passion it managed to generate, and, most of all, its unique synthesis of time-honoured ideas into a code that had both a universal resonance and a simplicity. In its early days, Christianity was happy to acknowledge its debts. Newness and originality were not regarded as a plus in religious terms at the time. Continuity was more important. Radical departures were regarded as impious, while the cloak of antiquity conferred many advantages. It was only much later, when at the height of its powers, that Christianity began to rewrite its past and edit out those who had influenced it.
This wider pattern is clearly seen in the development of the idea of heaven. The Christians were by no means the first travellers to hit on paradise as a destination where all the stresses and strains of this world would waft gently away amid clouds, soothing music and the omnipresence of the ultimate guide. Nevertheless, they realised to the full the potential appeal of such a place as an antidote to what for most was a miserable life on earth, and so promoted it with a vigour hitherto unseen. It proved an effective way of wooing waverers into their fold and, when heaven was twinned with hell as a carrot and stick, keeping them there. However, the origins of this paradise in the sky predate the birth of Jesus by many centuries.
From earliest times, there had been an interest in the concept of a destination to which the dead travelled. For many, this was a collective experience and involved no system of judgement. The Dieri of southeastern Australia are an aboriginal people whose customs have not changed since the Neolithic age. They envisage the dead as going to what they call the River of the Sky, located in the stars of the Milky Way. Although they have a fine time there, they do continue to communicate with those left behind and occasionally return as spirits to haunt their relatives’ sleep.
Others, however, evolved more complex and judgemental systems. In Egypt, the civilisation that thrived along the Nile and its delta from the fourth millennium BC until the time of classical Greece and Rome, had unusually well-refined notions of an afterlife, even if religion was not organised in any institutional form. They were an integral part of Egyptian life, as much taken for granted as the ebb and flow of the Nile. The Egyptians searched in their religion for something collective beyond the cycles of everyday existence, for a timeless, unchanging cosmos. The afterlife was part of that search, as the mummies and artefacts in the death chambers of the pyramids make abundantly clear.
They believed that a part of the body, thought to be either the heart or the stomach, and roughly equivalent to what we now call the soul, left the body at death and remained active on earth. It was often depicted as a human-headed bird, the ba, and was acknowledged to have physical needs, occasionally returning to the corpse. Hence the advanced art of mummification, so that the body would not rot, and the supplies of food that were left in the grave, along with a route out of the burial chamber or pyramid. The Egyptians also believed in the ka – the intellect and spirit of the person. This in turn had two parts – one which was effectively the body’s double and which stayed with the corpse in the tomb, and another which was the part that soared to a new world.
The Egyptians labelled this place the kingdom of the god Osiris, the lord of the dead and the judge of souls in afterlife. Osiris was based on a historical figure, the first pharaoh, who, after his own death, became ruler of the world beyond. The ka would be ushered into Osiris’s court by Anubis, a jackal-headed god. The candidate would then be put on one side of a set of scales. On the other was an ostrich feather. Since goodness was deemed to be very light, if he or she had been good they would not tip the balance and would be welcomed in to an eternal pleasure dome of banquets, contests, dancing and fun, where there was no illness, hunger, sorrow or pain. If they tipped the scales, they were consigned to an ill-defined underworld of monsters. The verdict was recorded in a court record by Thoth, Osiris’s son.
Thoth was credited with producing the illustrated Book of the Dead (c. 1580–1090 BC). As well as frightening depictions of the ghouls of the underworld and recreations of the court-room weigh-ins, it also contained hints on how you could ensure that the verdict went your way once you came before Osiris. At different stages of the pharaohs’ rule, the qualities necessary to achieve that ultimate lightness were different. In one age it would be courage in battle, in another loyal service to the ruler, in another great wisdom or moral strength. The admission criteria for the Egyptian heaven were set according to the needs of the present. As the practice became more popular, the scroll would also include a map of the land beyond this life – with its seven gates, rivers and valleys of the sky and potential traps – and was routinely placed alongside the bodies of kings when they were buried.
The influence of such ideas on the heaven that Christianity promoted so assiduously is, however, remote. A much more immediate embarkation point is Judaism, in effect Christianity’s elder sibling. Unlike the Egyptians, it initially had little interest in an afterlife. This is the view that dominates the opening sections of the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures and which prevailed while the Israelites established themselves in the Holy Land from around 1200 BC onwards. In addition to the here and now, these Jews believed there were two other worlds – one above and unobtainable, heaven, the abode of the gods which was ruled over by Yahweh (who was not yet regarded as the only God), and one below and inevitable, subterranean sheol – a word borrowed from Semite faiths in the region – to which were consigned all the dead, regardless of the merits or faults of their earthly lives. There was no suggestion that virtuous mortals might aspire to take the ‘up-lift’ to the heavens when they died. Entry was strictly restricted to a named and heroic handful – for example, the prophet Elijah. His journey to the skies – after his historic victory over the pagan monarchs Ahab and Jezebel and their deity Baal – is the only such voyage detailed in the Old Testament: ‘Now as they [Elijah and his pupil Elisha] walked on, talking as they went, a chariot of fire appeared and horses of fire, coming between the two of them; and Elijah went up to heaven in the whirlwind.’ (2 Kings: 2:11–12) Another similarly honoured was Enoch, a devoted servant of Yahweh, who is described in the Book of Genesis as ‘walking with God’ during his lifetime (365 years, according to Genesis, a figure dwarfed by his son Methu-saleh’s 969 years) and then rather vaguely as ‘vanishing because God took him’ (5:24).
Since almost no-one went there, Judaism wasted no time trying to map out the realm of the gods. There was also little interest in sheol. Tradition taught that it was a dark, silent mausoleum, separated from this life, but the sort of questions we now ask about personal immortality would have been met with blank stares by Jews of the period. The lines of communication between sheol, heaven and earth as the three sides of a triangle were, however, well-established. In the First Book of Samuel (Chapter 28), King Saul prepares for a battle by donning a disguise and consulting a necromancer at Endor. The ghost that she conjures up ‘rises from the earth’. It is Samuel himself, and Saul wants his dead ancestor, called reluctantly from slumber in sheol, to intervene in heaven with Yahweh, who he believes has abandoned the Israelites. Samuel accurately predicts that Saul will die. But Saul’s interest was not in his own personal immortality, his own fate after death; rather, he had a broader political concern. This is the key theme in the great prophets. Their teachings were bound up with this world and the problems affecting Israel, principally its survival.
Lack of interest in heaven continued unchallenged until the eighth century BC, when the Jews found themselves increasingly under threat from their mighty Assyrian neighbours to the north and east. In extremis, the people were encouraged to change tack and focus their faith on Yahweh, cutting down on intermediaries or other spirits and gods. Practices of ancestor worship, it was said, distracted from Yahweh, disappointed Him, and therefore had brought about military defeats. So, the souls of the faithful and unfaithful departed were, at a stroke, cast into outer darkness. King Josiah (640–609 BC), for instance, introduced new legal taboos on the disposal of corpses in an effort to stamp out remaining tendencies towards veneration of the dead. They were to be buried swiftly and then forgotten, he decreed, while necromancers and wizards were outlawed. As with all such official sanctions in matters of faith and morals, the Jews did not wipe out the practice of ancestor worship altogether, but they certainly marginalised it.
The living and the dead henceforth were eternally separated.
