Afterlife

Twenty years after his death, Clairvius Narcisse, a zombie from Haiti, stood staring down at his own tombstone.

The inscription was faded and barely legible. Narcisse was showing his grave to Harvard-trained Canadian anthropologist and ethno-botanist, Wade Davis, whose key interest is the relationship between psychoactive plants and humans.

On April 30, 1962, Narcisse, then aged about 40, had presented at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles, Haiti. He was spitting blood and was running a fever. Three days later, he died. The day after that, he was buried under a heavy concrete slab.

Continue reading "A walking, talking, real-life zombie from Haiti" »

Since the dawn of life, there has been death. And since the dawn of death, there have been endless vain attempts, some gallant and some desperate, some real and some imagined, some tragic and some inspiring, to grasp the key that unlocks immortality.

One of the earliest literary works, the Epic of Gilgamesh, is preserved on twelve clay tablets recovered from the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s ancient library collection and depicts a hero’s search for the secret to everlasting life. Jumping forward almost two thousand years, Oscar Wilde’s fictional character Dorian Gray was consumed by his desire for eternal youth.

The human preoccupation with preventing death is as alive today as it was in the times of Ashurbanipal and Wilde.

Continue reading "You might be dead, but you can still win arguments" »

George Bernard Shaw once observed that the statistics about death are very impressive - one out of one people dies. So why don’t we give more thought to what happens after we die? A 10-minute cab ride on Christmas Eve reminded me of a question we all need to ask, but rarely do.

I jumped in the cab at Chatswood with a spring in my step - I’d successfully completed my Christmas shopping - shopping I’d foolishly left until the last minute. When I asked the driver where he was up to with his present-buying, he explained that as a Muslim, he and his family wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas.

Instead, they would be holding their own celebration a couple of months later in a traditional Persian celebration that would appear, on the outside at least, much the same as a traditional Australian Christmas, minus of course, any references to God himself dwelling among us as he is born as a baby.

Continue reading "What do you think happens when we die?" »