Awakened by Death: Life-Giving Lessons from the Mystics

By Christiana N. Peterson

Fear of death is nearly as inevitable as death itself, so we have used modern medicine and the funeral industry to create an ever-increasing distance between us and our mortality. But these interventions have stripped death of its mystery and mysticism.

Taking readers on a journey through history, guided by the mystics, Awakened by Death shows us how our psychological and spiritual relationship to death has changed over time, and helps us to reclaim a healthy engagement with our own mortality. Ultimately, readers will gain a deeper understanding of how facing the fear of death, and embracing rather than eschewing its mysteries, can help us live richer, fuller lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Release date: Oct 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781506461175

Book preview

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I

The Body Turned Inside Out: The Medieval Mystics

1

The Great Leveler

A few years ago, my husband and I moved to a small town in Ohio. We bought an old house on a quaint street that turned out to be the town locus for trick-or-treating. Most of the excitement on Halloween night, when children begin knocking on our door at 5:30 p.m. in an endless stream, is focused on a house just down the street from us.

The owners of that house—a large, old stone building with arches and a front garden fenced in by a short white gate—begin to decorate for Halloween in stages. Skulls appear first, adorning the roof and front gables. Then the skeletons emerge, appearing to dance across the front garden. Life-size figures materialize next, gray hoods and cloaks tattered at the edges, swaying in the wind. Eerie orange lights, strung up across the white fence, illuminate the night.

Finally, on Halloween night, the inhabitants of the house disguise themselves in full-length costumes: they are werewolves, witches, or even Death with his scythe and ragged cloak. They stand imposingly in the garden behind the white gate. Prospective trick-or-treaters must pass by these figures, talk to them even, before they get to the nice ladies in their purple parkas handing out candy at the front door.

Our first Halloween in the neighborhood, our four-year-old daughter Annalee wouldn’t go near the figures, not even for a handful of candy. But an hour later, Annalee came bursting through the front door with something to tell me: she’d marched right up to those masked figures, shook one of their hands, and collected her candy. Though she wouldn’t have been able to articulate it yet, she was exhilarated by facing down her fears.

In many ways, Halloween is an appropriate time and place for many of us to face our fears. At various times in the history of the celebration, Halloween has come to represent the thin veil between worlds, between the fairy and the human world, between life and death, between the rich and the poor.

The history of Halloween and the images and traditions that are associated with it hark back to some of the more harrowing events in Western history. Theological understandings that have emerged out of cultural crises have become lodged in a collective memory in ways we might not even realize. The messages we’ve received from our culture about death, the afterlife, and our ability to escape death have been and continue to be shaped by this history. Taking a look at some of the death practices, art, and rituals from the medieval period might illuminate our own views of death and make us more aware of the ways we push death to the recesses of our imaginations. It might make us look at Halloween a little differently too.

***

On the horizon, a dozen ships swayed on the Black Sea as they headed toward the docks. Since trade routes had opened up between Italian city-states and other cities around the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, the Port of Messina in Sicily was always a bustle of activity. From the perspective of the ships, people meandering and swarming on the docks probably resembled the scattering of rats. It was a new era of trade and expansion.

But if a large sailing vessel could behave strangely, these dozen ships were certainly doing so.

As they drew nearer to the coast, their course seemed to waver even more than the rolling of the sea would naturally allow. To the educated observer, they seemed not only unmoored but unmanned. When the locals timidly boarded the strange ships, hoping to discover goods and wares from trade voyages, what they found instead made even the skeptics cross themselves in fear.

They were ghost ships, full of dead men.

Boats like this would start arriving at ports all over Europe and North Africa in the coming months of 1347 and 1348, ships carrying sailors from Kaffa in Crimea who had managed to escape sieges where soldiers were dying as much from illness as from war. All of them carried a sickness that had already devastated much of Asia, accelerating an end to the Mongol rule over China.

Not all of the twelve ghost ships’ sailors were dead, but the few who were alive and had managed to stumble onto the gangplank were covered in the veneer of death. The Italians sent the ships back out to sea for quarantine, but the rats and their fleas didn’t notice. The fleas piled hungrily out into the sea of people at the port, mixing right in with the swarm of the city. The Black Death sank its teeth into Europe and sucked the vitality from it. This catastrophic disease spread uncontrollably and not only culled the population of Europe by 30–50 percent1 but devastated the whole world.

***

Many cities in Europe were economically destroyed by the Black Death. Construction on cathedrals stopped because workers were dying in such large numbers; artists died, and developing schools of education had to be abandoned.2 As with every other century in human history, a natural preoccupation and fear of death touched the people of the medieval world. As Phoebe S. Spinrad notes in her book The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage, The death rate of the human race has always been one hundred percent, and few societies have failed to notice the fact.3 But the swiftness and totality of the casualties during the Black Death compounded this fear.

Even before the Black Death, life during the Middle Ages was hard, and any number of things could cut it short: illnesses and accidents we consider relatively minor in our modern Western society, rancid food, wounds that turned gangrenous. But on top of that, and most anxiety producing, was another dread. In medieval Europe, the fear of death was ultimately a fear of the afterlife—especially a terror of the burning pits of hell.4

While it’s true that ideas of the last judgment, heaven, and hell certainly emerged from specific readings of biblical texts, many imaginative and theological articulations of this afterlife grew from other sources during the Middle Ages. Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, an influential literary masterpiece of the early fourteenth century, was completed just over two decades before the beginning of the Black Death. While Dante didn’t create a theology of the afterlife, with his genius he crafted a work of art so effective that it still influences the creative imaginations of many Christians, even if they don’t know it. His nine circles of hell, each with increasingly creative and torturous torments, are particularly potent in the imagination.5

The effects of the Black Death and life in medieval times showed up in many art forms like The Divine Comedy, including visual, literary, and even artistic physical movement. When religious leaders wanted an alternative to the bawdy dances of their parishioners, they choreographed an ecclesiastical dance in which a personified Death came for persons from every section of society—the rich and poor alike—and danced them to their graves. The Danse Macabre or Dance of Death became a way of coping with what must have felt like apocalyptic devastation in the years after the Black Death. Eventually this death dance was portrayed in visual art and written poetry, the most famous being a mural at the cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris. For anyone who saw, read, or participated in the Danse Macabre, the resounding message was that death was the great social-leveler: the rich were as powerless before the inevitability of death as the farmer, the midwife, and the king.6

The Danse Macabre was one of the ways that people of the time practiced memento mori (remembering death/mortality). Some say the origins of the phrase memento mori go all the way back to ancient Rome when lower-ranking officials would whisper the phrase to generals returning from the victories of battle, to encourage humility. There are myths about Trappist monks in medieval times whispering memento mori to one another in their hallways (Trappist monks deny this).7 Still, many religious traditions and cultures have found it necessary to remember the inevitability of death. Whether they use the phrase or not, the grave art of the medieval period, the Danse Macabre, visual images of skulls, and daily prayers for the dead by some religious orders are all ways that people have connected to their mortality.

The visual depictions of death itself were varied in the Middle Ages. Some depicted death as another aspect of one’s own self. Sometimes death was an unbeatable horseman of the apocalypse, mowing down those in his way. Or maybe death was the hooded figure, much like those hooded figures hanging from the house down my street at Halloween: ragged cloak, skeletal face, a scythe in hand.

It’s no wonder that so many depictions of death existed. When the psyche becomes overrun with chaos or destruction on too vast a scale to be absorbed, Spinrad says, the natural impulse is to make the concept more familiar so that it can be dealt with.8 Medieval people managed their death fears with the only tools they had. And many times, these dances and depictions, both literary and visual, were created to encourage viewers and readers to remember that they would die and to repent before it was too late.

In the Danse Macabre, kings, princes, paupers, and maids would all end in death, equally. Clergy were no exception. Priests and bishops perished along with everyone else, leaving the dying laymen and women without religious authorities to perform their death rituals. This further intensified the terror of death. If you didn’t have clergy to send you off to the afterlife, would you automatically end up in those burning circles of hell?

To soothe the minds of the fearful, religious texts called ars moriendi (the art of dying) began to pop up. Ars moriendi offered spiritual and religious meditations, prayers, and rites for lay people who didn’t have access to a priest at death so they could repent and have their souls entrusted to God.9 These religious texts taught parishioners how to die well and provided comfort for those who believed they had lived godly lives worthy of heaven. For others, the texts served to fend off the horrors of that eternal burning lake of fire.10

The world of the Middle Ages has always been fascinating to those of us who are interested in death. Religious responses like ars moriendi and the changes in art reveal the way a culture responds to the swiftness of death on an apocalyptic scale. The Middle Ages are a petri dish for human responses to chaos.

Most of us in the Western world are not accustomed to the disruption of our normal lives. Our responses to such disruptions, both on an individual scale and on a societal level, might reveal our psychologies. How would we respond if our cities were permanently altered? If our architecture and schools and churches no longer looked the same. What would these disruptions do to our thoughts about death?

***

Three miles from where I lived in St. Andrews, Scotland, during graduate school, there is a small country stone church, surrounded by a graveyard. The church itself dates back to the nineteenth century, relatively young for the buildings in that part of the world. An old cross is evidence that the graveyard might have been the site of another place of worship, thousands of years old.

Though the church is picturesque, it isn’t the main draw for many visitors. The church is just the entry point for another more ancient site. To reach this unique place, my friends and I walked down a dirt path behind the church’s graveyard. We passed a seemingly ordinary stone that was carved by the Picts in about 800 A.D., the same group whose graves were at the top of Hallow Hill on my cemetery walk. This stone stood guard at the entrance to the forest path. Along the path, we discovered a well filled with a few inches of murky water, leaves, and disparate coin offerings from eager visitors. Beside it was a narrow and steep set of stone steps. They were mossy and worn, so we took our time descending, bracing our hands on the rock to keep from slipping. As we descended, our fingers brushed against carvings hewn from the stone: the face of an old man, Celtic knots, a Celtic cross of unknown age.

When the path opened out into a clearing and a bubbling stream, we saw strange pieces of color hanging from trees, strung across the rocks. These bits and bobs, vibrant tokens, and ribbons were from visitors who had journeyed to the ancient pagan site.

Mystery surrounds the origins of this place called Dunino Den. It was likely used as a worship site for the ancient Celts that occupied this land. When I planned my visit, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Local Scottish friends had encouraged me to explore the site, and it turned out to be a highlight of my time in Scotland, something I will always remember. But I have to admit that I felt something else in Dunino Den, and it wasn’t altogether pleasant: a shiver on the skin, a brush of something unseen, a cold wind breathing down my neck.

Dunino is a place that, like Halloween, marries the pre-Christian and Christian cultures of ancient times. It’s a place where pagan gods became Christian saints and worship sites were consecrated for the church.

According to academic folklorist Jack Santino, many of the customs we have at Halloween have their origins in the Celtic celebration of Samhain, the first day of the New Year in the Celtic calendar. The Celts were an ancient people whose descendants would become the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh, with some living in parts of northern France. Because Samhain was a day of transition in the Celtic calendar when the harvest was ended and  winter  would  bring  darkness,  it  directed  attention to  the  veils  between  the  seasons  and  between  worlds: the human and fairy world, the world of the living and the world of the dead. The tradition of going door-to-door bringing or begging food was associated with the appeasing of spirits, who were often portrayed by revelers in masks.

When early Christian missionaries arrived in Ireland before the fifth century, they attempted to understand this culture’s sacred practices and instead of rejecting them outright, consecrated them for Christ.11 In an effort to appeal to Celtic peoples, missionaries attached Christian holidays to the season of Samhain. Established on November 1, All Saints’ Day, or All Hallows’ Day (hallow means holy), was and is a day on the liturgical calendar to honor the saints, especially those who didn’t have a particular feast day already. But the effort to engage the traditions of this particular group (without obliterating them) meant that some of the traditions and beliefs still lingered in the consciousness and memory of the Celtic people.

This is clear in a place like Dunino Den, where pilgrims and visitors flock, even centuries later, and leave their offerings. The Celtic ideas of this veil between worlds and the traveling dead were so powerful that totally eradicating them was impossible. Instead of eliminating these traditions, the church adopted November 2 as All Souls’ Day, a day for the living to pray for the