NINE: The Quest for Immortality

The concept of immortality must have come early in the anomalous human development of a material culture, likely connected with the development of art and writing. Perhaps the artists of the caves of Lascaux in France glimpsed the notion that their creations of magnificently cavorting animals would outlive them. Certainly the Egyptians in the time of the Pharaohs were obsessed with immortality.

I went to Egypt to research Tales of Monkeyman, a novel about a man raised by baboons in Kenya. In researching baboons, I discovered that the Egyptians revered baboons as an incarnation of the god Thoth, the god of wisdom, a messenger of the other gods, the god of writing, and the guide to souls on the way to death. Thoth (pronounced “toth” with a long o) evolved into the Greek Hermes and the Roman Mercury.

I visited the pyramids with the expectation that they were likely to be over-hyped tourist attractions. When I got there, I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. They are so beautiful! There is something about how their image lands on the retina that bespeaks an archetype of Beauty. They were built as monuments to Pharaohs, manifestations of their monumental arrogance, and, along with mummification, an elaborate attempt to achieve immortality. And guess what? For all intents and purposes, they succeeded. They have certainly come closer to immortality than any other humans. They have been remembered longer. Ken Kesey captures this spirit in his story “The Secret of the Pyramids” in Demon Box. He contends that the meaning of the pyramids inheres in their capacity to provide a livelihood to the hucksters who prey on the tourists 4000 years after they were built.

At the time I was in Egypt, archeologists were beginning to understand that while slaves may have been involved in the construction of the pyramids, a major purpose of the project was to employ farmers during the off season, kind of an ancient New Deal. One of the things that I was left with after spending several days basking in the aura of these monuments was this: If they could do that back then, given the level of their technology, if they could mobilize the entire population to create these absolutely magnificent works of art, think of what we could do now.

And yet what are the pyramids but monuments to human arrogance, to human egotism? One of the things one experiences on LSD is the “death” of the ego – at least this is the terminology in the Pschedelic Experience, the loose translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Ralph Metzger and Timothy Leary which guided so many of us on our acid trips. What is this ego? We all have one, and we all have a sense of what it is intuitively. It is the “I” of our internal monologue – the word “ego” is actually a translation from Freud’s German, “Das Ich.” Freud’s definition is broader than that used in the Metzger book, and the more precision we can get in our metaphors here the better.