The Nomadic Alternative – Page 177

Since the here-and-now is preferable to the maybe or has-been, the idea of another brighter place, from which we came and to which we shall return, holds little attraction for the hunters. As they live in a perpetual present, they enjoy the rewards of the present, rather than store them up for some Valhalla in the life beyond the grave. "The Earth belongs to God and men are placed in it to enjoy it", says a Gipsy proverb. Anxiety for the future - in this life or the next - is irrelevant. The Bushmen know about magical spells - but as something done by very stupid people very far away.

Hunters concern themselves to live each stage of the life cycle to the fullest extent. Only by rejoicing in the present, without morbid attention to future or past, can one hope for the final reward of a right death. The hunters tend to divide themselves horizontally into age-groups and see life as a sequence of initiations. To synchronize with the point of death in the right frame of mind, the individual must time each phase of his life correctly.

Bushmen hold the stars to be connected in some way with the timing of death. "The stars know the time at which we die." Breath is life. When they die the wind blows. It blows out their footprints. "If there had been nothing the matter with us, our footprints would still lie plainly visible." This conception is remarkably close to the parinirvana or Final Blowing-out of the Buddha, and the possible implication of these beliefs about death I shall leave for the final chapter, except to note in passing the idea that the point of death is an appointment within a natural cycle of time.

Consequently a sudden unnatural death always comes as a horrifying shock. A killing lops off the life in the middle of its course, and as the dead man had no time to prepare for his extinction, murder cries aloud for revenge.

The concept of the afterlife is not a logical speculation, but an emotional, instinctive response to an unknown void. And most peoples have hoped that some incorporeal fragment of the living man might survive the corruption of the corpse. The Neanderthalers, who sprinkled red ochre over the bodies of their dead as a