What Ancient Civilizations Can Teach Us About Accepting Death

Death. We sanitize it, hide it away, pretend it only happens to the old and infirm. We act like if we just avoid speaking of it, we can dodge its inevitability.

But for our ancestors around the globe, death walked openly among the living. Ancient cultures wove their understanding of mortality into their very fabric - their customs, philosophies, spiritual visions. By examining how past civilizations engaged with death, we can unearth profound insights to enrich our modern lives, so often disconnected from this universal human experience.

In ancient Mexico, Aztec traditions saw death as a transition between cosmic realms to be greeted with reverence.

During their month-long Day of the Dead ceremonies, families would welcome back the souls of lost loved ones with grave-side feasts and vigils filled with music, drink and storytelling. Death became a time of togetherness, where altars laden with marigolds and offerings connected the living and dead. Children even joined in the remembrance, understanding it not as a taboo but as a celebration of life’s continuity. What a profoundly affirmative perspective on our finite time here.

Contrast that to the Mesopotamians’ bleak underworld where even great heroes like Gilgamesh failed to revive the deceased.

Yet Gilgamesh still embarked on a quest for eternal life, revealing our innate drive as humans to find meaning and purpose that transcends our mortal bounds. However shadowy death’s veil may seem, some part of us always strives for the redemptive light beyond it.

Likewise, the ancient Egyptians clung to the promise of an afterlife, but faced it with awe and spiritual wonder instead of dread. Through elaborate mummification processes, funerary texts and provisions for a lavish tomb, they ensured their spirits would smoothly pass into an idealized afterlife, one with all earthly pleasures intact.

Their ceremonial funerary barges were not events of weeping farewell, but confident voyages into paradise - the start of a great adventure, not an ending.

The ancient Greeks also found solace in the face of impermanence with their secretive Eleusinian mysteries, which initiated members into visions of a blessed afterlife through ritual purification.

As Plato suggested, the death of one’s physical form simply freed the eternal psyche to rejoin the divine cosmic order from which it came.

By weaving their mortality into a larger cosmic meaning, they attained an equanimity that allowed them to meet death with awe instead of anxiety.

Even in imperial Rome, where earthly glory and conquests were paramount, mortality’s shadow was never denied. Generals at the apex of triumph would hear the warning whisper, “Remember, you too must die some day.”

And Stoic philosophers like Seneca upheld virtue, wisdom and integrity as the way to live fully in the face of death’s constant possibility. Rather than fleeing from this reality, they sought meaning in each transient, precious moment.

Across these diverse cultures, we see how reflecting deeply on death need not lead to gloom or dread, but can instead profoundly expand our engagement with life. Rituals and communities that honor our shared mortality comfort us in grief and deepen our connections, binding generations together through stories of loss and remembrance. Contemplating mortality inspires expansive questions, hard-won wisdom handed down across the ages, and an urgency to know ourselves deeply in the time we have under the sun. And there is grace, even beauty, in openly acknowledging our impermanence - it lets us fully inhabit each irreplaceable moment we are given.

The ancients integrated their understanding of mortality into holistic worldviews that could enhance, rather than diminish, their lives. Perhaps it is time we seek inspiration from their examples. By befriending death once more, we can relieve our denial, awaken compassion, rediscover meaning. In dancing openly with death, reflections on its mystery need not plunge us into despair, but remind us gently yet profoundly of life’s tremendous gift. For when we acknowledge our days are numbered, we cannot help but cherish each transient, lovely one all the more.