Weird Tales/Volume 5/Issue 2/Death

Most men fear and dread death, especially if they allow themselves to contemplate it when they are in no apparent danger of experiencing it. The law's final punishment is death. The pangs of death have been held up before us by the supreme artists as the most frightful of human calamities.

But is death the terrible thing that human imagination pictures it? Is the moment of the separation of body and soul as dreadful as we suppose?

The evidence of observers, from remote antiquity until the present, indicates that we poor humans, when faced by the prospect of death, and when plunged into the terror that thought of personal extinction always brings along with it, confuse death itself with what may come after. We really fear, not the wrench that pulls the reluctant soul from the agonized body, but we fear the destiny that awaits us beyond the grave. And death itself is usually painless and unregarded by the dying.

Aristotle and Cicero affirm that death brought about by old age is without pain; and Plato tells us that death caused by syncope is accompanied by pleasant sensations. He goes farther and asserts that even violent death is not wholly lacking in pleasurable elements. The Greeks were more or less indifferent to death; but in some respects, popular superstitions gave rise among them to peculiar dread of certain forms of death. Drowning was peculiarly abhorrent to them, either because they believed that the souls of those who died in this way had to wander without rest for a hundred years; or because, conceiving the soul to be of a fiery nature, they believed that its greatest enemy was water, and that water would quench or at least seriously damage the subtle fiery essence of their being. Drowning is, however, regarded as one of the pleasantest forms of death, and men who have been dragged from the water unconscious and on the very threshold ​of the other world affirm that once they lost their power to resist, and yielded to what seemed to them to be their inevitable fate, they suffered nothing.

A quick death by violence, which horrifies us more than any other form (as is testified by the inclusion in all our prayer books of petitions to God to save us from violent death), is really the least terrible form, if we are to believe the testimony of many who have been miraculously snatched back to life after suffering some frightful accident. In such accidents, one feels very little pain, because the very thing that would cause agony abolishes all sensation almost instantly. Many men who have fallen from great heights, and have lain for a while as dead men, declared afterwards that they did not feel anything when they struck the earth. A noted hunter of wild beasts, in a recent article, recounts his experiences when attacked and nearly killed by a leopard: the excitement and the struggle were so intense that although one of his arms was practically chewed off and his body horribly lacerated, he felt nothing, but passed suddenly into an unconscious state.

In its desire to punish, or wreak vengeance on criminals, the law has constantly sought methods of execution which, by their frightful nature and the suffering caused to the victim, would discourage men from committing crimes. Such curious data to be found in the works of men of unquestioned sincerity make it doubtful whether the law has succeeded in finding ways of putting criminals to death in a painful manner. The great scientist Lord Bacon tells the story of a knight whose curiosity had been aroused concerning the amount of suffering endured by men being hanged; and he decided to try an experiment to learn whether this form of death were as terrible as it was thought to be. He climbed up on a table and placed around his neck a rope hung from the ceiling, and threw himself into the air with the intention of scrambling back on the table, which he had placed in such a position that he could easily do so, as soon as his agony became unendurable. But the good knight had not foreseen what was going to occur to him, and if one of his friends, who was there to witness his experiment, had not become alarmed by the long time that the knight swung in the noose, and cut him down, the good man would have been as successfully hanged as if the executioner had had charge of the affair! The knight afterwards explained that from the very instant that the noose tightened about his neck, he lost all power of feeling, and although conscious for a while, he did not remember anything about the table, nor did he realize his danger, and he felt no disagreeable sensations, not even suffocation.

This is what probably happens to all who are put to death, whether by hanging, by decapitation, by electricity, or what not; and also to all who suffer death by violence, except in a few cases. It seems impossible that there should be anything more than a sort of instantaneous agony, because almost at the instant of receiving the coup de grace, the victims lose consciousness.