Dialogue and Universalism

Volume 25, Issue 1, 2015

The Human Being. Its Nature and Function

The Archaic Perception of Death—an Integrated Model

Studies of ancient funerary rituals lead to the philosophical problem of the opposition of life and death. Ancient cultural forms that remove this opposition are based on the specifically irrational and correlate with irrational ideas about the soul and its destination after death. The modern rational mind eliminates these forms. Based on an ontologically balanced paradigmatic synthetic approach, considering the features of ontology and myth, a dynamic model of the archaic perception of death—metaphysics of overcoming—was formed. This integrated model most accurately reflects the pre-philosophical way of the transcendence of the being. The metaphysics of overcoming can be the core of the ancient ritual comprehension theory.