By aurora linnea

“The king did not die. As soon as he had breathed his last, he was exhibited as if he were still alive in a room where a banquet was prepared, with all the attributes of the power he had wielded during his lifetime.” — Philip Aries, The Hour of Our Death 

The earliest feasts are presided over by the King himself, once he has been disemboweled, embalmed, and stuffed with aromatic spices to check the stench of his decline. After several days the King’s body is removed and an effigy takes his place at the table. Waxen hands exposed, solemnly folded. Waxen head with its beard of real hair, with its eyes painted open so the King can survey his guests from the stately bed on which he is posed. An ewer of water is offered to the King, that he might cleanse his hands before dining; a servant raises wine to the King’s lips to let him drink, while another servant stands by with a cloth to wipe away any drips from the regal chin. Dish upon dish pile up untouched before the King, while the company assembled in his honor eat and drink at his side, careful to observe the same code of etiquette they would if the monarch were not a corpse, not a lifeless mannequin of wax and cloth—for to acknowledge that the great man has died would be an affront to his kingly dignity. Thus the guests recite: Le roi ne meurt jamais. The King never dies. Long live the King. 

(Years ago my siblings and I were babysat by a woman who was certain that Elvis Presley had never died. Watching a documentary about Graceland, she had glimpsed his face in a bedroom window: proof that Presley was still among the living. Of course, the King did not die.) 

The former Soviet Premier Vladimir Lenin died of a brain hemorrhage in 1925. For nearly a century, a team of anatomists, biochemists, and surgeons known as the “Mausoleum Group” has been commissioned by the Russian government to maintain Lenin’s corpse in as lifelike a condition as possible, so that he can continue to receive tourists at his tomb in Moscow’s Red Square. The Mausoleum Group’s task is to preserve the physical form of the dead communist’s body: its “look, shape, weight, color, limb flexibility and suppleness.” Lenin’s skin has been substituted with artificial skin, his eyelashes exchanged for artificial eyelashes, his nose and face resculpted, his fat vacuumed out and replaced with moldable paraffin fill. Every other year he spends a month immersed in chemical baths, for re-embalming. “In terms of the original biological matter, the body is less and less of what it used to be,” explains Alexei Yurchak, a University of California, Berkeley professor who researches the care and keeping of Soviet relics. Although little organic remains of the man, Lenin looks more vital than ever. It is as if he never died.

Two months after he died from cancer, the anthropologist Ernest Becker was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the bravery he demonstrated by admitting that Man is afraid to die. In his prize-winning book, The Denial of Death (1973), Becker argues that, “of all the things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.” Mortality, Becker writes, is an “inadmissible reality” Man refuses to accept, one  which he endeavors to overcome through the development of culture. Becker defines culture as a system of “symbols and dreams”—myths, illusion, artifice, synthetics. By superimposing culture over nature, Man labors to prevail over “the real nature of the world,” to suppress and supplant it, tame it and transform it into a death-free fantasy land of his own contrivance, in which mortality is not reality and men live forever. Disney World, basically. It did not occur to Becker that what he identified as universal “culture” is in fact a specific type of culture, reflective of a specific cast of mind. Not all cultures have circled as morbidly around a marrow of mortal fear as do those founded by the forefathers of male dominion. Thus I propose an adjustment to Becker’s thesis: not culture per se but patriarchal culture is rooted in Man’s refusal to come to terms with his own “real situation on this planet” as a mortal animal, and hinges on the delusion that Man can (and should) escape death. 

Recent research by social psychologists in the field of what’s termed “Terror Management Theory” supports the hypothesis that death terror seethes festering as manmade culture’s driving force. Studies reveal that individuals’ dedication to their society’s dominant culture increases when they are confronted with reminders of mortality. Induced to think of death, individuals become suddenly more loyal to the belief systems of their culture, more aggressive in the defense and enforcement of the ideologies to which they subscribe. Nationalism, sexist and racist stereotyping, political partisanship, religious sectarianism, a conviction in the justness of capitalism and the rightness of war—all are amplified when death’s shadow congeals to darken our thoughts. Struggling to shake off the pall, we recommit to culture. Terror management theorists interpret these findings as confirmation that culture’s raison d’etre is to provide refuge for Man when mortality lurches onto the scene, with cultural ideologies serving as “psychological shields” against the anxiety caused by these disconcerting encounters. Yet in order for culture to function effectively as sanctuary, one’s faith in it must be unfaltering: relief from terror comes only to those who believe more in culture than in nature. Fantasy must become more real to us than reality. Thus the intensified reverence for cultural doctrine when death creeps to mind. And thus, too, the renunciation of what is natural in us. In other terror management studies, researchers found that thinking of death prompted people to shrink from physical experiences, even pleasurable ones. A massage, for instance, or orgasm. Confronted with death, the test subjects sought to deny their own bodies. 

Other indications of Man’s enduring obsession with eluding mortality are far less subtle. All patriarchal religions are, at bottom, metaphysical systems for the avoidance of death. Common among them is the claim that, within the shell of Man’s mortal material body, there resides an immaterial, immortal soul; and it is this soul that constitutes Man’s true essence, his authentic self. The Torah conceives of the soul as god’s breath, at death inhaled from the body back into the cosmic lungs of the divine. In Shintoism, everything has a spiritual essence, called the kami, and it is said that when a man dies, his kami is sometimes seen as a fireball blazing towards eternity. 

If a man can believe he is not actually his earthly body but is instead his supernal soul, then he can imagine that, though the body dies, as his soul he will persevere beyond death. “Unborn, everlasting, eternal, [Man] is not slain when the body is slain,” affirms the Hindu deity Vishnu, preserver and guardian of men.

From St. Paul, we read, “If you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” Man crowds the firmament and the abysses beneath the earth’s surface with the afterlives and underworlds he contrives as post-life accommodations. Rivers Styx to be crossed, Elysian Fields and Valhallas for fallen heroes, soft-focus heavens of blue skies and blonde angels. The Ancient Egyptians furnished the tombs of their pharaohs with the housewares, snacks, and servants they’d need for a well-appointed afterlife. Taking a different tack, Man may tell himself that the soul migrates from one body to the next over the course of its undying existence; when one body perishes the soul is reborn into another, fresher vessel. And on and on it goes. Such is the theory of reincarnation, popular among Hindus, Jainists, Buddhists, and past life regression enthusiasts. 

The Christian Fathers report that on the Day of Judgment, everyone dead will rise from their graves to go before God and be routed to either eternal damnation or eternal rapture. Sinner or saint, everyone lives forever. And the Fathers put into their Lord’s mouth the promise they most craved: “He who believes in me will live, though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” Buddhists’ path varies from that trod by devotees of the Abrahamic creeds, but it is no less directed away from death. Their method is to transcend life through detachment from the material world, a practice that culminates in nirvana. When it achieves nirvana, the soul is released from physical existence, never again to be reborn on the earthly plane. Nirvana is freedom from life, from the body, and therefore from death. For spiritualists, the belief in communication with those who have “passed on,” or in ghosts as lost souls wandering the earth, grants the requisite reassurance of everlasting existence. Believers in quantum immortality source their consolation from the notion that there are numberless universes and each person lives numberless parallel lives in all of those universes, such that when the earthly iteration of the individual perishes, that person survives unto infinity through his myriad incarnations strewn throughout the multiverse. 

Of a slightly more recent vintage is the proliferation of schemes for attaining immortality of the body as well as the soul. Today, men of science busily devise ever more heroic fixes to nix disease and debility, from 3D-printed replacement organs to the injection of cell-repairing nanobots. Organizations like the Coalition for Radical Life Extension, Human Longevity, Inc., and the Fuck Death Foundation have dedicated themselves to overthrowing the gloomy “deathist paradigm,” turning their sights boldly “beyond the past of dying to a future of unlimited living.” Aubrey de Grey, founder of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation, denounces aging as “the greatest embodiment of our failure as a species to escape the yoke of nature.” His foundation invests in “rejuvenation biotechnologies” designed to pitch that yoke by “reconstructing the structured order of the living machinery of tissues.” In 2017, a California-based start-up calling itself Ambrosia – ambrosia, from the Greek ambrotos: immortal – merged luxury wellness with dystopian vampire nightmares by marketing plasma extracted from the blood of young donors as an anti-aging elixir, at a cost of $8,000 per liter. Rejuvenate Bio, a biotech company founded by Harvard professor George Church, employs gene therapy to code “anti-aging instructions” into DNA. Church reports that his experiments on mice and dogs have so far been promising. Men are confident that, wielding the powers of science and technology, they can vanquish death. Immortality is Man’s destiny. Dr. Joon Yun, a physician and hedge fund manager who sponsors the Palo Alto Longevity Prize, assures us that, “thermodynamically, there should be no reason that we can’t defer entropy forever.” Transgender/transhumanist thought leader and billionaire biotech entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt is equally sanguine: “Clearly, it is possible, through technology, to make death optional.” 

Men like the futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), put their faith in an upgrade from biological to technological existence as a means to solve the problem of death. Theirs is a perspective premised in Rene Descartes’ Enlightenment-era “scientific” update of the classic immortal soul concept. In Descartes secular revision, the soul is swapped out for the mind. Now Man is his mind, not his body. And the mind is immaterial, immortal. If not for the depredations of the body, the mind would persist indefinitely. Kurzweil believes that by 2045, we will be able to upload the full contents of our brains into computers, in effect transferring the mind from its perilously perishable bodily vessel into a more durable vehicle, i.e., a manmade machine. Inspired by Kurzweil, a wealthy Russian entrepreneur created the 2045 Initiative, which will allow customers to purchase personalized avatars destined to supersede their bodies once the mass transfer begins. The aspiring immortal can select from either a “full-body prosthesis topped off by [his] transplanted head,” or a “top-of-the-line, wholly artificial body containing [his] uploaded essence.” 

But all of this is a ways off. Even Kurzweil doesn’t expect the Singularity to arrive for another twenty years. Happily, for those men nervous that their shabby bodies might sputter out before the day Man finally liberates himself from the death-curse that is being biological, there’s cryogenics. At Alcor Life Extension Foundation’s Arizona facility, chilled “patients” (corpses) await revivification stored inside vacuum-insulated metal pods. No cryogenically frozen “patient” has been successfully revived to date; the human heart cannot survive even five hours of freezing—but Alcor remains optimistic. As of 2016, Alcor was the interim resting place for 149 crusaders against death, 112 of whom were men.  

Still other well-established strategies in Man’s quest for immortality include: siring heirs to carry forth one’s bloodline and/or memory, penning the Great American Novel (or some other Timeless Masterpiece), amassing wealth and erecting monuments/pyramids/obelisks/skyscrapers as permanent tributes to oneself. Capitalism generously supplies its own routes out of death. “Achieve Immortality! (We’re not kidding)” is the marketing tagline for a New York Community Trust Program allowing the wealthy to set up charitable funds that donate to their favored causes in perpetuity. 

But in spite of all of their striving, men continue to die. On earth, 65 million people die each year. 120 people die each minute. It can be surmised that approximately half of the deceased are men. A sobering thought indeed! Men do not yet have indestructible robot bodies to shield them from the elements. Instead, they remain as hideously shackled to their fragile animal bodies as ever. Nor do men yet possess any firm proof of the afterlife, or reincarnation, and faith only goes so far as a balm against terror. Culture may function as a comforting fantasy land in which Man can futz about pretending he’s more than a biological organism, but reality is an intractable foe and inevitably intrudes, in time, to shatter Man’s cozy illusions. So he is never quite free from fear. His denials are never entirely successful. The King’s corpse begins to stink in the dining hall. Sensation trembles conducted through flesh along an intricate lacework of nerves; the man shivers and cannot deny he is a living body. He notices he’s aging. He feels pain; he can be wounded. On some level, Man knows he will die. And when the delusional defenses he has devised to keep his knowledge at bay falter and fail him, Man lashes out. 

Chief among those Man incriminates for his lot as a mortal creature are: 1) the earth, and 2) women, who he has made symbols of maternity and that awful thing called biology. It is the fault of the earth that he is earthly, composed of mortal cells and substance. And was it not a woman who bore him onto the earth in the first place? It was his mother who – in creating his biological body from her own then casting him out into a homicidal world – condemned him to carnality and to death. (“This quivering jelly which is elaborated in the womb,” Simone de Beauvoir writes, “evokes too clearly the soft viscosity of carrion for him not to turn shuddering away.”) The mother, in conspiracy with nature – so intimate the two fuse into a single entity, Mother Earth – is the birthplace of Man’s mortality. Thus Man likens the womb in the woman’s belly to his tomb in the belly of the earth. In The Great Mother (1955), Erich Neumann sketches a vivid depiction of Man’s womb-tomb complex, revered by the author as a “primordial image of the human psyche.” Neumann describes the earth-womb lodged within the archetypal earth-woman as “the dark hole of the depths…of darkness without light.” Also, notably: “the abyss of hell.” “The opening of the vessel of doom is the womb,” he writes. As for the Mother herself, she is “the flesh-eating sarcophagus voraciously licking up the blood seed of men and beasts.” Robert Briffault conducted a study of mythologies from cultures the world over for his 1927 book The Mothers and arrived at the conclusion that “Woman is…universally regarded as having brought death into the world. In Ecclesiasticus, it is written that “[sin] began with a woman, and we must all die because of her.” But even before Eve sealed Adam’s fate, it was the femme fatale Pandora who caught the blame, having tipped open her jar to spill strife and death into the world. And of the Hindu goddess Kali, it is said that death “swims in her womb like a babe.” 

(Man’s outrage over abortion provides another insight into his belief that the female is the death of him. In the case of abortion, Man fears the mother not because she gives him his deadly body, but because by not birthing him, she deprives him of life. That she should have such power over his existence is unbearable. Whether birthing him or aborting him, the female cannot win: she is always a killer.) 

For Man, the earth and the female are his slaughterers, despised and deserving of punishment for the terrible cruelties they commit against him. Man has a right to defend himself. To dominate what would undo him, to destroy what endangers him. Ecocide, femicide: both are rooted in Man’s terrified antipathy for natural existence, a life that ends in death. They are the offensives in his endless war against being. Man craves conquest, vies to hold his boot to the throat of the natural world and quash it and thereby exult in how he has trounced death. Through his violent exertions to attain total control, he imagines he can master reality and ascend triumphant. The King never dies. God is immortal. He extracts a pittance of solace from these illusionary victories. But in time the afterglow wanes, sinister shadows seep back to haunt him; in time he will lose control—and it is then that he turns to retribution. He will avenge himself through annihilation, even if such sweeping devastation ensures his own demise. He would rather commit suicide than admit defeat. Fearing death, Man affects the death of life. There will be no survivors. 

(Man also reviles his own body, earthly and fearsomely woman-born as it is. This, too, guarantees his self-destruction. Body hatred is symptomatic of the death terror that fuels Man’s flight from life. He dissociates from his own substance, he denies and mortifies his flesh, maltreats it; by a thousand devices he works to transform his body from a biological organism into a cultural object, safely straightjacketed in his control. Surgical mutilations. Cosmetic modifications. Man-of-steel cyborg redesigns. As Susan Griffin writes, “the deluded mind must try to remake the world after an illusion.” But you cannot outrun what you are. Man cannot but be his body. And in trying to break away from the material being that he is, he merely weakens and wounds himself.) 

There are, of course, healthier ways of orienting oneself toward the reality of human mortality. Barbara Mor argues that in matriarchal religious traditions, death was not denied but accepted and even embraced as essential to life. Likewise, in The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (1983), Barbara Walker writes that for matriarchal religions, birth and death were equally important, “two passages through the same Door: one coming in, the other going out.” The circle was their central symbol. Nature’s continuity, life spiraling into death spiraling into rebirth, new life, transmutation. The moon dissolving only to create itself again risen from tidal darkness, vegetation wilting with the winter’s grey and then awakening, verdantly reborn with the spring—“these,” Mor asserts, are “the original, ancient, and matriarchal ideas of cyclic birth-death-and-resurrection.” As fusion with the substance of being – “the cosmic all” – death was revered as sacred, a source of mystery, not anxiety. 

For those tending more to the biological than the mystical, a no less positive continuity is provided by the nutrient cycle. When I die, if my corpse is not embalmed and locked away from the earth in a lead box but returned to it, matter into matter, I will be devoured by an untold teeming of saprophytes. Bacteria, fungi, worms, flies, beetles, maybe a scavenging vulture or coyote. The subsidence of my decomposing flesh will feed the soil, plants will thrive where I was laid down—in this way, my death will breed a flourishing: life’s renewal. I will be reincorporated into the substance of creation, I will be useful. For me, it is a joyous prospect. I have no fear of death. 

Man, however, has made it his mission to extract himself from the cosmic/biological life cycle and to consecrate himself as outside of mortality, impervious as the gods and machines he dreamt up to replace material reality. In doing so, not only does he squander the miracle of his aliveness, but he renders life ever more unlivable for the rest of earth’s creatures. Now Man wants to take his machines and join his gods in heaven’s vault; he yearns to leave the earth he wrathfully vampirized and launch himself into the clean, pure, lifeless expanse of outer space. Mary Daly defined patriarchal culture as essentially necrophilic, in love with death. Surely, male-dominated culture has degraded into a death cult, the signs of its terminal morbidity putrid and pervasive. Extinction without end. The soil depleted to dust. Dying reefs, bleached and ghostly. Manatees starving in their polluted lagoons, pregnant wolves murdered by men who want the wolves gone so they can raise cows, whom they will murder, while also murdering the land by grazing cows on it. Industrial slaughter. Domestic violence femicides. Pesticides, herbicides. Deforestation. Millions of people warehoused in nursing home wards or poisonous megacities dying from a virus Man’s own ecological ravages unleashed. None of this is natural death. It is manmade, and it is atrocity. 

Yet I do not believe Man’s pathology is as simple as a lust for death. Examining the fears and fantasies at the core of patriarchal culture, it is clear enough that Man is by no means smitten with death. Rather, he loathes and fears it. His grand ambition is to live forever, immortal. It is out of dread of death, not delight in it, that Man repudiates biology, embodiment, birth, nature, reality. What seems like his love for death is in fact his hatred of life, the yield of his terror—because to be alive is to one day die. At the root of patriarchal necrophilia lies a profound biophobia. Man has scorned life and grown morbid; he sows holocaust, contaminates whatever he touches with death until even he himself cannot survive in the heartbroken wreckage of a world he has tortured on the rack of his delusions. The rejection of life consummates – inevitably, predictably – in self-extermination. Until Man accepts his nature as a biological organism, until he reconciles himself with mortality, with material reality, he is doomed to be his own apocalypse. One way or another, the King must die. 

Aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.