The book analyzes two complementary aspects of death: how individuals cope with their own mortality, and how society deals with the dying and the dead. This has changed over the millennia, so the author, a professional historian (who writes in a very elegant and almost baroque English), begins with prehistory. Of course, one of the puzzling features of the human species is the widespread belief that there is an afterlife, despite no evidence to support it, the belief that somehow consciousness does not die with the body. The oldest evidence of burial of the dead are from cave 4 of Shanidar (70,000 BC) and then Cro-Magnon in France (30,000 BC). Spellman only mentions Sungir (about two hundred kilometres east of Moscow), dated between 32,050 and 28,550 BC, and Dolni Vestonice (Czechia) from about 28,000 BC. Then he jumps 25,000 years ahead to the chambered tombs of Newgrange in Ireland (3,200 BC). Progressively, the tomb became an adobe, decorated with all sort of amenities. He then jumps to the great river civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India, and of each one he sketches the beliefs in an afterlife. He then jumps to a brief history of Western philosophy. This summary is so brief that, in my opinion, it is not useful to anyone who is not familiar with the main philosophers, and is redundant for anyone who is. What Spellman wants to show, probably, is that science has forced philosophy to accept that the "soul" dies with the body: the mind comes out of the brain, and, as the brain decays, cognitive faculties decay. Eventually the body rots and disappears, and therefore the mind will too. The chapter, however, ends with a mention of theologian John Polkinghorne, who offers a new way to look at the sould: the atoms of our body change all the time, and we "are" not what we were years ago, but we "are" still the same person; hence personhood transcends the material structure, and he views that as a sign that there is something beyond the material body,

The book than enters a more religious discussion, starting with the "axial age" (the age of Confucius, Buddha, the Bible, Zarathustra, the Upanishads and Greek philosophy) and the change of perspective from the collective fate (that was the focus of ancient religious practices) towards the individual fate after death (that becomes the focus of Christianity and Islam). Quite a bit of space is devoted to the Christian dogmas and practices, both before and after the Reformation. There are interesting observations about the Ars Moriendi and Purgatory, which changed dramatically after Luther with implications for the relationship between the living and the dead. Then we get to modern times, to the "subjective turn": people still believe that there is a god, and that there is an afterlife, but don't necessarily believe in the religious dogmas. Spellman notices that religious life has been increasingly "secularized", i.e. irrational beliefs have been abandoned by many people... except when it comes to death... then the irrational belief that there is an afterlife is still strong.

A chapter is devoted to the environment, which has been hostile to survival ever since. Until the last century, humans lived in a hostile environment, constantly vulnerable to natural disasters. And, before modern medicine, much of life was spent in pain, with no relief from diseases or injuries. The process of dying itself was excruciatingly painful. All in all, the prospect of eternal life on Earth was probably not so exciting as it is today.

Chapter five is the real thing. That gives us the measure of how much things have changed when it comes to dying and to thinking of dying, at least in the Western world. First of all, an increasing number of people don't believe in an eternal soul, nor in a bodily resurrection. Secondly, we die alone. For thousands of years people were normally dying surrounded by an extended family. Now the process of taking care of the dying is delegated to an army of professionals: nursing homes, hospitals, funeral homes. We removed death from public view. Spellman notices that, ironically, by removing death from public view we have become more fearful of death, precisely because we are less accustomed with it. Thirdly, the definition of "dead" has changed: the pulse (the heart beat) is no longer the standard and now one is declared "dead" only when brain activity ceases. Some, however, argue that we should keep the body "alive" even though there is no brain activity, indirectly disputing the assertion that you are your consciousness or that consciousness is in the brain. What if some day technology enables a body to eat and move even though there is no brain activity?

Fourthly, dying has become a very long process. Medical technology keeps the sick alive for decades. The day when technology can keep people alive virtually forever is not too far. The day when technology will be able to resurrect the dead (i.e. restore a feeble level of electrochemical activity in the brain) is not far at all. Unfortunately, the day that we can rejuvenate old people is still very far, if possible at all. So the result of these life-extending technologies is create an ever larger population of old sick people, with increasingly long stays in intensive care units. The loss of both physical and cognitive functions can go on for a very long time before it leads to actual death. Meanwhile, the dying person is cared for by strangers who are hired by specialized institutions such as nursing homes and hospitals. Spellman is correct in remarking that for many people the prospect of senescence (increasing frequency of stays at the hospital and progressive loss of autonomy) is more scary than death itself.

The impact on society is colossal. It is estimated that by the year 2050 about 30% of the population will be over 65 in Western countries. In fact, it could be more than that because life-supporting (or, better, life-extending) technology keeps improving. An increasingly large amount of money is spent on such life-support procedures. Spellman notes that more money is spent by the US government to keep dying patients alive two more months than on all categories of schools. Indirectly, this tells us that the young and healthy pay a huge price for extending by a few months the lives of the old and sick (a few months that are most often totally unproductive, simply lying on a hospital bed and being attached to life-support equipment).

The religious posture on suicide appears quite contradictory. All religions consider suicide a sin based on the dogma that only God has the right to decide when someone has to die. But the same religions don't consider it a sin to extend someone's life with technology, thus altering the natural course of life as determined by their God. One would in fact think otherwise: that suicide is a glorious, courageous act that benefits everybody else by removing one person from an overcrowded planet.

When it comes to the post-mortem, the contrast with the past is stunning. Over thousands of years, humans developed all sorts of rituals to celebrate, mourn, remember and “accompany” the dead. In the West, it was normal for the person to die at home, assisted by the family, a doctor and a priest. The corpse was then washed and dressed by women. Then there would be a wake during which the body was displayed at home to family and friends. Then there would be a funeral, with the coffin carried by members of the family and friends through the streets of the town to the cemetery (or at least carried on a hearse, followed by family and friends). The cemetery was typically a church graveyard. Then there would be a period of mourning, with women wearing only black clothes. Then periodic masses to pray for the dead and frequent visits to the cemetery to bring flowers. What is left of all of this? Mostly, one picture of the dead, framed and placed on the mantelpiece or hanging on the wall. Everything else is in the hands of institutionalized care, bureaucrats and the funeral industry. The church has lost control over death and control has shifted to the town hall. The church used to maintain a registry of births and deaths. Now it’s kept at town hall. The cemetery belongs to town hall or, worse, to corporations. The post-mortem is increasingly a commercial enterprise.

The physical relationship between the living and the dead has completely changed, and mostly this is due to the fact that increasingly we don’t believe there is anything going on in death than the decomposition of the body (if it hasn’t been cremated).

To add to Spellman's book, an essay by sociologists Gunhild Hagestad and Peter Uhlenberg, "The Social Separation of Old and Young" (2005), shows how Western societies are segregating the different age groups: the young are confined to educational institutions, the adults to workplaces, the old to retirement homes.

Spellman mentions events that, in different ways, signal a different understanding of death, for example in 1963 the Catholic Church ended its opposition to cremation (traditionally, the belief was that the body had to be buried in order for bodily resurrection to happen), in 1967 Cicely Saunders founded the first modern hospice (St Christopher’s Hospice in London) to take care of the dying, and Robert Ettinger's "The Prospect of Immortality" (1962), the book that launched the discipline of cryonics (freezing the head in the hope that someday technology may be able to "resurrect" the frozen brain).

Spellman also mentions practices that, in the last two centuries, have replaced traditional religion while society became more secular: spiritualism (that spread in the 19th century) and parapsychology (born in the 1920s). The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in 1882 in London by a group of intellectuals including psychologist Edmund Gurney, poe Frederic Myers (who coined the term "telepathy"), philosopher Henry Sidgwick and physicist William Fletcher Barret, with the intent to study thought-transference, mesmerism, mediums, Reichenbach phenomena, ghosts and seances. Pioneered by charlatans like Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, spiritualism found fertile terrain in the 19th century in both Europe and the USA. Already in 1847 Andrew Jackson Davis published The Principles of Nature” in which he claimed that he could see the future and communicate with the dead. The first stars of spiritualism in the USA were Kate and Margaret Fox, in New York state, starting with their acts of 1848. Spiritualism became particularly popular among Quakers and socialists. In 1852 Charles Elliott published “Mysteries” and in 1853 Catherine Crowe published “The Night Side of Nature”. Allan Kardec published in France five books on spiritualism, starting with “The Life of The Spirits” (1857) and “The Book of Mediums” (1861). In 1873 Adelma Vay established in Hungary the Hungarian Spiritualist Association (at the time Hungary was part of the Austrian empire). The Italian medium Eusapia Palladino became famous all over Europe (all the way to Russia) with claims that she could levitate objects and and materialize spirits. Her Paris seances were even attended by the scientist Pierre Curie. Emma Hardinge Britten chronicled the movement in her book “Nineteenth Century Miracles” (1884). The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in 1882 in London by a group of intellectuals including psychologist Edmund Gurney, poe Frederic Myers (the one who coined the term ‘telepathy’), philosopher Henry Sidgwick and physicist William Fletcher Barret, with the intent to study Thought-transference, mesmerism, mediumship, reichenbach phenomena, apparitions and haunted houses, and seances. Parapsychology can be said to be born in 1927 when Joseph Banks Rhine and his wife Louisa established the parapsychology laboratory at Duke University. In 1937 Rhine founded the Journal of Parapsychology.

The last chapter "conclusions" doesn't really have any conclusion, just a sort of fatalistic compassion for the fate of human beings, who are conscious of their own death (and brief life) but powerless. Spellman points out that most of us spend a lot of our life looking for distractions so that we don’t think about the day we will die.

Spellman closes the book with the Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who found his own way to accept death as a reward, not a punishment.

TM, ®, Copyright © 2022 Piero Scaruffi