reunited with the immortal.
To believe in a literal resurrection of a decayed corpse, physically disfigured by disease, wounds and the natural effects of atrophy and putrefaction is in modern clinical, scientific terms a complete fallacy and nothing but mystical superstition based on wishful thinking and denial of the true nature of life and death. But if we dissect the scientific and clinical perspective more closely, the very opposite is the case. Religion has never denied death by positing an afterlife. It sees life as a flawed prelude to a perfect state unattainable on earth, the trials and tribulations of existence being the necessary passage to redemption and salvation achieved not through one’s own exclusive efforts but through faith in something larger than oneself. It is modern, secular, scientific and clinical thinking that while accepting death as final, seeks any number of ways to deflect its impact through the preservation of life, often at all costs. Euthanasia, the legal and ethical salve for the suffering of the dying, is simply another form of palliative care, which is itself a form of prolonged euthanasia through opioids and other painkillers that numb the body, dim the mind and suspend the soul in a kind of soporific limbo. When it comes to death, medicine is a life support system that is prepared to torture the body into either staying alive or quietly dying through anaesthesia. As every anaesthetist knows, a slight increase in the regulated dose of potassium can kill a patient through cardiac arrest. The drug that puts you to sleep can be an effective way to suicide.
While there is no reason to reject all the advances in medicine that can prevent disease, heal the sick, replace organs, clone cells and assist the terminally ill to die with dignity, there is also the downside of a system that creates dependencies on drugs in the same way as plastic surgery and certain draconian diet and exercise regimes can be a symptom of a denial of the cumulative effects of ageing, a masking of mutability and ultimately a denial of death through a protracted delay of its onset. In the modern world, the living replace the dead, begin to outnumber them, substitute an earthly paradise for an otherworldly heaven, and refuse to confront the psychological and spiritual characteristics of mortality that were once the domain of mythology and religion. The necropolis becomes a vitapolis, a dominion of the living where the dead are not just burnt or buried, but concealed, obscured and overshadowed by the immense aspiration to live and live on. The resurrection must occur on this side of the grave, a physical transfiguration of the body as the animating elan of life, shorn of the need for a soul and entirely consumed with its own corporeal essence in pursuit of happiness, wealth, pleasure, gratification and all that accompanies the garden of earthly delights. To die here is a taboo, so death must be indefinitely postponed, a day far off on the yonder blue horizon, obscured by a cloud of unknowing and a complete unwillingness to confront its spectre so that when the day finally comes we are completely and hopelessly unprepared, along with all those who mourn us, for the horror of a naked corpse.
There is no returning to Memphis or Luxor. The contemporary equivalents are very different spaces, part of a Vegas-like parody of history where life is a playground, the earth an exploitable resource, and the world a material realm of power divorced of the truth of the spirit as the body is estranged from its soul, where the only immortals are the god-like icons of a celebrity culture that has appropriated the stellar realm once occupied by Christ, Osiris and Horus. Here life is eternally triumphant, the fog of war, plague, famine and death but a grim consequence of gaping injustice where those who thrive offer living proof that death is an illusion, a distant shadow into which the living do not stray without quickly leaping back into the embrace of a neon sun. The gods are eclipsed, the saints erased, the lord of the lepers cleansed of his wounds and injected with steroids, a saviour of the living for whom the dead are but dust. The soul has become a shade, hidden, buried, stifled in a world of things, cloned and deep-faked to resemble a better or more obscenely realistic semblance that may in time become the hyper-real substitute for the primordial animating principle and power of life.
If indeed there is no way back to Thebes, there is perhaps a way forward, a taking on of the mantle of that long shadow of darkness in which the body, reunited with the soul, may transcribe the legacy of Osiris into a new Book of the Dead, a place of reckoning with suffering and death where the profound meaning of the mysteries can be decoded and reassigned their place in a modern, secular, clinical and scientific world, leading those who seek the essence of life to locate it not in cells or molecules, atoms, genes, the cerebral cortex, the amygdala or the limbic system, but to conceive these visceral things as the manifestations, incarnations and embodiments of consciousness, not just the cause of consciousness, but its spiritual bodily essence. When the body dies, so too does the soul die, and when the soul dies, it can effectively kill the body, sever it from its spiritual ancestor who, thus disturbed, will continue to haunt it as the shadow and double of itself. There is no escape from the golden scales that weigh the heart against the feather of truth. In this way, Osiris lives on, as Christ lives on, residing within us as eternal judges, our own inner gods and saviours, immortally wounded within this mortal coil.