The Archetype of Death

The symbols of death or the fear of death can be sunset; evening; a crossed river or falling in a river; a skeleton; snarling dogs; sleep; anaesthetic; gravestones; cemetery; blackness or something black; an old man or woman, or father time with a scythe; ace of spades; a fallen mirror; stopped clock; a pulled tooth; an empty abyss; the chill wind; falling leaves; a withering plant; an empty house; a lightning struck tree; coffin; struggling breaths; the dead animal in the gutter; the rotting carcass; underground; the depths of the sea – the VOID.

What lies beyond death is conjecture for all of us except if we have had a near death experience. But the archetype of death we are considering is not completely about physical death. It is about our observation of it in others; our conceptions of it gained from our culture, and our impressions arising from seeing dead animals, rotting corpses; the feelings that generate around our experiences and thoughts of it; our attempts to deal with our own ageing and approach to death; social violence – PLUS – what the deeper strata of mind releases in symbols or emotions regarding it and in response to our observations of the external world. It is about how our sense of conscious personal existence meets the prospect of its disintegration.

Unless we can come to terms with what is behind the haunting images of death we meet in waking and in our dreams, we fail to live fully and daringly. This is because we are too troubled by death lurking in the shadows of injury and the unknown. We therefore avoid living in a way that would be risky. Images of death and the associated emotions, carried within for years, can have a negative influence on our health. Coming to terms with death means the courage to feel the emotions of fear or chill and discover them for what they are – emotions; a personal image we have built. They are certainly not death, only our feelings about it. The differences shown in the two following examples illustrate the avoiding and the meeting. The first can be called an experience of the ‘death pit’.

I was disturbed by an unusually vivid dream last night – unable to sleep afterwards for almost two hours. In the dream I went out for the evening to see some friends. Golden beer spilled as one of my friends doubled up and the room sprang open with a Death’s Head shrieking behind him, as if a skin had been peeled back to reveal the bones of life crackling in a gigantic electric chair. It burned my brain. With a great effort I managed to wall up the apparition behind the bright fabric of the evening, leaving only a blurred after-image of the hole, like the torn edge of a strip of wallpaper that has been ripped and glued back into place.

It happened again. At first it was the result of a form of irritated curiosity, like picking at a scab, or scratching an itch irresistibly, in spite of the inevitable pain. This hurt far too much though. My whole frame shuddered, as if my bones were lines being ridden by a hundred express trains, or an electric current, a force field of limitless indifferent energy.

I sealed it up again, but the wound had been weakened by my curiosity, and burst open at the slightest agitation: as soon as I tried to lose myself in the happy group, my laughter triggered the catch, and I saw my friends faces twisted by laughter, with their own deaths crowing scornfully behind their backs, as if Death couldn’t wait to show He had the last laugh, pointing it out obscenely, obvious as a schoolboy’s joke. I was denied the temporary relief of friendship by the hideous mockery that was audible to me alone.

When I realised that I couldn’t control it, I was speechless and dizzy with fright and pain. I couldn’t stand properly, and vainly tried to stop falling against people and things like a drunk. Either my appearance of something I was unaware of saying had upset V., as I could see her crying, and from the snatches of conversation I caught, I realised that I had spoilt everyone’s evening. Eventually I was picked up and carried out by the bouncers, and left on the opposite side of the street. As I struggled, I became vaguely aware that I was dreaming, a fact which glimmered like a pinprick of light seen from the foot of a mine-shaft. I groped desperately towards it, even as I realised that the multifarious shapes of memory and imagination were materialising in the very street around me. I averted my gaze as a squat, malformed figure limped by, unwilling to acknowledge it as the progeny of my own brain. I clawed my way desperately in the shaft, as I felt visual imagination solidify into sound, and the threat of touch. Liquid splashed on the ground behind me, as if a bucket had been emptied from a half remembered opening in the building above.

With a desperate convulsion of mental energy, I deliberately tore my way out of the dream. I opened my eyes with relief, to see my room unchanged and still lit by the street lamp outside, opposite the school where the children would arrive in a few hours time. In spite of the heat of the June night, I was not even sweating, and felt surprisingly calm, apart from a raging suspicion about the means of my escape from my own imagination and its absurd but terrifying creations. A. J.

Second Example: ‘Suddenly I was in a huge underground cavern. It was hundreds of feet high and as wide. It had two great statues in it, both to do with death. The whole place overpowered me with a sense of decay and skeletal death, darkness, underground, earth, the end. I cried out in the dismal cave, ‘Death, where is your sting! Grave, where is your victory!’ I immediately had the sense of being a bodiless awareness. I knew this was what occurred at death. Fear and the sense of decay left me.’ Andrew.

Summarising these and many other dreams, it is not only the accumulated images of death, but also bodilessness, aloneness, loss of power and identity, which bring so much fear. There are antipodes of human experience. At the tip of one is focused, self determining self awareness. At the tip of the other is unfocused void without identity. Strangely enough we experience both each day in some degree. The first while awake – the second when we sleep. Yet to face the second with consciousness feels like all the horrors of death and loss. But facing it is important, especially in the second half of life. Although the unconscious carries the dark images we have of death, it also provides what feels like certainty about an existence which transcends death to those who experience it. This is presented as an awareness of existing eternally as part of the very fabric of life. In one form or another this is what those who dare to confront the dark images of death find beyond them.

Something that stands out in A. J.’s dream of the death-head, if one is looking for it, is that he was actually the creator of it all. He says in describing the dream, ‘I averted my gaze as a squat, malformed figure limped by, unwilling to acknowledge it as the progeny of my own brain.’ The realisation of how we create our whole experience of life is, as he says, frightening and painful. It was not simply the ‘bad’ things he was creating, but also the good. The frightening thing about this realisation is partly that we do not want to admit responsibility. It is much easier to feel we are victims. We are victims, but of our own creativity.

One of the most powerful dreams in which the whole spectrum of death and eternity is met is in Priestley’s book Rain Upon Godshill. In it he gives a personal account of his transforming meeting with death. See: Example in religion and dreams; Example 5 in nightmares.. If we observe the images and emotions of death in dreams, especially in a series of such dreams, the process of rebirth or transformation usually follows that of death. See: death; death and dreams; death – is there life afterwards?; rebirth or resurrection.

Useful questions are:

What are my own inherited or self created images of death?

Have I met and dared to discover where such images and fears arise from, and what lies behind them?

Am I really living without paralysing fears?

If not, is the fear of death involved in my paralysis?