ABSTRACT

This chapter explores three of the more significant answers that have gripped human imagination and characterised particular cultures over millennia: the dead become ancestors, they become immortal, or they survive in the memories of the living. It presents evidence of an ancient and widespread view that the dead become not immortal but temporary ancestors. The origins of ancestor veneration are as likely to lie in the social dynamics of family, land, gender and power as in any universal fear of extinction or desire for immortality. Immortality is therefore not, or not only, a response to awareness of finitude; rather, awareness, even terror, of finitude is what humans are left with when linear time comes to dominate over cyclical time, when individualism takes over from collectivism and then when secularisation erodes religions' offer of immortality.