Fictional physics
Dec. 13th, 2008 07:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackQ. What do we know about the afterlife?
For millennia, possibly millions of years, all anyone knew was that when humans died, they disappeared, and other animals didn't. This led to complicated funeral rites, and the general belief in a connection between having intelligence and having a soul, and many people choose to make an arbitrary definition of human according to that line: do you transcend, or do you not?
It's possible it served as an evolutionary advantage. "Hunt humans," it proclaims, "and you won't have any dinner." Which suggests intelligence was necessary, just as the development of most other human-only tricks, like spears, and language, are assumed to be derived from their development of intelligence.
Q. Where does the person go?
The greek civilisation was the first we know to have investigated, though only in Roman times do we know of reliable divinations. And we suspect the Egyptian and Chinese civilisations knew, a lot earlier, but we have no evidence. All placed much personal veneration on a succession of leaders or emperors.
Now we know simple divinations can pinpoint the exact place where someone died, and for some time afterwards let you see into death, and even converse briefly with the deceased. Much more questionable and dangerous experiments have rent doorways into the veil wide enough for passage out, and even passage back.
But the immediate details are no longer a mystery. In most traditionally Christian countries, you see the recently dead in a drifting white mist, the Veil Albicant, although the first veil is much the same in all places.
The deceased lingers there for a little while, hours or days, before moving. In the Veils, all direction is away from the world. It is until then that souls are occasionally recovered back into the world.
When can someone come back?
When a person's body is irretrievably damaged, it decays into the Veil Albicant. Sometimes this happens instantly -- witnesses of great falls have occasionally described someone as if "they went right through the ground". Sometimes, even if the heart is destroyed, it takes several minutes for the brain to shut down, at which time the body vanishes.
Occasionally a magician can pull an immediately-departed person back into the world. Normally the brain is so damaged they fade again immediately, but if they're sufficiently undamaged, occasionally they can be revived before that.
People have also theorised that the physical body is in some way repaired according to the person's self-expectations, in the same way that people that travel far into the veils seem to no longer be bound by a physical body at all. If that were right, it might mean someone in the veil for only a few minutes might have bled further, yet their brain might be very slightly less damaged than when they died.
For millennia, possibly millions of years, all anyone knew was that when humans died, they disappeared, and other animals didn't. This led to complicated funeral rites, and the general belief in a connection between having intelligence and having a soul, and many people choose to make an arbitrary definition of human according to that line: do you transcend, or do you not?
It's possible it served as an evolutionary advantage. "Hunt humans," it proclaims, "and you won't have any dinner." Which suggests intelligence was necessary, just as the development of most other human-only tricks, like spears, and language, are assumed to be derived from their development of intelligence.
Q. Where does the person go?
The greek civilisation was the first we know to have investigated, though only in Roman times do we know of reliable divinations. And we suspect the Egyptian and Chinese civilisations knew, a lot earlier, but we have no evidence. All placed much personal veneration on a succession of leaders or emperors.
Now we know simple divinations can pinpoint the exact place where someone died, and for some time afterwards let you see into death, and even converse briefly with the deceased. Much more questionable and dangerous experiments have rent doorways into the veil wide enough for passage out, and even passage back.
But the immediate details are no longer a mystery. In most traditionally Christian countries, you see the recently dead in a drifting white mist, the Veil Albicant, although the first veil is much the same in all places.
The deceased lingers there for a little while, hours or days, before moving. In the Veils, all direction is away from the world. It is until then that souls are occasionally recovered back into the world.
When can someone come back?
When a person's body is irretrievably damaged, it decays into the Veil Albicant. Sometimes this happens instantly -- witnesses of great falls have occasionally described someone as if "they went right through the ground". Sometimes, even if the heart is destroyed, it takes several minutes for the brain to shut down, at which time the body vanishes.
Occasionally a magician can pull an immediately-departed person back into the world. Normally the brain is so damaged they fade again immediately, but if they're sufficiently undamaged, occasionally they can be revived before that.
People have also theorised that the physical body is in some way repaired according to the person's self-expectations, in the same way that people that travel far into the veils seem to no longer be bound by a physical body at all. If that were right, it might mean someone in the veil for only a few minutes might have bled further, yet their brain might be very slightly less damaged than when they died.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-15 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-15 06:17 pm (UTC)As brain death is what makes the body enter the first veil, then presumably the brain is constantly doing something during life that keeps the body present. Are there near-death cases where people disappear for a couple of minutes and then reappear? That must be disconcerting if they are on the operating table. You probably need a magician on hand at dangerous operations.
Are there yogis or meditators who have achieved such control over their mind that they can enter and leave the first veil at will?
Now we know simple divinations can pinpoint the exact place where someone died, and for some time afterwards let you see into death, and even converse briefly with the deceased.
The place: that implies something was left behind, maybe a very small portal that gradually closes?
Conversing after death: if brain death means you enter the veil, then this supports the theory that brains heal after death.
Does anything go with the person? What is left behind? E.g. clothes, stomach contents, fillings, surgical implants? What if the person who dies is pregnant? Is the foetus left behind - assuming it is still alive - or does it enter the veil too?
no subject
Date: 2008-12-15 07:03 pm (UTC)As brain death is what makes the body enter the first veil, then presumably the brain is constantly doing something during life that keeps the body present
Or, conversely, the body transcending is generally accepted as a convenient definition for "death", but of course some people think this is too pat, and that it's more nuanced than that. And we know the brain has something to do with it, but have yet to work out exactly what.
(I like your interpretation though, I hadn't thought of it quite like that. Certainly non-human things don't seem to have any tendency to transcend into the first veil. I saw it more as, when the brain dies, "something" including the body is sloughed off into the veil. But yours sounds equally true.)
A better definition of death is "enter the veil and be unable to come back", but of course, that's hard to exactly define.
You probably need a magician on hand at dangerous operations.
Very much so. Dragging a just-vanished corpse back and resuscitating it requires certain ritual stuff. It's a bit like CPR -- it's not exactly very reliable, but always worth trying. Indeed, it's a bit like euthanasia -- you're not supposed to do it at all, but most doctors and nurses have a rote grasp of how to try it, and generally do, and look innocent afterwards.
Are there near-death cases where people disappear for a couple of minutes and then reappear?
It doesn't happen spontaneously, it requires certain mystical preparations. This is normally by a magician who reaches into death and pulls the body out. But a decent magician who can come and go can just about pull it off by casting them beforehand, or if he comes to consciousness quickly on the other side.
The interesting case is when the deceased is embroiled in something on the other side, or is particularly stubborn in finding something to cling to, and doesn't immediately progress further into death. In this case, you can have a magician enter death, wrestle with some sort of metaphysical manifestation that entrapped the soul, and return with the soul to life.
If a soul is free to travel, you only stand a chance of bringing it out for a few minutes -- half an hour tops. But in weird situations like this, someone might occasionally be dead for hours or brought back.
Twelve hours is the official record though. If someone's dead for, eg. three days, they've pretty much by definition progressed far enough into death (in one direction or another) that to bring them out requires moving against the gradient, which is pretty much impossible: figuring that out is a major miracle.
(Dying is a major hurdle though -- if you're in death, it's possible to travel for days or longer back out, just not permanently, and conversely a mortal magician can enter death and come back if his body is in good shape.)
Are there yogis or meditators who have achieved such control over their mind that they can enter and leave the first veil at will?
Ooh, that's a nice idea. I probably should have said so, but no -- entering death (and coming back) requires mystical stuff, and not dying.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-15 07:13 pm (UTC)Something like that. It's more like a wake (in, I guess, both senses): you can trace the impact of the transition until some time later.
You can look into death in other places, but you generally just see a white mist. If you want to enter death, that's fine, but if you're only supposed to look, it's not very helpful.
Entering death is called necromancy, and considered a bad thing. Not inherently bad, but pretty much impossible to do without messing up and making really bad consequences.
Looking in is, however, so traditional it's considered ok. I have a vision of chaplains wandering over bloodstained napoleonic battlefields with divining pendulums and whatnot, stopping for just a word or two with everyone they can find.
Funerals, if they can happen in time, involve a few last words between close relatives and friends and the deceased, which generally helps the deceased move on, and then a larger service with everyone else.
Does anything go with the person?
Scientists have been poking this question for ages. Notably, if not most nicely, atheistic French revolutionaries with their guillotine.
Pretty much everything in or on is taken along. There are traditions of people dying in their best clothes if possible. Bulky outer garments are sometimes left behind. Scientists say at least a thin molecular film is taken from anything the deceased is touching. There seems to be both a physical distance, and a psychological, component so people have a lot of good guidelines, but no-one's figured out any rules yet.
Ancient emperors were loaded with gold and gifts, and servants slain along with them. People theorise the pyramids were some sort of great ark, helpfully navigating lots of oxen and statues into death somehow-or-other, but no-one can either (a) duplicate the trick (b) travel very far into whatever part of death they think ancient egyptians tended to go, or (c) find any records.
Sometimes recent insertions do and sometimes they don't.
What if the person who dies is pregnant? Is the foetus left behind - assuming it is still alive - or does it enter the veil too?
Like death in reverse, this is considered a cut-off line for foetuses. If they're viable enough, they stay; if not, they go. However, it's been demonstrated that you can have a magician enter death, the mother hand her/him the premature baby, and she/he return with it, and intensive care can keep it alive. So people definitely campaign for this to be revised, but few people want to take that leap.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-15 09:59 pm (UTC)So what if you tie a rope to the dying person and the other end of the rope to something that won't go with them. Can you tether them to life, somehow? Could you pull them back from death? Would they bob around in the afterlife like an anchored ship?
no subject
Date: 2008-12-15 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-15 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-15 07:15 pm (UTC)It's funny, I occasionally love making some theological world-building like this, but can't quite make it come out into an actual story :)