The night kisses the fading day
whispering to his ear,
"I am death, your mother.
I am to give you fresh birth.”Rabindranath Tagore
Are we ruled by fate or free will? Is there an afterlife, or do we simply cease to exist? When life’s complexities are reduced to an either/or choice like this, I always wonder. I’m suspicious of simplistic reductions. Why can’t the answer be: all of the above? People seem to think we will all have the same experience, so either there is an afterlife or we cease to exist. Really? Must those two be mutually exclusive? Are we a biological mechanism that operates in one specific way, or is death more complicated than that? This is why it matters so much what unconscious metaphor is organizing our view of life. Are we really like machines? Or computers?
In my imagination we are not like machines or computers at all. Death couldn’t be like the flip of a switch - the end of electrical activity and boom, you’re gone. Some studies show that 17% of people who have experienced clinical death (an absence of electrical activity in the brain) report near death experiences. The rest report nothing. Why isn’t it possible that some people’s consciousness survives and others enter the fade-to-black and cease to exist as a separate personality? If both possibilities exist then the question becomes: Who survives death and why?
In the context of the novel, people who establish themselves in imagination before they die can live on in that realm after the physical body has died – as if they have moved to a lucid dream. The purpose of the Melissae, the teacher plants, and the ceremony at Eleusis is to teach people how to move over to the archetypal realm - where the gods live. It’s the same place that dreams and visions come from – the collective unconscious. Not everyone learns to stay conscious, and indeed in life this is also true. Some people are profoundly unconscious of their own inner lives and motivations. That’s the real Underworld. In Mythology, the woman, Psyche, who fell in love with Eros, was born mortal, but through her trials on earth (impossible tasks) she becomes divine and lives on with the gods. She loved and engaged fully with the trouble that caused her to grow through contact with several archetypal figures (gods). None her tasks could have been accomplished without help from that realm (divine intervention). That might be a pattern we all could follow.