I show my age by looking up the Weather Channel on the computer instead of "Hot Cheerleaders of the NFL," but sometimes you get something really interesting there, even freaky. Yesterday, they posted a heat-colored map of Hurricane Mathew as it bore down on the Bahamas, heading straight for overcrowded Florida, and they knew what they had in the picture. Titled something like, "this eerie picture is real!," it shows what looks like a state-sized skull with an evil, evil eye staring straight at the Sunshine State. Accounts like, "this may be the biggest hurricane in recorded history!" shrieked along side it, suggesting that global warming is dragging us to immediate doom, although the emphasis was clearly on the "may" and is most likely untrue. Still, the picture was real (although would not be seen as such by the naked eye) and it sends a chill up the spine. But why?
It is a death's head, of course, and not a sleepy old-man in his final hour, but an active agent of death itself, evil as evil can be. Death at the hands of humans can come from evil, but how can it be evil if from nature? From a force that is not only natural, but inevitable (and everyone knows it)? We have a divided view on death, the one the sleepy old man, and the other, the evil death head, by why do we so often make of death the latter?
At my age I have seen the ravages of dying up close and personal. To watch my parent's slow and inescapable decline was painful, but not horrifying. But it was horrifying when I saw my 52 year old cousin just days before she of died from cirrhosis. She was still talkative, although disoriented, which wasn't unusual for her anyway, and that is what made it so horrifying. To see someone whose hair was only just turning gray reduced to a skeleton, with only her liver lifting her torso up from the backbone, her head a skull, her eyes a shining, frightening yellow, signified that something had gone horribly wrong with the universe. It wasn't natural at all (although in a way, of course, it was), and gave me bad dreams for days. The death skull: bulls-eye on our worst fears; death before its time as a stalking, evil menace.
At this time I am reading a novel in Spanish that is Dan Brown-like, involving the Knights Templar, the pope, corrupt kings and dictators, and the fabled Cathar heretics of France @ the 13th century. It has long been a hot area and historical period for conspiracists, dragging in everything from the Holy Grail, the End Times, mixed with rumblings of Antisemitism whispering the name "Rothschild." In fact, it jumps forward into Hitler's Europe and his regime's own very real search for the Grail, but that is besides the point here. What is relevant is the Cathar's heresy itself. They believed that the earth, and everything on it, including the body, were made by Satan and were to be despised. The god that Christians then worshiped they believed to be, in reality, Satan, who had tricked the souls of humans into suffering in this terrible, diabolical reality, all the while fooling them into worshiping this very evil. Jesus was savior, they believed, but his depiction on a cross was evil and untrue - another trick of the devil to demean and hide the true God behind this mirage of evil. For them, only death would set them free, and for this reason, they were entirely celibate, or at least were supposed to be, to not bring pure souls down into the evil body created by Satan.
Of course, the Church did not like to think that they were worshiping the devil, and that they had it all wrong on Jesus, and so they did what people back then usually did - killed all who would not repent. The Cathars had gotten their wish, but it was seen as a horror. Why? They were set free!
I am being sarcastic there, but the question is a good one: if life is thought to be inferior to the life after death, believed by both Cathars and the Church faithful, how could death be seen as evil, at least for the latter in the case of natural death? Why the terror, the skull in the hurricane?
One the one hand, it is easy: dying people are usually miserable, at least until the body's strength has finally been wasted, and they do not present a pretty picture. But on another, it is not. In a movie from my childhood, "Darby O'Gill and the Little People," I was terrified when the protagonist, and old man, was being taken away by a black coach into the stormy skies of death. And yet, he was not miserable at all, merely a comfortable passenger in a rather well-appointed hearse. It was the fear of death, and not its side-effects that had gotten me at such a young age. And yet I was young and gullible (or innocent) then and had thoroughly believed that I would go to heaven at death. What gives?
It seems that as long as we are part of our bodies - whoever made them for whatever purpose - we will never have more than the proverbial mustard seed of faith. Jesus said (more or less), "whoever has even a mustard seed of faith could command a tree to grow in the ocean, and it would be so," but we are too attached, fear too much, have so little faith that we tremble, not only before the storm, but even at the thought of it coming to bring our worldly end. At least I do. But what does that make of our lofty proclamations? For even Jesus sweat blood before the Crucifixion, and if even him, what of us?
Maybe the Cathars were on to something; not that this world was made by Satan, but that it holds us in a Satanic-like grip. It is why we call those who have faced up to death willingly "heroes." We know it is what we should do, but can't out of fear. Even with perfect faith, we would fear, as the Crucifixion shows us. And so the death's head, which then becomes a symbol not of the horror of death so much as our lack of faith in the moments of crises, be that faith in heaven, Nirvana, or in the nothing at all of atheism. At the point of death, all our notions and certainties crumble in our trembling hands and woeful cries.
We are all being prepared to be heroes, if we only knew, in our knowledge of death. As my mother used to say, "old age is not for cowards," and she was right. But as cowards we go anyway, with hope to somehow come out as heroes, something even a mustard seed of faith could accomplish in the end. FK
It is a death's head, of course, and not a sleepy old-man in his final hour, but an active agent of death itself, evil as evil can be. Death at the hands of humans can come from evil, but how can it be evil if from nature? From a force that is not only natural, but inevitable (and everyone knows it)? We have a divided view on death, the one the sleepy old man, and the other, the evil death head, by why do we so often make of death the latter?
At my age I have seen the ravages of dying up close and personal. To watch my parent's slow and inescapable decline was painful, but not horrifying. But it was horrifying when I saw my 52 year old cousin just days before she of died from cirrhosis. She was still talkative, although disoriented, which wasn't unusual for her anyway, and that is what made it so horrifying. To see someone whose hair was only just turning gray reduced to a skeleton, with only her liver lifting her torso up from the backbone, her head a skull, her eyes a shining, frightening yellow, signified that something had gone horribly wrong with the universe. It wasn't natural at all (although in a way, of course, it was), and gave me bad dreams for days. The death skull: bulls-eye on our worst fears; death before its time as a stalking, evil menace.
At this time I am reading a novel in Spanish that is Dan Brown-like, involving the Knights Templar, the pope, corrupt kings and dictators, and the fabled Cathar heretics of France @ the 13th century. It has long been a hot area and historical period for conspiracists, dragging in everything from the Holy Grail, the End Times, mixed with rumblings of Antisemitism whispering the name "Rothschild." In fact, it jumps forward into Hitler's Europe and his regime's own very real search for the Grail, but that is besides the point here. What is relevant is the Cathar's heresy itself. They believed that the earth, and everything on it, including the body, were made by Satan and were to be despised. The god that Christians then worshiped they believed to be, in reality, Satan, who had tricked the souls of humans into suffering in this terrible, diabolical reality, all the while fooling them into worshiping this very evil. Jesus was savior, they believed, but his depiction on a cross was evil and untrue - another trick of the devil to demean and hide the true God behind this mirage of evil. For them, only death would set them free, and for this reason, they were entirely celibate, or at least were supposed to be, to not bring pure souls down into the evil body created by Satan.
Of course, the Church did not like to think that they were worshiping the devil, and that they had it all wrong on Jesus, and so they did what people back then usually did - killed all who would not repent. The Cathars had gotten their wish, but it was seen as a horror. Why? They were set free!
I am being sarcastic there, but the question is a good one: if life is thought to be inferior to the life after death, believed by both Cathars and the Church faithful, how could death be seen as evil, at least for the latter in the case of natural death? Why the terror, the skull in the hurricane?
One the one hand, it is easy: dying people are usually miserable, at least until the body's strength has finally been wasted, and they do not present a pretty picture. But on another, it is not. In a movie from my childhood, "Darby O'Gill and the Little People," I was terrified when the protagonist, and old man, was being taken away by a black coach into the stormy skies of death. And yet, he was not miserable at all, merely a comfortable passenger in a rather well-appointed hearse. It was the fear of death, and not its side-effects that had gotten me at such a young age. And yet I was young and gullible (or innocent) then and had thoroughly believed that I would go to heaven at death. What gives?
It seems that as long as we are part of our bodies - whoever made them for whatever purpose - we will never have more than the proverbial mustard seed of faith. Jesus said (more or less), "whoever has even a mustard seed of faith could command a tree to grow in the ocean, and it would be so," but we are too attached, fear too much, have so little faith that we tremble, not only before the storm, but even at the thought of it coming to bring our worldly end. At least I do. But what does that make of our lofty proclamations? For even Jesus sweat blood before the Crucifixion, and if even him, what of us?
Maybe the Cathars were on to something; not that this world was made by Satan, but that it holds us in a Satanic-like grip. It is why we call those who have faced up to death willingly "heroes." We know it is what we should do, but can't out of fear. Even with perfect faith, we would fear, as the Crucifixion shows us. And so the death's head, which then becomes a symbol not of the horror of death so much as our lack of faith in the moments of crises, be that faith in heaven, Nirvana, or in the nothing at all of atheism. At the point of death, all our notions and certainties crumble in our trembling hands and woeful cries.
We are all being prepared to be heroes, if we only knew, in our knowledge of death. As my mother used to say, "old age is not for cowards," and she was right. But as cowards we go anyway, with hope to somehow come out as heroes, something even a mustard seed of faith could accomplish in the end. FK
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