Sister of the Endless

Speculata on Death

Dream and Death from Netflix’s Adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman“ franchise

Sister of the Endless

I desire you inappropriately

Forgive me

And pull me away from my delirium

So that when it is time to follow you on that road

I might do so with clear eyes and a peaceful heart

To see the one who calls me beloved

The Theia beyond the speculae

I fear death. A lot. I was told that I once cried incessantly as a child because I didn’t want to die. I don’t remember much of the event, but perhaps that was when it finally clicked for me what death was, from the perspective of someone still alive. It is ultimate end of our life’s geodesic, a singularity with an event horizon often seen in the eyes of the dead’s body as an utter silence. My experience with death is thankfully sporadic, but it is painful nonetheless. I lost my maternal grandmother before I was 5, so I don’t remember much beyond seeing her body in the coffin, unable to process what I was seeing. I lost a classmate in secondary school, and it is still as a dream. I never processed it. I lost a friend to complications from sickle cell in my final year in undergrad. Given my age, that hit considerably harder. I was already in a depression, so it sort of worsened it. I barely think about her now, a fruit of my penchant to avoid this topic in its concrete forms. As someone who grew up evangelical, my fear of death is very related to my fear of eternal hell. I vividly remember praying for forgiveness under my breath every single time I spoke in JSS3 (I was 13 years old), to the horror of my Muslim friend, who obviously noticed how insane it was to live under such fear. I thought every single small exaggeration, annoyance, white lie, etc, would send me to the place where eldritch entities danced round my torment. “Torment” doesn’t begin to describe it, actually. I was under the influence of those afterlife testimonies. Evangelicals from anywhere in the world tend to know what I’m talking about. They claimed to see Michael Jackson burning in the flames, and demons who moonwalk as their actual mode of transportation (apparently, he learned it from them because he was in the so called “illuminati”). They also saw Popes in there (Anti-Catholicism is not far behind for these people), as well as many celebrities, and actual children, imprisoned in unbelievable torment for the apparently unforgivable sin of being obnoxious to their parents because they wanted to be like Ben 10 (I mean, what else could convince you today that the people who propagate this stuff are very evil?). I remember vividly the description of a woman whose sin was sexual. A python with spikes protruding from its body apparently entered her (soul body?) through her… lady bits (forgive me)… and out her mouth. In hindsight, there is definitely a misogyny fetish subtext in these visions, given that when it comes to sexual sins, I only remember them describing women as the sufferers.

I also read books by pastors like D.K. Olukoya on demons and their operations. The “Spirit Wife” was a constant fear of mine. It made me very terrified of my desires. I mean, why would you even think of sex if you might get a “Spirit Wife” that will “spoil your destiny” and lead you to hell, where they will do even worse things to you. But if you do the right things, you go to heaven, where (as Roberts Liardon described it) you have your mansions, endless play, fulfilling praise and worship, etc. You also get a very child friendly Jesus. His description was very… “White”, in hindsight. How a child friendly Jesus allows such horrific torture is beyond me, but the fact that there is a HUGE chance I might miss that place and enter what is basically the realm of every Warhammer Chaos God rolled into one is a great recipe for what some call “religious trauma”.

If you have never read this book, count yourself a very lucky person

This context is a major motivating factor behind my turn to universal salvation a few years ago. David Bentley Hart put my objections and horror in words that would resound across my heart in an ever-loudening rhythm of agreement[1]. And yet, I still have periods where this fear reanimates its own corpse, and the chief power of this animation is that phenomenology of death that terrified me as a child who barely knew anything about hell, if he knew about it at all. The vision of hell I came to accept with universal salvation is simply the consequences of our actions that require what one might call “divine and cosmic therapy” to work through, although it is commonly called purgatory. This hasn’t really changed, even as a tenuous non-Christian. Here’s Sallustius:

“The soul therefore becomes guilty because it desires good, but it wanders about good because it is not the first essence. But that it may not wander, and that when it does so, proper remedies may be applied, and it may be restored, many things have been produced by the gods; for arts and sciences, virtues and prayers, sacrifices and initiations, laws and polities, judgements and punishments, were invented for the purpose of preventing souls from  falling into guilt; and even when they depart from the present body, expiatory gods and dæmons purify them from guilt.”[2]

I like how E.P. Butler describes the afterlife purifier par excellence, Hades Himself, as a sort of “Therapist”[3], and it doesn’t seem like the therapy is not restricted till after dying a physical death. The entire world, in its universal aspects of “phenomenality”, the “specular”, as an “image”, and thus as a “ghost” or “trace” of the intelligible, is Hades’ realm, and thus philosophies that teach us about the world’s existence as image are taught, implicitly or explicitly, by Hades (even St Paul himself, who sees here a shadow of divine light). Hades is probably not the only God with this activity. The Hebrew Sheol (seemingly identified with Hades in Christian theology) as a divine entity is also of similar activity. I am hesitant to identify them, although I can syncretize in one direction or the other, one as the “power” of another, in Platonic terms. But, Hades is not Thanatos. He is the lord of the “dead” as specular image, but he is not the one who is death, and frankly, I’m not a fan of therapy either. I’m what a certain school of relationship experts call “avoidant”. I don’t want my soul laid bare before anyone, even if I want healing. I don’t want the reality of that possibility rushing towards me like an unescapable asteroid. But I guess the lesson of Hades the Therapist is that there hasn’t been a time when my soul is not laid bare to the Gods, and there is no time when their healing light is not present. I am just too broken to see it all of the time, and yet, healing is not being unbroken, but being consciously broken, for the goodness of my existence is too much for my being. Such is the same with the Gods, and such is what it means to be with them for whom “bringing forth the mortal world is a ‘work of sorrow [loigia erga]’”[4], and yet, are happy due to the fact of their eternity.

What then is the lesson of death herself, the event horizon of our personal singularities? I guess, based on the lesson of the Ever-Present Hades, I would summarize it as the doctrine of the Ever-Present Death: Do it Scared, for we are always already Dead. The moment we are born, our soul died, it crossed an event horizon and everything “past” was forgotten, and an integrity was disintegrated further. Physical death is just a terminus in this endless process. I do not want to reincarnate, but in the light of the concretude of this revelation, whenever it happens, my desires and intent might just be transformed. I see glimpses insofar as, as even souls in time, we are already dead, for change is death in life, and life in death. It is in this sense that death is a friend, as she always already holds your hand, leading you to the next second, the next moment, the next life. You already reincarnate, and thus die, insofar as you live, and live moment to moment[5]. Death is thus not Life’s shadow, but its skin. What is divine darkness but infinite light? In this moment of clarity, I see my depressive desire for death as anything but. It is a desire for non-existence, for the impossible “state of nothing”, the disordered desire for the skin of life without its soft grasp through the path of living change. In desiring death this way, I reject it, I spurn its gifts. But the Goddess is forgiving, and Death never lets go. Its light rains on us all. Rather wrench the speculum from the God, I should receive its aethereal gifts. Even in the debilitating fear and grief, I should hold the gift of her hand, through life, up to the inevitable horizon where I meet the one who hides her face behind all our fleeting loves, the one of whom I am speculare, her death[6].

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[1] David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, Yale University Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvnwbzd4.

[2] Sallustius and Thomas Taylor, ‘On the Gods and the World’ (London: Edward Jeffery and Pall Mall, 1793).

[3] Rebecca Buchanan, Host of Many: Hades and His Retinue (Independently Published, 2021).

[4] Edward P. Butler, ‘Proclus on Hera’, accessed 9 June 2024, https://lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com/23173.html.

[5] In "becoming" (bhava, γένεσις) we die and are reborn every day and night, and in this sense "day and night are recurrent deaths" - Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, ‘On the One and Only Transmigrant’, Journal Of The American Oriental Society 3 (1944): 28.

[6] “Immortals become mortals, mortals become immortals; they live in each other's death and die in each other's life.” – Heraclitus. Translation from: William Harris, HERACLITUS The Complete Fragments Translation and Commentary and The Greek Text (Middlebury College, 1995), http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=90C23603445CB0F6B04A8D9064FD3BD5.

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[1] Sallustius and Thomas Taylor, ‘On the Gods and the World’ (London: Edward Jeffery and Pall Mall, 1793).

[2] Rebecca Buchanan, Host of Many: Hades and His Retinue (Independently Published, 2021).

[3] Edward P. Butler, ‘Proclus on Hera’, accessed 9 June 2024, https://lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com/23173.html.

[4] In "becoming" (bhava, γένεσις) we die and are reborn every day and night, and in this sense "day and night are recurrent deaths" - Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, ‘On the One and Only Transmigrant’, Journal Of The American Oriental Society 3 (1944): 28.

[5] “Immortals become mortals, mortals become immortals; they live in each other's death and die in each other's life.” – Heraclitus. Translation from: William Harris, HERACLITUS The Complete Fragments Translation and Commentary and The Greek Text (Middlebury College, 1995)