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SOULSCAPES THE ENGLISH DISSENTERS who beached at Cape Cod in 1620 arrived well prepared. Packed into a ship previously used in the wine trade were their clothes, tools, pots, seeds, and a store of “victuals” sufficient for a return. On board, too, was a distinctive vision of divinity and an explicit notion of humankind’s place in this life and that to come. Since then, Americans have carried on a conversation framed by these seafaring Separatists about the nature of the afterlife and, maybe more important, who will be rewarded there and who will not. Two views about the afterlife have been in competition for much of the time since. Is our destiny a celestial gated community with strict entry requirements and an omnipotent Ruler showered with adoration by the assembled chosen? That is the traditional understanding. Or is it grand in a more democratic, contemporary way, a restful, almost domestic place where the inhabitants abide with family, friends, even former pets, the whole surrounded by a perpetual glow of Great Love welcoming all to their final “home”? These two models hardly exhaust the possibilities, but they are recognizable and commonly held variants among the postmortem worlds many Americans imagine. More than that, they exemplify an enduring conviction that something “up there” awaits, however unclear our perception of its spiritual landscape . Given the utilitarian, commonsense style most North Americans endorse, it is remarkable that they would invest their cosmic hopes in vague, ethereal realms beyond the present and over the rainbow.1 Beliefs about such realities are widespread in human cultures, and as long ago as 1907 the French anthropologist Robert Hertz proposed a model for analyzing them systematically and sociologically (1960). He argued that any 86 4 set of death practices involves three essential components: the survivors, a corpse, and a realm of postmortem experience. These can be imagined as the three points of a triangle, but what was crucial for Hertz was not the named points but their connections, the relationship of each to the other two (Metcalf and Huntington 1991: 79–85). For example, if survivor-to-corpse is the base leg of the system, display and body disposal arrangements are central as the ritual enactments of that relationship. The resources and social standing of the participants are on public view, as are their aesthetic choices as to what is “appropriate” to the occasion. Most North American funerals, for example, follow a recognizable script and reception-line conversations often involve judgments on how it was ornamented: open casket or not; things said and unsaid in the eulogy; choice of music; how other mourners comported themselves; what the deceased would have thought of it all. Aesthetics and display are important, both as markers of the status of the living and as measures of esteem for the newly deceased. The difference in scale between a pauper’s funeral and that of a president exemplifies the extremes of what we all do when we make “appropriate” and “proper” arrangements for dispatch of the one we love. Nor is that labor “just ritual” as the utilitarian-minded allege. Reynolds and Waugh suggest that “Death rites not only transform the dead to their proper levels in the world beyond but transform the living into creators of the order in which everyone may find a place. The ritual participants operate at a level of cosmic significance far beyond their role in the ordinary scheme of things” (1977: 9). The performance of ritual is critical, not just for expressing our sense of loss but in the workings of the two other components of Hertz’s understanding of death as a kind of system. The second element of the model, linking the corpse to postmortem experience , invokes concepts of the self, and beliefs concerning its survival and transmutation into something else—an ancestor, a spirit being, an animal, or even, as we will see, something of a god. Two things are important here. First, and again referencing the body, there is the manner in which people think of themselves as animate beings. Do they imagine their corporeal selves having an essence, a nonmaterial force such as a spirit or soul, multiple souls, an embedded personality, a surviving memory which relocates somewhere outside a failed body? If so, where within us does such agency reside, when in the dying trajectory does it separate from flesh, from what point does it exit the body, and how do we know it has left? Is there...

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