Joseph L. Henderson, Wisdom of the Serpent
I — THE FEAR OF DEATH
Not so very many years ago, in his Varieties of Religions Experience, William James
foreshadowed an entirely new psychological relativity toward religious experience.
Ignoring theology, he brought to his readers the benefit of an impartial and, above all, accepting attitude to all forms of religious experience.
He did not consider some as higher or lower, better or worse than others, and although a good many were experiences reported by pathological individuals he
did not interpret these experiences themselves as being essentially healthy or deranged.
It is with this attitude that I should like to approach the subject of death; in fact, the subject of death and resurrection as a whole.
It is a subject which defies our ever finding the ultimate truth but one around which cluster a variety of symbolic representations by which the living have sought to
approach the end of life in a meaningful way.
Of course it must be recognized that the first reaction of most people to the thought of death is not symbolic but painfully literal.
What will happen to Me when I die?
And for this we must postulate a personal reaction appropriate to the individual disposition of each person who faces the fear of death, which is at bottom the ego’s
fear of the unknown.
So it seems to me from a psychological point of view.
In the contrast between the universal and the personal experience of what is unknown we may find the conditions necessary to explore the eternal mystery of death.
To this end we shall review traditional patterns of belief and compare them with experiences of modern individuals.
The selected texts provide us at the outset with a rich yield from the records of mankind concerning death and its correlates, rebirth and resurrection, which I as a psychologist and psychotherapist will use along with case material to illustrate and I hope reinterpret for contemporary minds some aspects of this eternal theme.
If we may postulate that the fear of death is basically fear of the unknown, there would seem to be no limit to the images of foreboding or hope which can be
projected by a fearful ego into it.
Surprisingly, therefore, I think it can be demonstrated from the diverse material at our disposal that the combinations are not infinite but conform to certain rather simple designs.
Whenever we find the theme of death, whether in recurrent myths or modern dreams, we find that it is never seen to stand alone as a final act of annihilation.
Apart from extreme forms of pathological depression or of infantile sadism, death is universally found to be part of a cycle of death and rebirth, or to be the condition necessary to imagine transcendence of life in an experience of resurrection.
Somewhere between the myths of death and rebirth and the myths of death and resurrection we find abundant evidence for another theme in which the experience of death and rebirth is central—the theme of initiation.
Initiation provides the archetypal pattern by which the psyche, whether in individuals or in groups of people, is enabled to make a transition from one stage of development to another and therefore brings the theme of death and rebirth
into close relation to problems of education whether in a religious or a secular sense.
Viewed from the only absolute standpoint we have, that is, of being still alive, we can therefore regard fear of death as being fear of change, or fear of growing up, or fear of becoming independent of the claims of the material world, or a mixture of all three.
In order to make our study broad enough to do justice to such widely separated groups as are represented by the claims of pragmatists on the one hand or by metaphysicians on the other, we have above all to postulate the existence of a symbol-forming tendency in all people, irrespective of race, creed, geography, and historical period, common to Buddhists or Christians, African Pygmies or Kwakiutl Indians.
The same symbols may be found to have equal importance in the dream life of both modern New Yorkers and the inhabitants of Communist China.
C. G. Jung’s famous concept, the “collective unconscious,” has given a necessary modern label to the universal source of the products of symbolism; but now what, fifty years ago, appeared to be only “unconscious” has progressively come to express itself in the consciously or halfconsciously realized data of archetypal images and their corresponding patterns of behavior.
But the concept of the unconscious is still relevant, especially in this material, since as far as we know the fear of death is derived from an archetypal pattern whose total extent can never be made visible in this life; the image is present, but the actual experience is forever withheld, and we try to know and yet do not know its full meaning.
All the rest is symbol, which we are then justified in accepting as hypothetically real in the absence of further knowledge.
Partially enlightened, but still full of doubt and curiosity, humanity continues to fear death and yet longs for a deliverance from life appropriate to the symbol of its choice.
A way of learning more and experiencing more of this symbolic life is provided by modern studies of comparative mythology, but we have to be cautious about which one of several uses we choose to make of this.
We may, as Neumann warns us, fall into an introverted negative way which “leads through the experience of heavens and hells to a merger of the two; it moves farther
and farther from consciousness to ecstatic demolition of the ego.”{1}
In contrast to this way there is another way equally to be avoided.
This is the “outward mysticism of extroversion…and culminates in a pantheistic or panentheistic seizure in which the ego is overpowered.”
Beyond
these two choices there is a third choice “bound up with unity of being” which “corresponds to development of personality…the man of this phase is in the world and outside it, at rest and in creative motion, attached to the numinous and also at home in himself.”{2}
The winding course a person must follow before attaining such an ideal philosophical position is shown in the contrasting themes of the separate chapter headings.
The chief difference
between the cosmic cycle and the nature cycle is, very roughly, the difference between a masculine creative agency (Shiva) and a feminine creative agency (Inanna).
This division of archetypal configurations seems basic to any understanding of mythology, while the interaction of the two provides one of the germinal points of psychological development of an individual nature.
This can be seen in the symbolism of the unconscious of modern people as well as in the traditional myths.
Out of this interaction there comes into being a type of mythology which is no longer exclusively masculine or feminine but a mixture of both, appealing to men or women either in rites of tribal societies or in the dreams of modern individuals.
This is the archetypal pattern of initiation with its eternal theme of death and rebirth, sometimes associated with entrance into the life of a significant group, sometimes experienced in a lonely individual rite of vision.
This rite of vision leads us to the most remote and single form of all initiation—shamanism—with its other-worldly capacity for liberation.
Lastly, the themes of rebirth and resurrection, so differently illustrated in the changing myths, lead to a recurrent dilemma experienced by modern people as
the need to choose symbols of containment in the meaningful group, or symbols of liberation of a transcendent, individual nature.
This necessarily poses an ultimate question as to whether these two kinds of symbols must remain separate or whether they may on some transpersonal level be
joined and reconciled. E
xamples of this attempt at reconciliation comprise the substance of the final chapter. ~Joseph L. Henderson, Wisdom of the Serpent, Page 14-16
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