less recognisable and hence largely inaccessible plain – the spiritual heaven:
In the vision the winds were causing me to fly and rushing me high up into heaven. And I kept coming until I approached a wall which was built of white marble and surrounded by tongues of fire … And I came into the tongues of fire and drew near to a great house which was built of white marble, and the inner wall were [sic] like mosaics of white marble, the floor of crystal, the ceiling like the path of the stars and lightnings between which [were] fiery cherubim, and their heaven of water, and flaming fire surrounded the wall, and its gates were burning with fire. And I entered into the house, which was hot like fire and cold like ice, and there was nothing inside it; fear covered me and trembling seized me. And as I shook and trembled, I fell upon my face and saw a vision. And behold there was an opening before me [and] a second house, which is greater than the former, and everything was built with tongues of fire … It is impossible for me to recount to you concerning its glory and greatness. As for its floor, it was of fire and above it was lightning and the path of the stars; and as for the ceiling, it was flaming fire. And I observed and saw inside it a lofty throne – its appearance was like crystal and its wheels like the shining sun; and I [heard] the voice of the cherubim; and from beneath the throne were issuing streams of flaming fire. It was difficult to look at it. And the Great Glory was sitting upon it – as for His gown, which was shining more brightly than the sun, it was whiter than any snow … The flaming fire was round about him, and a great fire stood before Him.
(Book of Enoch 1:20–21, 49–50)
The authors of Enoch provide further details: there is an alabaster mountain, topped by sapphire, which is the throne of God and a sweet-smelling tree-of-life (like the Hesperides Tree of Greek mythology), which will be enjoyed in the north-east of heaven by the meek and the just for eternity. Moreover, they echo the Book of Daniel (it is unclear which text came first) in employing one of the most enduring descriptions of heavenly figures. In his dream about heaven, Daniel sees the ‘Ancient of Days’. ‘His robe was white as snow, the hair on his head as pure as wool.’ (Dn 7:9–10) Enoch speaks of the same figure, protected by the wings of the Lord of the Spirits, with hair as white as wool.
These first detailed descriptions of the shadowy domain of heaven reflected a substantial body of disillusioned opinion within Judaism in the first century AD which was turning its gaze skywards in despair at what was happening on earth. As such, it had a direct influence on the new Jesus cult that arose at this time and was to become Christianity. The ruling group of Sadducees, a priestly caste based on the Temple, may have had little time for talk of resurrection and so dismissed texts such as Enoch as a distraction from the central need to police ritual purity in the here and now, but their rivals, the Pharisees, and the rebel group of Essenes, best known now through the Dead Sea Scrolls, embraced the apocalyptic thinking behind such books. The Pharisees for their part dreamed of a renewed Judaism that would rise, in the terms of the Book of Daniel, from the dry bones of a conquered Israel. The Essenes were more otherworldly, removing themselves to the desert at Qumran near the Dead Sea, rejecting politics and national concerns, and anticipating the imminent dawn of a new, mystical Jewish state under the leadership of a messiah. Their fervent belief in the End of Days focused their attention ever more closely on what was to come in the new life. Their one aim was to get as close to Yahweh as possible in this life in preparation for the next. They wanted to blur the boundaries. So, as well as their taste for apocryphal literature, they tried to prepare themselves physically by leading an austere existence. They were mainly celibate, their food was frugal and monotonous and they always bathed in cold water. Only in the white garments that they wore at communal gatherings was there a hint that the heaven they were trying to anticipate in their lifestyle would, in its detail, be in any way celebratory.
Just a year before his death in 1989, at the age of seventy-eight, the celebrated British philosopher A. J. ‘Freddie’ Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon while in hospital being treated for pneumonia. He passed out and then, technically, he died. His heart stopped for four minutes before medical staff were able to revive him. A convinced atheist and rationalist, Ayer subsequently spoke to friends of his vivid experience on the other side. His biographer, Ben Rogers, writes:
He had been confronted by a bright red light, painful even when he turned away from it, which he understood was responsible for the government of the universe. ‘Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space. These ministers periodically inspected space and had recently carried out such an inspection. They had, however, failed to do their work properly, with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw, was slightly out of joint.’ Ayer could not find any of the ‘ministers’ responsible for space, but he realised that ministers who had been given charge of time were in his neighbourhood and remembering that, according to Einstein, space and time were one, he tried but failed to signal to them by walking up and down and waving the watch and chain he had inherited from his grandfather. Ayer became ‘more and more desperate’ as his efforts elicited no response. At this point his memory of the experience stopped, although when he regained consciousness, he woke talking about a river – presumably the River Styx – which he claimed to have crossed.
(from A. J. Ayer: A Life, Ben Rogers)
In subsequent interviews, Ayer admitted that the experience had made him ‘wobbly’ about the possibility of an afterlife, but soon reverted to type and labelled himself a ‘born-again atheist’. His mind and brain had continued working when his heart had stopped, he explained, and he had had a bad dream. His wife Dee told friends that ‘Freddie had got so much nicer since he died.’
CHAPTER TWO Come Back and Finish What You Started
Judaism moved forward from the Axial Age by developing the idea of a personal God whose ways soared above those of humanity as the heavens tower above the earth. Other contemporaries, though, travelled in the opposite direction. They rejected the single, personal God as too limiting, prone to become a projection of our own fears, needs and desires. They opted instead for an impersonal and opaque deity which was less constrained, less clearly defined, less of an encouragement to complacency within a system of rewards and punishments, and more of a challenge to individuals to journey beyond language, dogma and earth-bound imagery in order to explore the transcendent within.
On the Indian subcontinent, there is some surviving evidence that the reincarnation-based belief system later encapsulated in Hinduism had in fact existed since prehistoric times. On the basis of archaeological findings, for instance, scholars believe that faith in reincarnation existed in the Dravidian people of southern India and northern Sri Lanka. However, in the Vedas – the first sacred texts of Indian civilisation, composed in the second millennium BC – there is the conviction of a life after death but no details about how it is achieved. It is merely a land of shadows akin to the oldest Jewish beliefs.
The Axial Age saw the emergence of both Hinduism and Buddhism. The stance they took on afterlife was radically different from that taken first by Judaism, under the influence of Zoroastrianism, and later by Christianity and Islam. Between 600 and 300 BC, some of the key documents of Hinduism, the Upanishads, were written down by scholars and philosophers of the highly developed civilisation which was based on the River Indus. The Upanishads, while paying homage to the Vedas, substantially developed their ideas on what happened after death by teaching something called samsara – literally a chain of embodiments – whereby individuals died and were reborn according to how they had lived their previous life, i.e. by what ‘karma’ they had achieved.
In places the Upanishads were very specific. If you had stolen grain in one life, you would become a rat in the next. If you killed a priest, you would be reborn as a pig.
