The Energy of Life: - Guy Brown

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is the origin of the Greek word sarcophagus (meaning ‘flesh eating’) perhaps reflecting a prehistoric notion that the body and soul of the dead could enter into and be preserved in stone. The bodies were, in fact, eaten by micro-organisms too small to be seen. The Egyptians developed mummification to prevent this process, although of course lacking any knowledge of the existence of bacteria. Mummification was, however, never entirely successful, and the final resort of both the Egyptians and later cultures was to circumvent the problem by favouring the idea that the mind or soul could separate from the body at death, and either live independently (in heaven or another world), or in other objects (such as in statues), or another body (reincarnation).

      The decay of the flesh leaves the bones. Some cultures believed that the bones represented the essential core of the human, the flesh its disposable clothing. The bones contained a vital fluid, which we would now identify as the marrow encased by major bones, the spinal cord encased by the spine, the brain encased by the skull, and the cerebro-spinal fluid permeating the cavities of the brain and spine. All these ‘bones’ surround, as if protecting, a greyish-white gelatinous material or fluid, which in ancient Greece was thought to be the origin of semen, another off-white gelatinous fluid. Thus, semen was thought to be derived from this vital gel, a kind of creative force, constituting the brain, spinal cord and bone marrow. The Romans consequently believed that men’s tiredness after orgasm and ejaculation was due to the draining of creative force throughout the body. The myth that masturbation causes blindness may originate from this ancient concept that the sperm partly derives from the brain. In Greek legend, gods and goddesses were born directly from Zeus’s head (Athena) or thighbone (Dionysus), because this is where the creative force was thought to be located. The belief that bones were the essential core of the human being, encasing an individual’s procreative powers, may have motivated the preservation of the bones of ancestors in many cultures.

      The body’s decay after death appears the counterpart of its growth in life. The growth of the body is dependent on food, and it is all too evident that when a human stops eating, they stop growing, shrink, then die. Clearly there was something in food or in eating that was related to life, and this link was all the stronger because food consisted of recently dead animals or plants. Food could thus be thought of as containing either a soul or soul-nourishment. In most early cultures, there were religious rites involving human or animal sacrifice and the eating of the flesh. Often the food was blessed or otherwise transformed so that a god or soul might enter and be absorbed into the body of the eater. The Christian mass is partly derived from earlier Greek Orphic and Bacchic rituals, where food was magically transmuted into the body and soul of a god, which then entered into the body and soul of the person eating. A version of this is described in Euripides’s Bacchae, where the normally well-behaved, upper-class ladies of Athens achieve an ecstatic state, hunting a wild animal representing the god Dionysus, tearing it limb from limb and devouring the raw flesh. This was a means of obtaining ‘enthusiasm’, which in Greek means the entry of a god into the person. Thus, enthusiasm is a kind of mind energy, and these rituals were a means of obtaining it.

      The idea that food was incorporated into the body – that when eaten, the substance of the food became the substance of the body – predates Classical Greece, but just how this transformation might occur was not elaborated until the Greeks devised various schemes. One idea was that food was broken down and transformed into blood, then congealing (as in blood clotting) in various ways to produce the body’s organs. While this might explain the growth of children, it did not really explain the fact that although adults do not grow, they require large amounts of food. Later the idea of ‘dynamic permanence’ was developed by Alcmaeon in the sixth century BC, according to which the structure of the body was continuously breaking down and being replaced by new structures and substances derived from food. This would account for the fact that the body slowly decayed after death, when no food could be eaten. The general concept that material things consist of smaller components, which can be rearranged to give all the different forms or structures of things (such as food or the body), was an extremely important and fruitful one. It was particularly developed by Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Democritus, leading to much speculation as to what the simple components might be, for example water, fire, air or earth or atoms of different shapes.

      During illness and starvation, the fat of the body shrinks, while in times of health and plenty, it expands. Until comparatively recently, fat was often associated with health and riches. Some Andean Indians still associate the fat with the spirit, and thus when a man ‘fades away’ in chronic illness or starvation, his spirit fades away too, often thought to have been stolen by a sorcerer. Fat, blood and air are the basic body fluids in traditional Andean physiology, and fat is the energy principle distributed from the heart via a system of channels and rivers mirroring the hydraulics of the Andes. This imaginative physiology is indeed partly based on an analogy of the body with the mountains and rivers, so that the head is like the mountain peaks lost in the clouds, while the legs are the river valleys. Illnesses associated with particular parts of the body can be treated by offerings of coca, blood and fat at earth shrines located at appropriate parts of the mountains. In the modern West, where food is plentiful and wasting illness rare, being fat now has the connotation of being unhealthy and poor. But, of course, only a couple of hundred years ago a rotund outline was celebrated, and the skinny figure, favoured today, was feared and pitied.

      Our caveman is now distraught. He has watched his mate die: first she stopped moving, then she stopped breathing, her heart and pulse stopped, then the heat left her body, which then started to decay leaving bones and then dust. Watching this process, he has formulated new ideas about life, but these are completely useless in actually dealing with death. Many thousands of years later, we are in the same position: although we know much more about death, we are completely incapable of reversing it. However, let us return to our caveman, who is now in a reflective mood. Many of the differences between the living and the dead are visible and obvious, but perhaps the most important difference is neither visible nor obvious: what happens to the mind? What happens to our perception, thoughts, feelings and will at death? Thoughts, feelings and perceptions are not visible in other people, even if we open up their bodies, and there is no obvious machinery for producing them inside the body. The caveman could not see his mate’s thoughts and feelings when she was alive, so it is conceivable that when dead she is still capable of producing them, although they remain invisible to him. Perhaps the mind or soul enters the body at birth and leaves it at death. Accordingly, the mind of the caveman’s mate may still be alive though her body is dead and gone. This thought may not provide the caveman with much immediate relief, but implies that when he himself dies his mind may survive in some form, and may even enable him to meet up with his mate again.

      Different cultures had quite different ideas about whether and in what way the mind might separate from the body at death. But the ancient Egyptians, Indians and Greeks, believed that the mind could survive death. This belief has obvious repercussions on how we view the relations between mind, body and matter generally. If the mind can separate from the body at death and survive as an invisible but active entity, then we could conclude that life consists of two separate entities: an invisible active mind (or soul) which occupies a passive material body. Furthermore, all other entities in the world might also consist of a similar combination of mind and matter. This dualistic distinction between active mind (or spirit) and passive matter foreshadows that between energy and matter, which replaced it: the modern concept of energy has its ancestors among the spirits.

      Early explanations of the world attributed intentions or desires to objects, and interpreted events in terms of the desires of spirits and gods. This type of explanation (known as ‘teleological’ or ‘intentional’) mirrors that which we use to explain other people’s behaviour. Thus, if someone hits me over the head with a baseball bat, I might explain this behaviour by attributing it to the attacker’s anger or his intention to rob me. Similarly, if a stone fell on our caveman’s head he may have seen this as the anger or intentions of a spirit, god or even the stone itself. Nowadays, we would look for a ‘mechanistic’ explanation of such an event (for example the stone fell from a building), rather than ascribing evil intentions to the stone or the event itself. In the ancient world, there could be relatively few genuine ‘accidents’ because most events were thought intended by someone, something or some god. Thus almost everything was seen as meaningful; in

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