Death - and After? by Annie Besant (best english novels to read txt) 📕

PREFACE.

Few words are needed in sending this little book out into the world. It is the third of a series of Manuals designed to meet the public demand for a simple exposition of Theosophical teachings. Some have complained that our literature is at once too abstruse, too technical, and too expensive for the ordinary reader, and it is our hope that the present series may succeed in supplying what is a very real want. Theosophy is not only for the learned; it is for all. Perhaps among those who in these little books catch their first glimpse of its teachings, there may be a few who will be led by them to penetrate more deeply into its philosophy, its science, and its religion, facing its abstruser problems with the student's zeal and the neophyte's ardour. But these Manuals are not written for the eager student, whom no initial difficulties can daunt; they are written for the busy men and women of the work-a-day world, and seek to make plain some of the great truths that render life easier to bear and death easier to face. Written by servants of the Masters who are the Elder Brothers of our race, they can have no other object than to serve our fellow-men.



DEATH--AND AFTER?

Who does not remember the story of the Christian missionary in Britain, sitting one evening in the vast hall of a Saxon king, surrounded by his thanes, having come thither to preach the gospel of his Master; and as he spoke of life and death and immortality, a bird flew in through an unglazed window, circled the hall in its flight, and flew out once more into the darkness of the night. The Christian priest bade the king see in the flight of the bird within the hall the transitory life of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed the soul, in passing from the hall of life, winging its way not into the darkness of night, but into the sunlit radiance of a more glorious world. Out of the darkness, through the open window of Birth, the life of a man comes to the earth; it dwells for a while before our eyes; into the darkness, through the open window of Death, it vanishes out of our sight. And man has questioned ever of Religion, Whence comes it? Whither goes it? and the answers have varied with the faiths. To-day, many a hundred year since Paulinus talked with Edwin, there are more people in Christendom who question whether man has a spirit to come anywhence or to go anywhither than, perhaps, in the world's history could ever before have been found at one time. And the very Christians who claim that Death's terrors have been abolished, have surrounded the bier and the tomb with more gloom and more dismal funeral pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can be more depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded, while the dead body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than the sweeping robes of lustreless crape, and the purposed hideousness of the heavy cap in which the widow laments the "deliverance" of her husband "from the burden of the flesh"? What more revolting than the artificially long faces of the undertaker's men, the drooping "weepers", the carefully-arranged white handkerchiefs, and, until lately, the pall-like funeral cloaks? During the last few years, a great and marked improvement has been made. The plumes, cloaks, and weepers have well-nigh disappeared. The grotesquely ghastly hearse is almost a thing of the past, and the coffin goes forth heaped over with flowers instead of shrouded in the heavy black velvet pall. Men and women, though still wearing black, do not roll themselves up in shapeless garments like sable winding-sheets, as if trying to see how miserable they could make themselves by the imposition of artificial discomforts. Welcome common-sense has driven custom from its throne, and has refused any longer to add these gratuitous annoyances to natural human grief.

In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hour-glass--all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors. Milton, who has done so much with his stately rhythm to mould the popular conceptions of modern Christianity, has used all the sinewy strength of his magnificent diction to surround with horror the figure of Death.

The other shape,
If shape it might be called, that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either; black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
Satan was now at hand, and from his seat
The monster moving onward came as fast,
With horrid strides; hell trembled as he strode....
... So spoke the grisly terror: and in shape
So speaking, and so threatening, grew tenfold
More dreadful and deform....
... but he, my inbred enemy,
Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
Made to destroy: I fled, and cried out _Death!_
Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded _Death_.[1]

That such a view of Death should be taken by the professed followers of a Teacher said to have "brought life and immortality to light" is passing strange. The claim, that as late in the history of the world as a mere eighteen centuries ago the immortality of the Spirit in man was brought to light, is of course transparently absurd, in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary available on all hands. The stately Egyptian Ritual with its _Book of the Dead_, in which are traced the post-mortem journeys of the Soul, should be enough, if it stood alone, to put out of court for ever so preposterous a claim. Hear the cry of the Soul of the righteous:

O ye, who make the escort of the God, stretch out to me your
arms, for I become one of you. (xvii. 22.)

Hail to thee, Osiris, Lord of Light, dwelling in the mighty
abode, in the bosom of the absolute darkness. I come to thee,
a purified Soul; my two hands are around thee. (xxi. 1.)

I open heaven; I do what was commanded in Memphis. I have
knowledge of my heart; I am in possession of my heart, I am
in possession of my arms, I am in possession of my legs, at
the will of myself. My Soul is not imprisoned in my body at
the gates of Amenti. (xxvi. 5, 6.)

Not to multiply to weariness quotations from a book that is wholly composed of the doings and sayings of the disembodied man, let it suffice to give the final judgment on the victorious Soul:

The defunct shall be deified among the Gods in the lower
divine region, he shall never be rejected.... He shall drink
from the current of the celestial river.... His Soul shall
not be imprisoned, since it is a Soul that brings salvation
to those near it. The worms shall not devour it. (clxiv.
14-16.)

The general belief in Re-incarnation is enough to prove that the religions of which it formed a central doctrine believed in the survival of the Soul after Death; but one may quote as an example a passage from the _Ordinances of Manu_, following on a disquisition on metempsychosis, and answering the question of deliverance from rebirths.

Amid all these holy acts, the knowledge of self [should be
translated, knowledge of the _Self_, Atma] is said (to be)
the highest; this indeed is the foremost of all sciences,
since from it immortality is obtained.[2]

The testimony of the great Zarathustrean Religion is clear, as is shown by the following, translated from the _Avesta_, in which, the journey of the Soul after death having been described, the ancient Scripture proceeds:

The soul of the pure man goes the first step and arrives at
(the Paradise) Humata; the soul of the pure man takes the
second step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hukhta; it goes the
third step and arrives at (the Paradise) Hvarst; the soul of
the pure man takes the fourth step and arrives at the Eternal
Lights.

To it speaks a pure one deceased before, asking it: How art
thou, O pure deceased, come away from the fleshy dwellings,
from the earthly possessions, from the corporeal world hither
to the invisible, from the perishable world hither to the
imperishable, as it happened to thee--to whom hail!

Then speaks Ahura-Mazda: Ask not him whom thou asketh, (for)
he is come on the fearful, terrible, trembling way, the
separation of body and soul.[3]

The Persian _Desatir_ speaks with equal definiteness. This work consists of fifteen books, written by Persian prophets, and was written originally in the Avestaic language; "God" is Ahura-Mazda, or Yazdan:

God selected man from animals to confer on him the soul,
which is a substance free, simple, immaterial, non-compounded
and non-appetitive. And that becomes an angel by improvement.

By his profound wisdom and most sublime intelligence, he
connected the soul with the material body.

If he (man) does good in the material body, and has a good
knowledge and religion he is _Hartasp_....

As soon as he leaves this material body, I (God) take him up
to the world of angels, that he may have an interview with
the angels, and behold me.

And if he is not Hartasp, but has wisdom and abstains from
vice, I will