Perhaps a man's faith in the afterlife necessarily falters the moment he starts seriously to probe the origins of the concept among the primitive men of 30,000 years ago, who provided their corpses with weapons to see them through death's terrors. Obviously the idea of heaven had a rise in evolution's slow periods—and, battered by the investigative fervor of science, has it not had a fall too? In a new book that attempts to survey the history of man's conception of destiny, a British cleric and scholar raises this question, and ends with an answer trembling on his tongue. The answer seems to be yes.
Samuel George Frederick Brandon, 54, author of Man and His Destiny in the Great Religions, is the son of a Devonshire sailor; he was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1932, earned his doctorate in divinity while campaigning with Britain's First Army in North Africa during World War II. In 1951, he gave up a career as an army officer to accept his present post as professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester, and presented a concise version of Man and His Destiny in the Wilde Lectures on Natural and Comparative Religion at Oxford between 1954 and 1957.
Dreams of Paradise. Brandon starts his story in the Upper Paleolithic Age, when bodies were tinted red ocher before burial —an attempt to replace through magic the blood that seemed to be missing.
Then, in rich chapters, he describes the virtually inexhaustible variety of answers that man has proposed to the question of what follows death. Islam preached an afterlife of sensual pleasure for the true believer; some Hellenic religions gloomily warned of a dark, shadowy Hades. The Sumerian faith of ancient Babylon and the primitive Yahwist faith of Israel also preached an afterlife of agony rather than ecstasy—which was still apparently preferable to believing that death was merely obliteration.
One of man's most amenable interpretations of death and destiny emerged from the rich civilization of later Egypt. Bodies were mummified; food, clothing and jewelry were stored in crypts; slaves were slaughtered to serve their dead masters in the new world. By "ritual assimilation'' with the god Osiris, it was believed that the dead could share in his resurrection and live happily ever after. Judging by the drawings found in pyramids, the Egyptian vision of Osiris' kingdom was as sensuous as Mohammed's fleshly dream of a Paradise filled with soft-eyed houris, serving exquisite wines to the eminently deserving servants of Allah.