Cultural Attitudes Toward Death

The attitudes of various religious groups toward death appear to both reflect and determine attitudes of persons within the dominant culture. In primitive societies, where religion and culture were for all practical purposes the same thing, death was tied to life in a cyclical way. That is, death would lead to rebirth or resurrection in one form or another. In this connection, Frazer describes primitive rituals connected with the agricultural and seasonal cycles that in some measure sought to discover meaning in the cycles of human life as well. One such European folk festival, which is designed to ward off ill luck, involves what Frazer refers to as "Burying the Carnival."

On the evening of Shrove Tuesday, the Esthonians make a straw figure called a metsik or "wood-spirit;" one year it is dressed with a man's coat and hat, next year with a hood and a petticoat. This figure is stuck on a long pole, carried across the boundary of the village with loud cries of joy, and fastened to the top of a tree in the wood. The ceremony is believed to be a protection against all kinds of misfortune. Sometimes the resurrection of the pretended dead person is enacted. Thus, in some parts of Swabia, on Shrove Tuesday Dr. Iron-Beard professes to bleed a sick man, who thereupon falls as dead to the ground; but the doctor at last restores him to life by blowing air into him through a tube.1

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an achievement. Lacking the courage to quest alone, man finds the courage to attach himself to what may be a more powerful personality or idea. The quest for oneness with the eternal, for identification with the powerful, is not only personal but cultural, and in a broad sense can be held to be at the core of the formation of civilization. "Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life."9 This suggests that there is a collective longing for exemption from the terror of the ultimate. Yet as Becker demonstrates, the normal society cannot escape this terror. For as Whitehead says, "The Day of Judgment is always with us."10 Still, man seeks to validate his own worth, in life, by identifying with one considered more worthy. Natural narcissism--the feeling that the person next to you will die, but not you--is reinforced by trusting dependence on the leader's power. No wonder that hundreds of thousands of men marched up from trenches in the face of blistering gunfire in World War I. They were partially self-hypnotised, so to speak. No wonder men imagine victories against impossible odds: don't they have the omnipotent powers of the parental fi
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Approximate Word count = 3684
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)

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