Golden Verses Step 10

Death Is Not Our Final Destination

In this step we look at Death and we take up the courage we need to consider it. We are not very good at doing this generally, with some people doing their best to avoid looking at this inevitability, even to the extent of not making a will or provision for their dependents. But there are other kinds of preparation that can help us. How can we consider death with equanimity?

Fortitude from Siena Cathedral..

Step 10.

§ Know that Death is destined for all of us §

- Verse 16

THE GREAT CHANGING

Please note, that this verse doesn’t say that ‘Death is our soul’s destiny, not its destionation.’ Death is rather a door we pass through on the way towards our destination, which is entirely about entering into the wholeness of the soul and its divine likeness. Death is a great changing, and Hierocles tells us clearly that it is our own attitude to the soul that makes the big difference to how we approach it:

‘For the person who believes their soul to be mortal and who has become accustomed to live without either rule or reason, does not distinguish between what is mortal in us and has need of riches, rather than being supported and strengthened by virtue.’ (GV X, 12). It is the soul itself that delights in the practices of the cardinal virtues and ‘if there were not something of us that remains after death, and if that something were not of a nature capable of being adorned with virtue and truth – which we believe the rational soul to be – then our desires would never be fixed upon good and honest actions. For the bare suspicion of the soul’s being mortal stifles and deadens in us our appetite for virtue and stirs us up to the enjoyment of physical pleasures, whatever they may be or however they are provided.’ (GV X,20)

Indeed, this is true in our own era, where the short-term mindedness of society is largely driven by the thought that ‘this physical life is all that we have,’ which so often betrays us into the hedonistic drive to enjoy life as much as we can - no matter the consequences to those who follow us. This one-sided attitude has opened up our world to a destructive tendency whose consequences are being stored up for our children and all those who follow us in the world of generated life. We might well observe that it is the fear or avoidance of death, and our inability to take possession of our own souls, that is actually causing greater evils than that of our own simple mortality.

If we attend to the soul as the vehicle that conjoins the physical and spiritual sides of reality, then we have also to become ever more aware of our choice of daimon. If we recall the Myth of Er in Plato’s Republic, which we looked at last time, we see each soul waiting to start its new life and the way that the guardian of the lots addresses them:

Painting by Wendy Manzo, Born of Water & of Spirit..

‘Ephemeral souls! This is the beginning of another cycle for the mortal race. No daimon shall obtain you by lot, but you should choose a daimon. Let whoever who has drawn the first lot be the first to choose a form of life, to which you will be linked by necessity. Virtue has no master: and it is, by honouring, or failing to honour it to a greater or lesser degree, that each shall have their share of it. Responsibility falls upon the one who chooses, but the divine is not responsible.’

Our particular choice of ‘a form of life’ is also the pattern by which our character will be formed. This leads us to act in certain ways, but we are not alone during our life, for guiding us is the daimon whom we have chosen. The daimon, as guide of the soul, is there to encourage us to live, both according to the pattern of our form of life, to manifest its destined course, but also to lead us after death to the evaluation of our life that we call ‘judgement.’ (For a guide on how to the read the Myth of Er, I refer you to Joseph Sibley’s excellent, if allegorical, reading of it in his thesis on ‘Choice and Character in the Republic’s Myth of Er.’ https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10198852/13/Sibley_10198852_thesis.pdf)

Our choices determine the nature and pattern of our life and, however skilful, learned, or good we are, death also comes for us as an opportunity. Hierocles’ fragmentary work on Providence sums it up like this:

‘In our case, each one of us obtains by the decision of our judicial daimons the life we deserve on the basis of our previous lives. In this life everything has been included: race, city, father, mother, the moment of conception, the particular body, the modes of behaviour and various fortunes that belong to life, the manner and appointed hour of our death. And there is a daimon who is alloted to us to help fulfil all these things. … Hence there is for each soul a providence, a judgement, a penalty, a purification, a sending forth to birth, a proper apportioning of life, and a death that does not happen spontaneously; and after death there is a journey to Hades with our guiding daimon to whom our life has been allotted.’ Hierocles in Photius Library codex 251,29 & 30.

Just as board and online games come with gifts, drawbacks, and other factors to assist you through the game’s progress to the end, so we also come into life with our own array of factors. The combination of these give us the parameters of our life. But if we steer by means of our daimon or spiritual guardian, we can come through our life by the greatest attention to a harmonious balance. This everyday practice of ‘doing our philosophy’ enables us to be ready for the changes of death, which include the assessment and evaluations of our life’s measure.

These fearful things are not all that there is. ‘It is not a fable that there is a Providence which allots to each their proper share, and that our soul is immortal,‘ Hierocles says, but clearly we have to also investigate the cause of suffering.’ (GV X, 2.) Providence is the primary source of goodness in the whole of existence and, whatever the circumstances of our particular pattern of life, we also experience mercy, opportunity, remission and joy.

The Golden Verses, taken as a whole, provide us with the courage, strategies and guidance to seek to the very heart of life’s mysteries, including the causes of suffering, which later verses will examine further.

‘Since to die has been destined for is all, and that a certain period of time has been determined for the continuance of our mortal bodies, when the appointed moment comes, we should not be angry, but willingly submit as to a divine law. Destiny makes this clear that our mortal life has been limited by certain bounds, and it is the mark of practical wisdom to follow the teachings of the Divine, seeing that it does not seek to avoid dying but to die well.’ (GV X, 6)

So, if the aim of a philosopher is not merely to avoid dying, or to overcome the fear of death, but to die well, where do we find that courage?

COURAGE AND OUR SOUL’S PURPOSE

We left the four cardinal virtues in Part 2 without a proper consideration of Courage. In the world of tarot, the card that we now know as Strength, once had more of the sense of Fortitude – the strength that withstands vicissitudes and trials. Courage is both the strength we need for a purpose, but also the fortitude that sustains our effort. Courage is something we generally assign to those who are professionally required to demonstrate it, like those who work in the police and the army, and we sometimes forget that it belongs to us also. Iamblicus breaks it down for us:

‘Let courage be understood to be an unshakeable intellectual potency and the highest form of intellectual activity, which constitute self-identity of intellect and a state of mind steadfast within itself…These are the manifestations of courage as viewed in the course of daily life, either established on their own or being combined with the steadfast attitude and reasoning; those forces, that in the realm of the passions take a noble stand in relation to what is and what is not to be feared, and in relation to fear itself and boldness, and in relation to pleasure and pain, and which preserve always the same correct opinions and keep to the harmonious and middle path, and which both calm the spirit under the influence of reason and, in turn, rouse it up when the need arises to establish a common purpose for these things compounded out of passion, reason and will. These I hold to be the various forms of courage: from these their flow into people’s lives and ability of action that is unconquerable: willingly choosing and performing noble deeds for their own sake and, in the cause of the good, undergoing every sort of toil and danger, devoting itself readily to tasks that seemed difficult, maintaining good cheer in the face of death, and indeed practising it while bearing and dealing with pains with equanimity. (Iamblichus, Letters p.31)

We all know from our own lives that we have each engaged in very difficult and complex things out of love and the need to protect the vulnerable. We have done noble deeds, as well ones we are not so proud of, and we have undertaken to endure with devotion things that, at another time of our life we would have shrunken from. That mysterious equanimity is with us, even as our hearts are in our mouths, as we say. Whether we have to change a tyre on the motorway all on our own, or face the anger of a mob, or undergo the pains of childbirth, or bear the loss of our home or job, we somehow go to the root of our soul and find the courage – strength with fortitude.

Death from Watt’s Chapel.

It is that same courage that ‘enables us to bear death with constancy and the loss of the goods of fortune with patience and self-control.’ (GV, X, 5). In this following, very Stoic, passage from Epictetus, we are given a philosophical dialogue between a person who is realizing how things are inevitably changed by death and his more Stoic self. It pulls no punches, outlining a view of death and the inevitability of how a mortal condition ends. The relentless logic of the person in passage questioning how h should act is not included here to cause you to despair, but as a means of stirring your own courage. Note what this man decides he will do and how:

‘ “Oh, so I will no longer exist?” - No, you won’t exist, but you will be something else, of which the world now has need: for you also came into existence not when you chose, but when the world had need of you. So, the wise and good person, remembering who they are and whence they came, and by whom they were produced, is attentive only to this, how they may best fill their place with discipline, remaining obedient to God. Do you still wish me to exist? Then, I will continue to exist as a free person, noble in nature, as you have wished me to live: for you have made me free from hindrance in that which is my own. But if you have no further need of me - I thank you; for I have remained here for your sake, and for the sake of any other person, and now in obedience I will depart.

“How will you depart?” -Again, according to your wish, as someone free, as your servant, as one who has attended to your commands and prohibitions. And so long as I shall stay in your service, whom do you want me to be? As a ruler, or a private person, as a senator or a commoner. a soldier or a general, a teacher or a head of a household?” - Whatever place or rank you assign to me, as Socrates says, “I will die ten thousand times rather than desert them.” And where do you want me to be? in Rome or Athens, or Thebes or Gyara? I only ask that you remember me where I am. If you send me to a place where it is impossible to live in harmony with nature, I shall not depart from life in disobedience to thee, but as if you were giving me the signal to retreat: I do not abandon you, that’s my least intention, but I realise that you have no need of me. If I am granted a way of living in accordance nature, then I will seek no other place than where I am, nor seek other company than those among whom I am living.’

By day and night, keep these thoughts to hand: write them down and read them. Study them, talk to yourself, and to others. Ask around, “Can you help me understand this?” and go speak to another and another. Then if anything that is said be contrary to your wish, this reflection will immediately relieve you, that it is not unexpected. For it is important to be able to say in all matters of loss: “I knew that I had a child who is mortal being.” Or, “I knew that I was mortal, I knew that I might leave my home, I knew that I may be ejected from it, I knew that I may be led to prison.” Then if you turn round and look to yourself, and examine whence this happening has been occasioned, you will recognize that it comes from the place of things which are out of your power of the will, out of the sphere of choice, and beyond that which is not my own. What does it matter, then?’ - Epictetus, Discourses 3, 94-106

This is the kind of dialogue we might have with ourselves, were we Stoics, but we note the willingness to be wherever we are put down on earth, and the request to the divine to not leave us without resources if that place is a difficult one for us to live in harmony there. The last paragraph, you may think, passes beyond what is feasible for a human being – to consider logically that even our own child is mortal, and that we knew it. Also, we see once more the concept of ‘which lies in our power,’ and what is beyond it. When we journey into those reasons, we need the guidance of our daimon, because we beyond the power to choose.

Because we are all people of spirit, as well as people of body, our soul is the medium by which we join those two perspectives on life together. When it comes time to depart, the soul makes it journey with the daimon as guide.

§ Consider §

*What are the most shocking ends and changes that you have endured? Consider how you coped with them. What was helpful at the time, how might you do things differently when confronted with such ends and changes today? How did you talk to yourself? What gave you the courage?

* What do you think is the reason that you were sent into your present life? Why were you needed or called here?

* HIerocles bids us look at the component factors of our life: ‘race, city, father, mother, the moment of conception, the particular body, the modes of behaviour and various fortunes that belong to life, the manner and appointed hour of our death.’ Consider your own particular array of factors and where you currently stand.What holds all these factors together?

* Philosopher Sarah Rappe, speaking recently in interview, said, ‘We do philosophy by simply being ourselves, we do it by letting go of our activities, by sending ourselves back into that place of constant abiding - that sacred place.’ https://shwep.net/podcast/all-from-nothing-sara-rappe-on-damascius/) What is your own place of constant abiding? Allow your soul to reveal it to you, ask your daimon to lead you to discover it. What does it feel like to be continually able to return to this condition of soul?

MEDITATION

This meditation is based upon mutability or change. After reading it through, take it within your tholos or many-pillared temple that is made up of all those we encountered in Part 1 – the Gods, the Oath, the heroes, daimons, ancestors, family and friends: how does each respond or answer to this. What do you learn from this colloquy?

‘Remember what we have heard from the philosophers… they tell us that this world is one city, and the substance from which it has been formed is one, and that there must be a periodic change when some things must give way to others, that some must be dissolved, while others come into their place; some to remain in the same place, and others to be moved; elsewhere and that all things are full of friendship, first of the gods,and then of human beings, who by nature are made to be of one family; and some must live with one another, while others must be separated, rejoicing in those who live with us, and not grieving for those who are removed from us. For human beings, as well as being naturally noble-minded, and capable of holding in contempt all things which are not in our power, also possesses this quality of not being rooted nor to be naturally fixed to the earth, but being able to move from one place to another, sometimes from the pressure of certain occasions, and at others just for the sake of seeing (other places.) (ED 3:24, 10-12)

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May the Spring Equinox (or the Autumn one in the Southern Hemisphere) bring you the courage to make whatever changes are coming into your life!

For those who have completed the Walkers Between Worlds Foundation Course with us or our teachers, the first Intermediate Level course is running next month.

6-9 April 2025 (Sunday-Wednesday) THRESHOLDS OF POWER & HEALING with Caitlín & Dr. Tish Marrable at Main Centre, Earthspirit, Compton Dundon Somerset. This course teaches a range of shamanic healing ways including plant-spirit healing, extraction of intrusions, embodiment of personal allies and includes the shamanic ceremony of The Mare Mother's Dream-Dance. This course is an essential next component for shamanic practitioner training. Held at EarthSpirit’s Main centre, Dundon, Somerset. Ensuite: £652, Standard: £607 Camping: £573, Non Res £501 Single supplement £15. Dietary Supplement £15 BOOKING: Non-returnable deposit of £190 to Jane May, Briarwood, Long Wittenham, Oxon OX14 4QW (01865 407680) janedmay@btinternet.com