Ghost Stories
August 13. My grandparents married on this day in 1953. Happy 71st wedding anniversary to them. And to you, welcome. Grab a coffee and let’s get smarter together.
Yesterday, I talked about how the introduction of funeral rites in Ancient Egypt hacked the human world generation protocol, eliminated the existing natural support networks, and created new networks of obligation and debt. The question now is: how did they do it? How did they get everyone to believe they better feed the dead?
You can basically already hear the ‘Or else …’ resonate in the question. And yes, most likely stroking fear played an important part. In Ancient Egypt, ca. 3500 BC, it is quite easy to assume that the fear stroked was the fear of ghosts, used in the same way politicians today stroke the fear of immigrants.
The best place to start to explain is with the fact that humans haven’t always been in a habit of burying their dead. Yes, the earliest known hominin burial everyone agrees on happened ca. 78.000 years ago in a cave in Kenya. But for the next 70.000 years this treatment was the absolute exception. And most of those burials found, especially the ones with grave goods starting around 50.000BC in the Upper Paleolithic period, involved individuals with visible abnormalities that would have made these people stand out. They were dwarves or giants or hunchbacks; giving us enough room to speculate that the others, too, stood out because of mental deviations like perhaps autism or schizophrenia. They were all well treated in life, well nourished, as a part of the care network so that they reached a good age. It was only in death that they were treated differently, heaped on with goods – as if to weigh them down and make sure they stayed where they were put.
The philologist and Assyriologist Irving Finkel connects the start of leaving the dead with goods with the begin of the concept of ghosts. Because you only leave the dead surrounded with goods if three things are true for you:
a. Something of them survives after death
b. This something can separate from the body and escape to go elsewhere
c. If a. and b. are true it is only reasonable to assume the thing might show up at your doorstep again.
The earliest description of a ghost is thought to be embedded in an ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablet from ca. 1.500 BC. The text gives instructions about how to exorcise a ghost from your home. The oldest surviving ghost story from Greco-Roman is called The Hunted House and was performed for the first time ca. 200 BC, but the playwriter informs us that his play was based on an even older one from 288 BC. The central element of Greco-Roman ghost stories was a lack of a proper burial. Their message was clear: “If you’re not burying your dead correctly, their ghosts will rise and they will not be happy.”
This is the kind of message the uber-explorers of Ancient Egypt would have had to introduce and spread between the people around their tiny courts ca. 3.500 BC. With the concept of ghosts already long established along with the idea that you need to give the person, you don’t want to leave their grave, reasons to stay where they are with goods, it would have required only a little tweaking of the existing stories. You’d tell them that not just something of special people in life might survive death and separate from their bodies, but of all people. Uber-explorer courts would be perfectly suited to insert the tweaked story into the population as heroic societies distinguish themselves not just through their rejection of standardization but through their theatrics and poets engaged in elaborate techniques of oral composition. They could have stroked fear the same way their Greco-Roman counterparts did for the same reasons a few millennia later.
Then as today, question your sources. Explore. AKA think. Make a habit out of thinking. Let’s turn thinking into the norm again.
Like, comment, share – and follow, lest you miss a single opportunity to improve yourself and society. Once you do, we’ll meet again. At the coffeepot.
To watch this post as a video, go here.
#science #history #reality #Egypt #ghosts #ghoststories #burial #gravegoods #manipulation #HeroicSocieties #WorldGeneration #Hacking #self #mind #brain #thinking #explore
