The following is a book review which was originally published in the Scroll of Set Vol. 8, No. 4. By sharing it on this blog, I hope to bring attention to the importance of looking beyond sources that are explicitly “magical” for self-understanding and transformation. Setians draw inspiration and fuel for Xeper from all corners of the cosmos, and it can be eye-opening to discover that owning the biggest occult library in town might not be the key to success that you always imagined!
Do you remember the first time you realized you were going to die? How about the last time?
Every one of us has experienced, at some time, that uncomfortable sense of our own smallness in the vast expanse of time and space – when we perceive the concept of the infinite, and what a small blip of energy each of us really is in the grand scheme of things.
Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s 1975 opus The Denial of Death laid the theoretical foundation of the idea of Terror Management, arguing that the fundamental conflict of human existence, leading to most, if not all, of our problems, is the fact that we’re simultaneously endowed with the limitless psyche and imagination of gods – able to conceive of the infinite, the past and future, to solve problems, invent something from nothing – while also being imprisoned in the bodies of animals, needing only to eat, fuck, decay, and die. Our curse is that we can, and do, use these boundless minds to understand the mortality of our carnal selves. Over the millenia, humanity has attempted to bridge this gap between our disconnected states by pursuing a sense of heroism and thereby, immortality.
The great failure of conventional religions has been their inability to reconcile our dual states of being in any meaningful way. They tell us that this physical world doesn’t matter, that our rewards, however they might manifest, will come to us once we’ve left it. Yet clearly, our bodies, our mortality, and our existence on earth are of the greatest consequence. In fact, it’s well worth considering that this is all we have.
In Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, social psychologists Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski sought to find and quantify the real, measurable behavioral outcomes of the human fear of our own mortality. This work is a powerful, mind-bending exploration of the human condition – the extreme highs and lows of which we are all capable, and a strong hypothesis of the origins of much of our behavior.
Through over 25 years of experiments, the authors show that humans’ fear of death has led us all to pour ourselves into various “immortality projects,” unconsciously seeking to cope with the reality of our own impending deaths. This is a truly eye-opening book, expounding on the fundamental problems that torture the consciousness of all people and many of the surprising things that have resulted from our desire to deny our own carnal nature. This book holds tremendous value in illuminating how we all struggle to cope with death. Seeing the world, our history, and ourselves through the lens of Terror Management Theory will provide readers with a powerful Initiatory Shock, as old perceptions fall away and new ones become uncomfortably clear.
Worm at the Core provides many opportunities for self-reflection, and even proposes ideas to heal and move beyond this ancient dilemma. How would you live your life if you knew there was nothing beyond it?
XeperAustin 