The Different Perceptions of Death in Early History

It must be noted that the existence of burial rites indicates a distinction between a death anxiety and a fear of death, in which the former is a form of prediction while the latter is a reaction to a stimulus. The prediction that a module oneself is accompanied by a consistent vulnerability towards the force of nature results in a belief in the existence of the greater power, which must be distinguished from what is merely a threat - As for the encounter with a threat, there always exists the chance of avoidance while the encounter with the greater power is believed to be universal.

It is notable that even the oldest human writings in current discovery are writings about death, which include the Chronicles of Gilgamesh in Sumer and the Book of the Dead in Ancient Egypt. As for the Book of the Dead, it is even more notable that, unlike the Chronicles of Gilgamesh, which was an anthology of folktales throughout Mesopotamia, the Book of the Dead in Egypt was written by royal pontiffs as a national project.

Much of Ancient Egyptian thanatology has still not been understood by Western philosophers. In addition, even if the mummification in the Old Kingdom started as a preservation of the Pharaoh for his upcoming regime as the Osiris, the same practice later spread to the entire Egyptian society by the New Kingdom, in which mummification became a huge nationwide enterprise.

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The period of the Tame Death is characterized by its own historical standpoint that only abhorred a sudden death, by which the phenomenon of death itself is considered purely natural as long as there has been an inner communication between the dying and the realm of Heaven. This has been altered dramatically at the period of Death of the Self, which is divided from the period of the Tame Death by the onslaught of Black Death.

The bubonic plague brought this major change primarily by the fact that it blurred the distinction between a sudden death and an expected death. It was also because of the unique characteristic of the bubonic plague on a human physical body that the dying had no choice but to be distant from one's survivors. The period of Remote and Imminent Death is divided from the period of Death of the Self by the Renaissance. In this new period, the main interest moved from the way to die into the way to live as there appeared the growing population of older adults.

Towards the end of this period, in addition, the concept of deathbed came back to the spotlight as the bubonic plague was no more a threat it used to be towards a human body, which eventually developed an immunity towards this new generation of pathogens. The period of Thy Death is divided from all other periods by the invention of modern warfare by which murdering a human life became so simplistic with the assistance of advanced weaponry. This is even strengthened by the introduction of systematic racism and, for the last but never the least, the introduction of nuclear weaponry, which the academic circles have only recently discovered to be additionally capable of inciting a tremendous scale of deforestation.

The major difference between the Civil War and the Independence War before the 19th century was that it was now "too easy" to murder a member of the military during the Civil War because of the rapid improvement in weaponry. The Civil War is often considered the first modern war in the sense that it was the first war that commanders had no choice but to pour down their troops into the battlefield until they run out of them. Because of this, it was often way more difficult for the state to come up with an explanation for the families of the specific reason why the soldier has deceased.

The feeling that even the main agent of the war (the state) cannot come up with a proper explanation of the reason why the soldier died in the battlefield was a big stressor against the surviving families. In addition, the advanced weaponry also stripped soldiers on the battlefield with the sense of control on their personal whereabout, as the invention of artillery and marksmanship gave them an impression that they do not have any control on whether they will die or survive on the very next minute.

Puritan theology concluded with predestination, based on the part of the Holy Bible that God is omniscient. If God were really omniscient, he must have been already aware of whom is to be saved and whom is to be abandoned. Yet, if this conclusion were right on their part, it became rather dubious on what they have to do with their remaining lifetime. Yet, instead of wasting the remainders of their life based on the tenet of predestination, the Puritans decided to consider every single day of their life to be an experimentation if they are to be saved or not.

This is an important part of the Puritan culture, just as it is evident from the fact that American journalism has been heavily influenced by Puritanism. For instance, the first newspaper in the United States, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was written and printed in Massachusetts, a northern state with a strong Puritan influence, instead of the Old Dominion (Virginia) in the South.

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