Chapter 170. After Death: Bridge, Scales, Resurrection, Rebirth and Their Rivals

The traditions of this study give three families of answer to what follows death: one life, judgment and bodily resurrection (Zoroastrianism, then Judaism, Christianity and Islam); a chain of lives under karma (the Indian religions, Orphic-Platonic thought, the Cathars, the Kabbalistic gilgul); and an underworld of shades (the Mesopotamian land of no return, early Sheol, Homeric Hades). Modernity added afterlives that claim evidence: mediumship, Tipler’s cosmological resurrection and the upload. Mehran Keshe’s teaching both rejects reincarnation and dissolves the courtroom of judgment, and Mitchell Heisman treats the fear of death itself as the hidden source of morality. This chapter sets these positions side by side as their sources present them. It begins with the older answers of Part 1 (ch. 2–6): prehistoric graves, the Mesopotamian land of no return, the Egyptian weighing of the heart and the Indo-Iranian kingdom of Yima. All of these come before the scriptures that later traditions argue from.

Before scripture: graves, ancestors and the land of no return

The oldest evidence is the grave itself. Eliade dates certain burials to the Mousterian (c. 70,000–50,000 BCE). He reads the red ochre strewn over the dead, “a ritual substitute for blood, hence a ‘symbol’ of life”, and graves oriented to the east as signs of belief in survival and hope of “re-birth”. He also records Leroi-Gourhan’s doubt that personal grave goods are attested at all, and warns that “beliefs and ideas are not fossilisable” [Eliade, Istoria credințelor și ideilor religioase, #44122, ch. I §2-3]. For the megalith builders of Atlantic Europe the dead were not weak. In Eliade’s reading the ancestors in the stone dolmens became “powerful and indestructible like the rocks”. He contrasts this with Mesopotamian, Hittite, Hebrew and Greek views, in which the dead were “poor unhappy and powerless shades” [#44122, ch. V §34] (ch. 2).

Mesopotamia is the classic case of that second view. According to the reference shelf, all the dead went to the underworld (Arallû, Ganzer, Irkallu) “irrespective of social status or the actions performed during their lifetime”, and of them the Descent of Ishtar says that “dust is their food and clay their nourishment” [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. The ghost (gidim) depended on funerary offerings. Unfed, it could “become restless and liable to haunt the living” [Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, #70458]. Gilgamesh looks for immortality and fails to get it. Ut-napishti can offer only “restored youth” through a plant, and Gilgamesh loses it [#70458, “Gilgameš”] (ch. 3). There is no judgment here, and conduct does not change the outcome. Early Sheol, “a dark place from which none return” [Wikipedia: Intermediate state (Christianity)], belongs to the same family. So does Canaanite Mot, “Death”, who swallows Baal and whom Smith traces as a personified demon through Isaiah 25:8, Hosea 13:14 and Revelation 21:4 [Smith, The Early History of God, #67245, ch. 2] (ch. 5).

The Zoroastrian sequence: three nights, the Bridge and the scales

The Pahlavi texts collected in Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism give the fullest early account of an individual judgment. The soul stays near the body for three nights: “for three days and nights your soul will sit at the body’s head. And on the fourth day at dawn, accompanied by the just Srosh and the good Vay and mighty Vahram, and opposed by Astvihad and the worse Vay and the demon Vizarsh … it will reach the high and terrible Chinvat Bridge, to which everyone comes” [Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, #55116, “The Fate of the Soul at Death”]. At the Bridge the soul is weighed: “Rashn the just, who holds the balance for souls, never makes it dip to one side, neither for the just nor for the wicked, neither for a lord nor for the ruler of a land … He does not swerve by as much as a hair’s breadth, and has no regard for persons” [#55116]. As ch. 17 sets out, Mithra presides over this tribunal with Rashnu and Sraosha.

The person’s own conscience meets the soul. The editors explain that daena, “Inner Self”, “was the term used by the prophet for the figure which meets the soul at the Chinvat Bridge, in the old religion simply a beautiful girl” [#55116]. For the wicked she appears as a hag. Ritual duties also count at the Bridge. Failing to celebrate the seven holy days of obligation “was a sin that ‘went to the Bridge’, i.e. counted at Judgment Day” [#55116, sec. 1.6].

The Arda Viraz Namag turns the doctrine into a guided tour. The righteous Viraz’s soul crosses the Chinvat Bridge, “and after seven days and nights it returned and entered his body again” [#55116, sec. 6.3]. He sees heaven, hell and Hammistagan, the place where souls whose good and evil deeds balance are held. That place is a Zoroastrian intermediate state. The judgment of the individual is not final, however. The “future body”, tan i pasen, “will be made immortal at Frashegird” [#55116, 6.3.5], the bodily resurrection and renovation of the world.

Boyce argues that most of this sequence is older than Zarathushtra. In her reconstruction of the Indo-Iranian religion, souls (urvan) went to “the underworld kingdom of the dead, thought to be ruled over by Yima (Skt. Yama), the first king to reign on earth and the first man to die”. The way there was the “Chinvat Crossing”, possibly a ford “guarded by supernatural dogs”. A later hope that some souls might ascend to “Paradise, the ‘House of Song'” brought with it “the concept of resurrection of the body”, recreated “from the dry bones a year or so after death”. The crossing became a bridge to heaven, where “a beautiful girl appeared to lead [the soul] upward to the gods” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, #55116, “1.2.5”] (ch. 6). That is the girl whom the editors identify above as the old form of the daena. Yama survives on the Vedic side, but Macdonell’s count places him among the least-invoked gods [Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, #54250] (ch. 7). Eliade’s note that early hunters believed an animal could be reborn from its bones, a belief he traces as late as Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones [#44122, ch. I §4], shows how old the image of the dry bones is that Boyce places at the start of resurrection belief.

Egypt, Hades and the transmigrating soul

McClelland describes the Egyptian Book of the Dead, “Chapters of the Coming Forth by Day”, as tomb inscriptions dating “from 2500 BCE to 200 CE” whose purpose “was to safely guide the soul to the underworld (tuat, duat) of the god Osiris, and to assist in convincing the judges of the dead” of the soul’s worth [McClelland, Encyclopedia of Reincarnation and Karma, #66947, “Book of the Dead”]. Part 1 gives the procedure. Bierbrier writes that the Book of the Dead’s “most important spell concerned the ritual of the weighing of the heart against the feather of maat to determine the deceased’s worthiness to enter the afterlife”, reached through gates “guarded by demons” [Bierbrier, Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, #366518, “Book of the Dead”]. Before the weighing came the Negative Confession, “a confession of sins not committed”, made before Osiris and forty-two assessors [Mercatante, Who’s Who in Egyptian Mythology, #72968, “Negative Confession”]: “I have not stolen. I have not slain men and women… I have made none to weep” [Weaver, Egyptian Mythology, #66942, ch. IV]. The dead person was also ritually identified with Osiris, “since the deceased was identified with Osiris during the rites” [Mercatante, #72968, “Osiris”]. The privilege widened over time, from the “exclusively kingly ‘Pyramid Texts'” to the Coffin Texts, a change some call the “democratization” of the afterlife [The Egyptians: An Introduction, #363364] (ch. 4). The heart against the feather is the closest parallel in this study to Rashn’s balance that “does not swerve by as much as a hair’s breadth”. The library’s sources do not say whether one derives from the other. Greek thought held both the shadowy Hades and the Orphic doctrine of the soul imprisoned in the body (ch. 40), which Pythagoras and Plato turned into metempsychosis (ch. 41). McClelland notes that Aristotle’s criticism of transmigration helped him find “more acceptance in the late medieval Church than were the views of Plato” [#66947, “Arguments”].

Sheol, resurrection and the Persian question

The reference shelf states that “The early Hebrews had no notion of resurrection of the dead”; sheol “was a dark place from which none return”. By Jesus’ time “Daniel 12:1–4 and … Isaiah 26:19 had made popular the idea that the dead in sheol would be raised for a last judgment” [Wikipedia: Intermediate state (Christianity)]. Chs. 31 and 166 give Carter’s and Mills’s view that immortality and resurrection entered Judaism in the Persian period. Ch. 33 covers the Pharisee-Sadducee split over resurrection. A popular-medical author pushes the derivation further. Shealy writes that “the concept of resurrection of corpses originated with the Zoroastrian religion in Persia”. He also reads Josephus as reporting that the Pharisees were “a Jewish sect that believed in reincarnation” [Shealy, Energy Medicine, #63535, “From Zoroastrianism to Judaism”]. That claim belongs to Shealy, not to the specialist literature cited in chs. 31–33.

Christian heaven, hell, purgatory and the intermediate state

The Supernatural Guide to the Other Side records disputes inside Christianity. In Protestantism, “The conservatives believe in a literal place of hell, while the more liberal tend to believe that a loving God could not put people into such a place of torment. They feel it is more likely an eternity separated from God himself”. Catholics add purgatory. The Orthodox teach that “after the soul leaves the body there is an anticipation of judgment” [The Supernatural Guide to the Other Side, #63018, ch. 9].

The reference shelf fills in the history. “The Eastern Church admits of such an intermediate state, but refrained from defining it”. “The idea of Purgatory as a physical place was ‘born’ in the late 11th century”, and indulgences grew out of it (ch. 64). Luther and Calvin rejected purgatory but kept an intermediate state. Mortalists (Adventists, Christadelphians, Jehovah’s Witnesses) hold that the dead “sleep” until the resurrection [Wikipedia: Intermediate state (Christianity)].

Islam: barzakh, the Hour and martyrdom

The reference shelf notes that the Christian intermediate state “bears resemblance to the Barzakh in Islam” [Wikipedia: Intermediate state (Christianity)]. Negru places Judgment Day at the centre of Islamic eschatology. The Mahdi “will be the savior of Islam and he will rise shortly before Judgment Day. He will free the world of error, injustice and oppression together with Jesus”. Al-Dajjal appears “at the same time with the return of Isa” [Negru, A History of the Apocalypse, #62383, Part I].

Aberth gives a case in which belief about the afterlife shaped behaviour during an epidemic. Al-Wardi of Aleppo, who died of the Black Death in 1349, wrote: “This plague is for the Muslims a martyrdom and a reward, and for the disbelievers a punishment and a rebuke”. One scholar called this doctrine “a major theological innovation of Islam”. Aberth disputes its uniqueness, noting that seventh-century Spain already promised resurrection to plague victims [Aberth, Plagues in World History, #66467].

Karma, rebirth and the Christian quarrel

McClelland’s encyclopedia covers the reincarnationist side. On Buddhism he records the anatman problem. The reasons for denying a permanent self “would seem to logically deny continuati[on]” between lives, yet “the Buddha’s teachings never denied … the ‘heroic I'”, the I that strives for liberation [#66947, “Anatman/Anatta”].

He is blunt about Christianity: “standard Christianity can not easily accept a belief in reincarnation”. Its doctrine of Christ as the “most complete revealer” is, in his view, “definitely … incompatible with reincarnation” [#66947, “Christianity and reincarnation”]. He reports that “One of the main criticisms of reincarnation by the early Christian Fathers was that the doctrine of multiple lives encouraged antinomianism, as exemplified by the heretical Caropocrates” [sic] [#66947, “Christian fathers critical of reincarnation”]. His cross-references send the reader to the “Church Council of 553”, which condemned Origenism, and to the Cathars [#66947, “Cathars”]. He records Edgar Cayce’s view that Adam was “the collective name for a primordial group of souls” and the name of its leader [#66947, Introduction].

Rebirth also has a Jewish form. According to the Supernatural Guide, “According to the Zohar … the evildoers are consigned to resurrections on earth after memories of previous births and actions are erased. These souls must rectify past wrongs in the reincarnated life to attain salvation” [#63018, ch. 9; see ch. 104]. Ch. 100 covers the Romanian Orthodox critique of Tibetan reincarnation. Steiner’s lecture cycles listed in Disease, Karma and Healing include “Earthly Death and Cosmic Life” [Steiner, Disease, Karma and Healing, #69269, bibliography of lecture cycles].

Afterlives that claim evidence: mediums, Omega Point, upload

Spiritualism (ch. 129) claimed that séance communication proved survival. Tipler goes further and claims that physics itself implies resurrection. “theology is nothing but physical cosmology based on the assumption that life as a whole is immortal. A consequence of this assumption is the resurrection of everyone who has ever lived to eternal life. Physics has now absorbed theology” [Tipler, The Physics of Immortality, #63681]. His chapter XI, “Comparison of the Heaven Predicted by Modern Physics with the Afterlife Hoped for by the Great World Religions”, with its section “Immortality in the Major Non-Western Religions”, claims that the theory “is consistent with only those features of religion which are found in all of the great world religions” [#63681]. Ch. 165 treats Kurzweil’s mind-uploading as a secular version of the same hope.

Keshe: no reincarnation, no court, a soul that judges itself

The Keshe Foundation Brazil summary Reincarnation Does Not Exist is based on KSW 465 and carries the note “Summary has not been checked by KF”. Eastern reincarnation, it adds, “leads to stagnation in spiritual development”. The Soul of the Man (STM) is a plasma created when the M-fields of sperm and egg interact; it matures with the Soul of the Physicality (STP), and “at the point of maturity, or what we call death, the STP gives all its energies to the STM”, which “finds its place in the U according to its field strength”. A soul that conducts itself negatively “will become a dust or a cell of something else”. The summary concludes that “the process of creating a Soul happens once … So in a way the Christian Fathers were not totally wrong” [Keshe, Reincarnation Does Not Exist (2023-01-04), #378487].

In KSW 467 Keshe says only partial inheritance survives. A return “somewhere as the package of ‘Mr. John’ with the memories etc, does not exist. It cannot happen. But, the way you say, ‘my grandson has my eyes,’ you passed part of yourself … We are all reincarnated from part of the fields” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 467, #378179]. KSW 595 removes the judge: “Day of Judgment – you are judge of yourself; No courts – Heaven or Hell … You decide Heaven or Hell” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 595, #378307]. KSW 631 gives the mechanics. Near-death experiencers “don’t go Heaven – take position in U – instantly”. “Ghosts” are “P with energy of P – left behind – not STM or STP”. At death the STM and STP separate, and “the Phoenix rises out of ashes of P – Resurrection”. He adds that “the Hell and the Heaven is on this planet” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 631, #378343].

Heisman: death as the hidden master

Heisman reverses the usual question. Instead of asking what follows death, he asks what the fear of death has built: “Most common moral positions justify and cloak this fear of death. And like any traditional authority, time has gathered a whole system of rituals, conventions, and customs to maintain its authority … For most people, fear of death is the unquestionable master that establishes all other hierarchies — both social hierarchies, and the hierarchies within one’s own mind” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, Part II]. His section “Open Your Mind to Death” says that “Opening one’s mind to death emerges from the attempt to unshackle one’s mind from the limitations of all borders” [#38252, “Open Your Mind to Death”]. The library catalogues the work under the title “suicide note”. Ch. 159 records the circumstances of his death as the catalogue presents them.

Key points

• Eliade reads Mousterian ochre burials and east-facing graves as belief in survival, and the megaliths as making ancestors “indestructible like the rocks”. He also warns that “beliefs and ideas are not fossilisable” (#44122).
• Mesopotamia sent every dead person to one dim underworld “irrespective of… actions”, with no judgment. The ghost depended on offerings, and Gilgamesh failed to win immortality (Wikipedia; #70458).
• Egypt made the outcome depend on conduct: the Negative Confession, the heart weighed against Maat’s feather before Osiris, and a privilege that widened from kings to commoners (#366518; #72968; #363364).
• Boyce dates Yima’s kingdom of the dead, the Chinvat Crossing, the guiding girl and resurrection “from the dry bones” before Zarathushtra (#55116).
• The Zoroastrian texts give the earliest full individual judgment: three nights, the Daena, an impartial scale held by Rashn and his companions, the Chinvat Bridge, a middle place (Hammistagan), and bodily resurrection at Frashegird (#55116).
• Whether resurrection passed from Persia to Judaism is argued in chs. 31–33. Shealy, a popular-medical author, states flatly that it “originated with the Zoroastrian religion” (#63535).
• Christian traditions divide over the intermediate state: the Catholic purgatory, the undefined Orthodox state, Protestant rejection of purgatory, and mortalist soul-sleep. Protestants also divide over a literal hell (#63018; Wikipedia).
• Islam centres on the Day of Judgment, preceded by the Mahdi and the return of Isa (#62383). Al-Wardi’s plague-martyrdom doctrine shows afterlife belief guiding conduct during an epidemic (#66467).
• McClelland finds standard Christianity incompatible with reincarnation and records patristic objections, including antinomianism (#66947). The Zohar keeps rebirth as a penalty for evildoers (#63018).
• Tipler presents the Omega Point as a physical resurrection of everyone who has ever lived and claims it matches the afterlife of every great world religion (#63681).
• Keshe denies personal reincarnation and the external court. Each soul judges itself, and its place after death is fixed at once by its accumulated field strength (#378487, #378179, #378307, #378343).
• Heisman reads the fear of death as the unacknowledged authority behind morality and custom (#38252).