I'm reading The Map of Heaven, a follow-up to the huge bestseller Proof of Heaven. Like the first book, this one was written by Eben Alexander and Ptolemy Tompkins; unlike the first book, The Map of Heaven makes more of an effort to understand Alexander's complex NDE and to locate it within spiritual and mythic traditions.
One particularly interesting section concerns ancient ideas of the afterlife and how they evolved under the influence of the Eleusinian mystery cult. The book relates early descriptions of the afterlife realm as a dim, murky region inhabited by joyless, half-aware spirits—think of the Greek Hades or the Hebrew Sheol. This sad underworld was a limbo of darkness and mist, in which even the most heroic figures were mere shadows of their former selves—enervated, muttering shades with only vague recollections of their earthly glories.
This depressing outlook was challenged by the Eleusinian mysteries, a secret cult that survived for more than a thousand years and was a major spiritual force in the Greco-Roman world. Some of its iconography persisted in later cultures. Indeed, its elemental mythic narrative—of a psychically wounded male hero guided by a mysterious female consort into a new realm of understanding—survives even today in the many movies and novels that use this story arc as a basis for the plot. (For example, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code … or my own novella Chasing Omega.)
Though the details of the mysteries were a closely guarded secret and remain largely unknown, it seems clear enough that their purpose was to guide the initiate through a symbolic death and rebirth, while teaching that the afterlife, properly understood, was not a realm of terror or malaise but of joy. The mysteries had a powerful effect on many people, similar to near-death experiences in our era. The famed 1st century AD biographer Plutarch, who underwent his own initiation into the mysteries, writes about the afterlife in terms not much different from modern NDErs or spiritualists:
Thus death and initiation closely correspond; even the words (teleutan and teleisthai) correspond, and so do the things. At first there are wanderings, and toilsome running about in circles and journeys through the dark over uncertain roads and culs de sac; then, just before the end, there are all kinds of terrors, with shivering, trembling, sweating, and utter amazement. After this, a strange and wonderful light meets the wanderer; he is admitted into clean and verdant meadows, where he discerns gentle voices, and choric dances, and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions. Here the now fully initiated is free, and walks at liberty like a crowned and dedicated victim, joining in the revelry; he is the companion of pure and holy men, and looks down upon the uninitiated and unpurified crowd here below in the mud and fog, trampling itself down and crowded together, though of death remaining still sunk in its evils, unable to believe in the blessings that lie beyond. That the wedding and close union of the soul with the body is a thing really contrary to nature may clearly be seen from all this.
[Fragment from "On the Soul"; source here.]
A different translation of the same text is included in the postscript to this post.
The Map of Heaven covers this territory in an interesting way:
"Happy is he who has seen this," says the mystery text of the initiate who has seen through the terrors of death to the wonders lying beyond. "Who has not taken part in the initiation will not have the same lot after death in the gloomy darkness." That gray, grim realm bears more than a little similarity to where I started out on my journey: that elementary, mud-like "place" that in Proof of Heaven I call the Realm of the Earthworm's-Eye View … It bears a great resemblance to the dim, swampy, lower areas of the afterlife as described by many ancient societies.
The realm of the soul is like an ocean. It's vast. When the physical body and brain, which act as buffers for this world while we are alive, fall away, we risk falling into the lower realms of the spiritual world: realms that correspond directly to the lower portions of our psyche and are, as such, murky in the extreme.
That, I believe, is what the ancients were talking about whenever they brought up realms of afterlife that were grim, dark, and miserable. And that's why initiation was so important, both in Greece and in so many other ancient cultures. Through initiations, people were reminded experientially of their true identities as cosmic beings whose inner structure directly mirrored the structure of the spiritual worlds that waited at death. The idea that the human soul is modeled on the spiritual world met that by following the ancient Greek injunction to "know thyself," one learned to know the cosmos that gave us birth as well.
Initiations were often frightening in parts because the spiritual world has its darker areas, just as the human psyche does. But mostly these rites appear to have been deeply affirming. The initiates knew that the rites they had experienced had prepared them both to bear the burdens of earthly life and to find their way back home to the higher regions of the world beyond when they reentered it at death. These were realities for these ancient peoples. What they had to say about them was based at least in some part on experience, which is why their writings on the subject can be thrilling and, for some people, terrifying.
But there is no need to fear. Once free of the buffering system that our physical brains and bodies provide, we will make it to where we belong. Even if we are not perfect (and I know a little about this because I certainly am not) we will make it to that realm of light and love and acceptance … It is, I believe, about being open. Open enough to allow ourselves to be pulled from the realms of darkness in the afterlife, which correspond to the sea of our own darker, dimmer regions, up into those regions of light that we all have the ability to enter if we want to …
But there are people who are not open to that good, when it comes for them. When that light descends, nothing in them says yes to it. So they stay where they are—in the dark—until they are ready to be brought out of it. Knowing this ahead of time is invaluable. That's why, for the ancients, knowledge of the existence of the worlds beyond, and of what they look like, was one of the greatest gifts of heaven.
[pp 11-13; I broke up a long paragraph into shorter ones for easier reading.— MP]
I think there's a lot of truth in this, and that it serves to encompass both the "earthbound" and low-level entities encountered by mystical explorers as well as the higher beings. And I'd point out that some NDErs who report hellish or nightmarish experiences also say that when they prayed for help, or opened themselves to the possibility of rescue, they suddenly found themselves in a better place. Howard Storm's NDE is one example.
Increasingly I think that these negative experiences are under-appreciated, and that they suggest levels of the afterlife realm that can be most unpleasant. The natural temptation to focus on positive, reassuring NDEs (which do seem to be the majority) may have blinded us to the flip side of the experience, which can be equally important and equally real. The long-term significance of NDEs, then, can be compared to the cultural significance of the Eleusinian mysteries, which opened people's minds to a more positive vision of the soul and its destiny, and thus apparently made it easier for the newly dead to navigate the sometimes treacherous waters of the next world.
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P.S. An alternative translation of the fragment from Plutarch's "On the Soul":
When a man dies, he is like those who are being initiated into the mysteries. The one expression teleutan the other teleisthai correspond … Our whole life is but a succession of wanderings, of painful courses, of long journeys by tortuous ways without outlet. At the moment of quitting it, fears, terrors, quiverings, mortal sweats, and a lethargic stupor, come over us and overwhelm us; but as soon as we are out of it pure spots and meadows receive us, with voices and dances and the solemnities of sacred words and holy sights. It is there that man, having become perfect and initiated—restored to liberty, really master of himself—celebrates crowned with myrtle the most august mysteries, and holds converse with just and pure souls.