The Oldest Religion

The oldest religion, as judged by the oldest sacred sites, centered around burial rites, was ancestor worship. I am certain it was noted and marveled at, that some who died came back to life*. And some who returned reported what today is called Near Death Experiences. This I believe seeded our most primitive faiths.

For this  oldest of religions, life and death were separated by thinner veils. The ancestors were still available to us for guidance and communion. It was only later that death became a kind of finality and we became concerned about whether or not there was an afterlife.

Death for many seemed senseless and thereafter life could even be described as a meaningless accident of Nature. It fell to a newer and more mythic religious temperament to invent all manner of phantasmagoria to sooth our growing insecurities about death and our place in the Cosmos.

The Spiritualism of the last two hundred years, corrupted by charlatans preying on the gullible only cast more doubt on this primitive faith that life can not be killed. And the theories of transmigration of the soul while theories still yet fuel the imaginations of psychics who offer us a false and second hand sense of knowing  which serves the ego more than understanding.

Yet for all we do not know and can not prove, the intuition of the heart speaks to me thus - that in the strange worlds of what the Physicists call the Quantum realms, we become "entangled" or connected in some similar way, with the life energy of others, regardless of spacial separation and even time, and this I suggest, very strongly established by the actions of love - in those bonds of bodies and genes as well as of hearts and dreams. And within this entanglement of soul connections the veil between words can seem thin indeed, and love here at the very least, as it says in the Song of Songs, proves strong as death.

*The most famous case of the apparent dead coming back to like was probably Jesus, to which the term "resurrection" was technically misapplied by Gospel writers.
Before embalming became  popular, grave robbers and others would open coffins and find the interred had tried to claw their way out of the grave after burial.