Part 4: Afterlife Stories INTRODUCTION excerpted from “The World of Myth” by David Leeming. Afterlife Stories, page 64.

Perhaps an even more important factor is consciousness itself…………..[…….]. It might be said that consciousness of the total life process – of life’s beginning, middle and end as a single plot – is [a being’s] defining characteristic. Without that consciousness, existence, itself – certainly our existence is threatened. That being the case, it is perhaps ultimately impossible to conceive of the permanent loss of consciousness. Even if we do not go so far as to believe in the physical restoration of our individual lives, we tend to have difficulty conceiving of life without the consciousness by which we perceive it. The afterlife is an almost inevitable result. And it should be noted that more often that not, the souls in the various underworlds – the heavens and hells of world mythology – are nearly always, in death, freed from the restrictions on knowledge of the future that are necessarily associated with the physical life – and with mortality itself. In the afterlife individual consciousness comes into its own as part of a larger consciousness that informs all things and actions.” 

Utnapishtim, in the Babylonian  Gilgamesh  epic, survivor of a mythological  flood whom Gilgamesh consults about the secret of immortality. Utnapishtim was the only man to escape death, since, having preserved human and animal life in the great boat he built, he and his wife were deified by the god  Enlil. Utnapishtim directed Gilgamesh to a plant that would renew his youth, but the hero failed to return with it to his home city. See  Noah;  Ziusudra.

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