What Happens To Your Soul After Death? | You Need To Know This
The fate of the soul
What happens between death and reincarnation is seldom discussed in articles about Hinduism. This is regrettable, for the perception of these events helps explain some of the rites of the religion and provides unique insights into the human preference, when thinking about death, to conceptualize metaphysical developments in very concrete terms.
Immediately after death, the soul is not clothed in a physical body but in a vaporous thumb-sized structure (linga ṡarīra). This is immediately seized by two servants of Yama, the god of death, who carry it to their master for a preliminary identity check. Afterward, the soul is promptly returned to the abode of the deceased, where it hovers around the doorstep. It is important that the cremation be completed by the time of the soul’s return, to prevent it from reentering the body. By the 10th day, the near relatives have purged some of the defilement (mṛitaka sutaka) they incurred from the death, and the chief mourner and a priest are ready to carry out the first śrāddha (ritual of respect). This is a step toward the reconstitution of a more substantial physical body (yatana ṡarīra) around the disembodied soul (preta) of the deceased. A tiny trench is dug in a ritually purified piece of land by a river, and the presence of Vishnu is invoked. Ten balls of barley flour mixed with sugar, honey, milk, curds, ghee, and sesame seeds are then placed, one by one, in the soil. As the first ball is offered, the priest says (and the son repeats after him), “May this create a head”; with the second ball, “May this create neck and shoulders”; with the third, “May this create heart and chest”; and so on. The 10th request is for the ball to create the capacity to digest, thereby satisfying the hunger and thirst of the newly created body. Bungled ceremonies can have catastrophic effects. Prayers are offered to Vishnu to help deliver the new entity (now perceived as some 18 inches [46 centimetres] long) into the power of Yama. The balls of barley are picked up from the trench and thrown into the river. Further śrāddhas are performed at prescribed times, varying according to caste; one of these rituals makes the soul an ancestral spirit, or pitṛi. With the completion of these rituals, the soul of the deceased leaves this world for its yearlong and perilous journey to Yama’s kingdom. The family is now formally cleansed. The men shave their heads, and the women wash their hair. The family’s tutelary god (removed by a friend at the time of the death) can be returned to its home. A feast is offered to Brahmans, neighbours, and beggars—even the local cows are given fresh grass. There is a sense of general relief: if the śrāddhas had not been performed, the preta could have become a bhūta (malignant spirit), repeatedly turning up to frighten the living. For the deceased, things would have been worse: the preta would have been left errant. (A similar fate befalls the soul of a person who commits suicide.) The horror of dying unshriven that haunted people in medieval Europe resembles the despair of the devout Hindu at the prospect of having no son to perform the śrāddhas.
The soul, in its substantial envelope, is meanwhile proceeding on its journey, holding onto a cow’s tail to cross the Vaitarani, a horrible river of blood and filth that marks the boundary of Yama’s kingdom. Throughout, it is sustained by further śrāddhas, during which friends on earth seek to provide it with shoes, umbrellas, clothing, and money. These they give to a Brahman, in the hope that the deceased will benefit. During such rituals relatives have to avoid all sewing, which might occlude the pitṛi’s throat, rendering it incapable of ever breathing or drinking again. After a year, the pitṛi in its yatana ṡarīra reaches Yama’s seat of judgment, where it is sentenced to a strictly limited term in heaven (svarga) or hell (naraka) according to its deserts. This completed, it moves into another body (the karaṇa ṡarīra), whose form depends on the individual’s karman. It could be a plant, a cockroach, a canine intestinal parasite, a mouse, or a human being. Unlike Jains, Hindus believe that whatever body the soul eventually moves into, it inhabits as sole tenant, not as a tenement lodger.
Islām
Probably no religion deals in such graphic detail as does Islām with the creation, death, “life in the tomb,” and ultimate fate of humankind. Yet the Qurʿān, the holy book of Islām, itself provides no uniform or systematic approach to these problems. It is only in its later parts (which date from the period when the small Muslim community in Medina had come into contact with other religious influences) that problems such as the relation of sleep to death, the significance of breathing, and the question of when and how the soul leaves the body are addressed in any detail. Popular Muslim beliefs are based on still later traditions. These are recorded in the Kitāb al-rūḥ (“Book of the Soul”) written in the 14th century by the Ḥanbalī theologian Muḥammad ibn Abī-Bakr ibn Qayyīm al-Jawzīyah.
The basic premise of all Qurʿānic teaching concerning death is Allāh’s omnipotence: he creates human beings, determines their life span, and causes them to die. The Qurʿān states: “Some will die early, while others are made to live to a miserable old age, when all that they once knew they shall know no more (22:5; i.e., sūrah [chapter] 22, verse 5). Damnation and salvation are equally predetermined: “Allāh leaves to stray whom he willeth, and guideth whom he willeth” (35:8). As for those whom Allāh leaves astray, the Qurʿān states that “for them there will be no helpers” (30:29). Allāh has decided many will fail: “If We had so willed We could certainly cause proper guidance to come to every soul, but true is My saying ‘assuredly I shall fill Jihannam’ ” (32:13).
In this perspective the individual’s fate (including the mode and time of death) appears inescapably predetermined. The very term Islām, Arabic for “surrender,” implies an absolute submission to the will of God. But what freedom does this allow those predestined to continue in the path of error, or to reject God’s will? And if there is no such freedom, what sense was there in the mission of the Prophet Muḥammad (Islām’s founder) and his appeal to people to alter their ways? It is hardly surprising that arguments about free will and predestination broke out soon after the Prophet’s death. The ensuing tensions dominated theological (and other) controversies within Islām during many centuries.
Questions concerning the meaning of life and the nature of the soul are dealt with patchily in both the Qurʿān and the Ḥadīth (the record of the sayings attributed to the Prophet). The Qurʿān records that, when asked about these matters by local leaders of the Jewish faith, the Prophet answered that “the spirit cometh by command of God” and that “only a little knowledge was communicated to man” (17:85). Humanity was created from “potter’s clay, from mud molded into shape” into which Allāh has “breathed his spirit” (15:28–29). A vital spirit or soul (nafs) is within each human being. It is associated, if not actually identified, with individuality and also with the seat of rational consciousness. It is interesting to speculate on the possible relation of the term nafs to such Arabic words as nafas (“breath”) and nafīs (“precious”), particularly in a language where there are no written vowels.
Death is repeatedly compared with sleep, which is at times described as “the little death.” God takes away people’s souls “during their sleep” and “upon their death.” He “retains those against whom he has decreed death, but returns the others to their bodies for an appointed term” (39:42–43). During death, the soul “rises into the throat” (56:83) before leaving the body. These are interesting passages in the light of modern medical knowledge. The study of sleep has identified the episodic occurrence of short periods during which the limbs are totally flaccid and without reflexes, as would be the limbs of the recently dead. Modern neurophysiology, moreover, stresses the role of structures in the upper part of the brain stem in the maintenance of the waking state. Lesions just a little higher (in the hypothalamus) cause excessively long episodes of sleep. Irreversible damage at these sites is part of the modern concept of death. Finally, various types of breathing disturbance are characteristic of brain-stem lesions and could have been attributed, in former times, to occurrences in the throat. Nothing in these passages outrages the insights of modern neurology. The absence of any cardiological dimension is striking.
It is orthodox Muslim belief that when someone dies the Angel of Death (malāk al-mawt) arrives, sits at the head of the deceased, and addresses each soul according to its known status. According to the Kitāb al-rūh, wicked souls are instructed “to depart to the wrath of God.” Fearing what awaits them, they seek refuge throughout the body and have to be extracted “like the dragging of an iron skewer through moist wool, tearing the veins and sinews.” Angels place the soul in a hair cloth and “the odour from it is like the stench of a decomposing carcass.” A full record is made, and the soul is then returned to the body in the grave. “Good and contented souls” are instructed “to depart to the mercy of God.” They leave the body, “flowing as easily as a drop from a waterskin”; are wrapped by angels in a perfumed shroud, and are taken to the “seventh heaven,” where the record is kept. These souls, too, are then returned to their bodies.
Two angels coloured blue and black, known as Munkar and Nakīr, then question the deceased about basic doctrinal tenets. In a sense this trial at the grave (fitnat al-Qabr) is a show trial, the verdict having already been decided. Believers hear it proclaimed by a herald, and in anticipation of the comforts of al-jannah (the Garden, or “paradise”) their graves expand “as far as the eye can reach.” Unbelievers fail the test. The herald proclaims that they are to be tormented in the grave; a door opens in their tomb to let in heat and smoke from jihannam (“hell”), and the tomb itself contracts “so that their ribs are piled up upon one another.” The period between burial and the final judgment is known as al-barzakh. At the final judgment (yaum al-Hisāb), unbelievers and the god-fearing are alike resurrected. Both are endowed with physical bodies, with which to suffer or enjoy whatever lies in store for them. The justified enter Gardens of Delight, which are described in the Qurʿān in terms of prevalent, but essentially masculine, tastes (37:42–48). At the reception feast on the Day of Judgment unbelievers fill their bellies with bitter fruit, and “drink down upon it hot water, drinking as drinks the camel crazed with thirst” (56:52–55). They then proceed to hell, where they don “garments of fire” (22:19) and have boiling water poured over their heads. Allāh has made provision against the annihilation of the body of the damned, promising that “whenever their skins are cooked to a turn, We shall substitute new skins for them, that they may feel the punishment” (4:56). Pleas for annihilation are disregarded. Although this is sometimes referred to as the “second death,” the Qurʾān is explicit that in this state the damned “neither live nor die” (87:13).
A special fate is reserved for the martyrs of Islām; i.e., for those who fall in a jihād (“holy war”). Their evil deeds are instantly expiated and the formalities of judgment are waived; they enter the Garden immediately. Similar dispensations are promised to “those who had left their homes, or been driven therefrom, or who had suffered harm” in the divine cause (3:195). For the Shīʾites, followers of the smaller of Islām’s two major branches, the prospects for martyrdom are even wider. A major event of the origin of Shīʾism, moreover, was the slaughter of the Prophet’s grandson, Ḥusayn, in 680; this heritage has imbued Shīʾism with a zeal for martyrdom. Some of the behaviour of Islāmic fundamentalists is explicable from this perspective.
A gentler strand in Islāmic eschatology produced, over the centuries, a series of reinterpretations or adaptations of the original doctrine, some of whose tenets were even claimed to have been only metaphorical. These tendencies, which stressed individual responsibility, were often influenced by the Ṣūfīs (Islāmic mystics).
Muslims accord a great respect to dead bodies, which have to be disposed of very promptly. The mere suggestion of cremation, however, is viewed with abhorrence. The philosophical basis, if any, of this attitude is not clear. It is not stated, for instance, that an intact body will be required at the time of resurrection. It is unlikely, moreover, that the abhorrence—which Orthodox Jews share—arose out of a desire to differentiate Islāmic practices from those of other “people of the Book” (i.e., Jews and Christians). The attitude toward dead bodies has had practical consequences; for instance, in relation to medical education. It is almost impossible to carry out postmortem examinations in many Islāmic countries. Medical students in Saudi Arabia, for example, study anatomy on corpses imported from non-Islāmic countries. They learn pathology only from textbooks; many complete their medical training never having seen a real brain destroyed by a real cerebral hemorrhage.
In 1982 organ donation after death was declared ḥallāl (“permissible”) by the Senior ʾUlamāʿ Commission, the highest religious authority on such matters in Saudi Arabia (and hence throughout the Islāmic world). Tales inculcated in childhood continue, however, to influence public attitudes in Islāmic nations. The widely told story of how the Prophet’s uncle Ḥamzah was murdered by the heathen Hind, who then opened the murdered man’s belly and chewed up his liver, has slowed public acceptance of liver transplantation. Kidney transplantation is more acceptable, perhaps because the Ḥadīth explicitly states that those entering the Garden will never more urinate.
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Christianity
The Christian legacy
The spread of rationalistic and scientific ideas since the 18th century has undermined many aspects of religion, including many Christian beliefs. The church, moreover, although still seeking to exert its influence, has ceased to dominate civil life in the way it once did. Religion is no longer the pivot of all social relations as it once was in ancient Egypt and still is in some Islāmic countries. The decline of the church is epitomized by the fact that, while it is still prepared to speak of the symbolic significance of the death of Jesus Christ (and of human death in general), it has ceased to emphasize many aspects of its initial eschatology and to concern itself, as in the past, with the particular details of individual death. In the age of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the elaborate descriptions of heaven, purgatory, and hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, while remaining beautiful literature, at best raise a smile if thought of as outlines for humanity’s future.
Death is at the very core of the Christian religion. Not only is the cross to be found in cemeteries and places of worship alike, but the premise of the religion is that, by their own action, humans have forfeited immortality. Through abuse of the freedom granted in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve not only sinned and fell from grace, but they also transmitted sin to their descendants: the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. And as “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), death became the universal fate: “Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men” (Rom. 5:12). Christian theologians spent the best part of two millennia sorting out these implications and devising ways out of the dire prognosis implicit in the concept of original sin. The main salvation was to be baptism into the death of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3–4).
Among early Christians delay in the promised Second Coming of Christ led to an increasing preoccupation with what happened to the dead as they awaited the resurrection and the Last Judgment. One view was that there would be an immediate individual judgment and that instant justice would follow: the deceased would be dispatched forthwith to hell or paradise. This notion demeaned the impact of the great prophecy of a collective mass resurrection, followed by a public mass trial on a gigantic scale. Moreover, it deprived the dead of any chance of a postmortem (i.e., very belated) expiation of their misdeeds. The Roman Catholic notion of purgatory sought to resolve the latter problem; regulated torture would expiate some of the sins of those not totally beyond redemption.
The second view was that the dead just slept, pending the mass resurrection. But as the sleep might last for millennia, it was felt that the heavenly gratification of the just was being arbitrarily, and somewhat unfairly, deferred. As for the wicked, they were obtaining an unwarranted respite. The Carthaginian theologian Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers, outlined the possibility of still further adjustments. In his Adversus Marcionem, written about 207, he described “a spatial concept that may be called Abraham’s bosom for receiving the soul of all people.” Although not celestial, it was “above the lower regions and would provide refreshment (refrigerium) to the souls of the just until the consummation of all things in the great resurrection.” The Byzantine Church formally endorsed the concept, which inspired some most interesting art in both eastern and western Europe.
During its early years, the Christian Church debated death in largely religious terms. The acerbitas mortis (“bitterness of death”) was very real, and pious deathbeds had to be fortified by the acceptance of pain as an offering to God. Life expectancy fell far short of the promised threescore years and 10. Eastern medicine remained for a long time in advance of that practiced in the West, and the church’s interventions were largely spiritual. It was only during the Renaissance and the later age of Enlightenment that an intellectual shift became perceptible.
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Descartes, the pineal soul, and brain-stem death
The first attempts to localize the soul go back to classical antiquity. The soul had originally been thought to reside in the liver, an organ to which no other function could, at that time, be attributed. Empedocles, Democritus, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Epicureans had later held its abode to be the heart. Other Greeks (Pythagoras, Plato, and Galen) had opted for the brain. Herophilus (flourished c. 300 BC), a famous physician of the Greek medical school of Alexandria, had sought to circumscribe its habitat to the fourth ventricle of the brain; that is, to a small area immediately above the brain stem. Controversy persisted to the very end of the 16th century.
The departure of the soul from the body had always been central to the Christian concept of death. But the soul had come to mean different things to various classical and medieval thinkers. There was a “vegetative soul,” responsible for what we would now call autonomic function; a “sensitive soul,” responsible for what modern physiologists would describe as reflex responses to environmental stimuli; and, most importantly, a “reasoning soul,” responsible for making a rational entity (res cogitans) of human beings. The reasoning soul was an essentially human attribute and was the basis of thought, judgment, and responsibility for one’s actions. Its departure implied death. The Anatome Corporis Humani (1672) of Isbrand van Diemerbroeck, professor at Utrecht, appears to have been the last textbook of anatomy that discussed the soul within a routine description of human parts. Thereafter, the soul disappeared from the scope of anatomy.
The modern and entirely secular concept of brain-stem death can, perhaps rather surprisingly, find both a conceptual and a topographical foundation in the writings of René Descartes (1596–1650), the great French philosopher and mathematician who sought to bring analytical geometry, physics, physiology, cosmology, and religion into an integrated conceptual framework. Descartes considered the body and the soul to be ontologically separate but interacting entities, each with its own particular attributes. He then sought to specify both their mode and site of interaction; the latter he deduced to be the pineal gland. The pineal was to become, in the words of Geoffrey Jefferson, “the nodal point of Cartesian dualism.”
Before Descartes, the prevailing wisdom, largely derived from Greece, had regarded the soul both as the motive force of all human physiological functions and as the conscious agent of volition, cognition, and reason. Descartes succeeded in eliminating the soul’s general physiological role altogether and in circumscribing its cognitive role to the human species. Descartes’s writings about death show that his concept of the soul clearly implied both mind and the immaterial principle of immortality. It had to mean both things, for no one had ever conceived of survival after death without a mind to verify the fact of continued existence, to enjoy its pleasures, and to suffer its pains.
The relation between body and soul had been discussed in patristic literature, and, because of his Jesuit education, Descartes would have been familiar with these discussions. The church’s interest in these matters was strictly nonmedical, seeking only to reconcile earlier Greek theories with its own current doctrines. Descartes was the first to tackle these problems in a physiological way. With one foot still firmly on consecrated ground (and with Galileo’s difficulties with the Inquisition very much in mind), he sought to give a materialistic, even mechanistic, dimension to the discussion. In this sense, his De Homine (On Man; published posthumously in 1662) can be thought of as an updating of Plato’s Timaeus. His contemporaries viewed Descartes as having delivered the coup de grace to an earlier Greek tradition (dating back to several centuries before Christ) that had claimed that animals, as well as humans, had souls. This had been the subject of much discussion in the early Christian Church. During the 4th century, St. John Chrysostom (onetime archbishop of Constantinople) had denounced the idea, attributing it to the devil, who had allegedly managed by various maneuvers to deceive people as varied as Pythagoras, Plato, Pliny, and even Zoroaster.
Descartes probably was impressed by the central location of the unpaired pineal gland, situated where neural pathways from the retinas converge with those conveying feelings from the limbs. This “general reflector of all sorts of sensation” is, moreover, sited in the immediate proximity of the brain ventricles, from which (according to the wisdom of the day) “animal spirits” flowed into the hollow nerves, carrying instructions to the muscles. In his Excerpta Anatomica, Descartes had even likened the pineal to a penis obturating the passage between the third and fourth ventricles.
Descartes proved wrong in his beliefs that all sensory inputs focused on the pineal gland and that the pineal itself was a selective motor organ, suspended in a whirl of “animal spirits,” dancing and jigging “like a balloon captive above a fire,” yet capable in humans of scrutinizing inputs and producing actions “consistent with wisdom.” He was also wrong when he spoke of the “ideas formed on the surface” of the pineal gland, and in his attribution to the pineal of such functions as “volition, cognition, memory, imagination, and reason.” But he was uncannily correct in his insight that a very small part of this deep and central area of the brain was relevant to some of the functions he stressed. We now know that immediately below the pineal gland there lies the mesencephalic tegmentum (the uppermost part of the brain stem), which is crucial to generating alertness (the capacity for consciousness), without which, of course, there can be no volition, cognition, or reason.
It is a matter of vocabulary whether one considers the mesencephalic tegmentum either as being involved in generating a “capacity for consciousness” or as preparing the brain for the exercise of what Descartes would have considered the “functions of the soul” (volition, cognition, and reason). In either case, the total and irreversible loss of these functions dramatically alters the ontological status of the subject. Descartes specifically considered the example of death. In “La Description du corps humain” (1664) he wrote that “although movements cease in the body when it is dead and the soul departs, one cannot deduce from these facts that the soul produced the movements.” In a formulation of really modern tenor, he then added “one can only infer that the same single cause (a) renders the body incapable of movement and (b) causes the soul to absent itself.” He did not, of course, say that this “same single cause” was the death of the brain stem. Some 300 years later, in 1968, the Harvard Committee spoke of death in terms of “irreversible coma” (where Descartes had spoken of the “now absent soul”) and stressed, as had Descartes, the immobility of the comatose body. The religious and secular terms seem to describe the same reality.
There have been other neurological controversies concerning the locus of the soul. Early in the 18th century Stephen Hales, an English clergyman with a great interest in science, repeated an experiment originally reported by Leonardo da Vinci. Hales tied a ligature around the neck of a frog and cut off its head. The heart continued to beat for a while, as it usually does in the brain dead. Thirty hours later, the limbs of the animal still withdrew when stimulated. In fact, the elicited movements only ceased when the spinal cord itself had been destroyed. This observation gave rise to a great controversy. Reflex action at spinal cord level was not then fully understood, and it was argued that the irritability implied sentience, and that sentience suggested that the soul was still present. The “spinal cord soul” became the subject of much debate. It is now known that such purely spinal reflex movements may occur below a dead brain. It was shown during the 19th century that individuals executed on the guillotine might retain the knee jerk reflex for up to 20 minutes after decapitation.
The church is still concerned with the diagnosis of death, but the theological argument has, during the last half of the 20th century, moved to an entirely different plane. As mentioned earlier, in 1957 Pope Pius XII raised the question whether, in intensive care units, doctors might be “continuing the resuscitation process, despite the fact that the soul may already have left the body.” He even asked one of the central questions confronting modern medicine, namely whether “death had already occurred after grave trauma to the brain, which has provoked deep unconsciousness and central breathing paralysis, the fatal consequences of which have been retarded by artificial respiration.” The answer, he said, “did not fall within the competence of the Church.”
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Public attitudes
Until about 100 years ago, people had by and large come to terms with death. They usually died in their homes, among their relatives. In villages, in the 18th or early 19th centuries, passers-by might join the priest bearing the last sacrament on his visit to the dying man or woman. Doctors even stressed the public health hazards this might cause. Numerous pictures attest to the fact that children were not excluded from deathbeds, as they were to be during the 20th century.
The general acceptance of death was to be subverted by the advances of modern medicine and by the rapid spread of rationalist thought. This led, during a period of only a few decades, to a striking change of attitudes. In the advanced industrial countries, a large number of people now die in hospitals. The improvement in life expectancy and the advances of modern surgery and medicine have been achieved at a certain price. A mechanistic approach has developed, in which the protraction of dying has become a major by-product of modern technology. The philosophy of modern medicine has been diverted from attention to the sick and has begun to reify the sickness. Instead of perceiving death as something natural, modern physicians have come to see it as bad or alien, a defeat of all their therapeutic endeavours, at times almost as a personal defeat. Sickness is treated with all possible weapons, often without sufficient thought for the sick person—at times even without thought as to whether there is still a “person” at all. The capacity to “care” for biological preparations, with no other human attribute than physical form, is part of the context in which the reevaluation of death described earlier has taken place.
Parallel developments have taken place at the level of the psyche of the dying person and of the person’s relatives. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, an American psychiatrist, has outlined the stages (denial, anger, bargaining, preparatory grief, and acceptance) through which people, informed of their own approaching death, are said to pass. Her writings are based on a wide but essentially American experience, and their universality has not been tested, particularly in other cultural contexts. They may well prove somewhat ethnocentric.
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The development of the death industry (satirized in Evelyn Waugh’s Loved One and explored in Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death) is also a by-product of the technological revolution and of modern attitudes to death. Undertakers have become “morticians” and coffins “caskets.” Embalming has enjoyed a new vogue. Drive-in cemeteries have appeared, for those seeking to reconcile devotion to the dead with other pressing engagements. Cryogenic storage of the corpse has been offered as a means to preserve the deceased in a form amendable to any future therapies that science may devise. Commercial concerns have entered the scene: nonpayment of maintenance charges may result in threats of thawing and putrefaction. In a contentious environment, the law has even invaded the intensive care unit, influencing the decisions of physicians concerning the withdrawal of treatment or the determination of death. A wit has remarked that in the modern era, the only sure sign that a man is dead is that he is no longer capable of litigation.
