IMMORTALITY QUESTS IN STORY AND LIFE:

Cryonics, Resuscitation, Science Fiction, and Mythology*

Steven B. Harris

Since the 1960's when the late Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces began to be
read on college campuses, and most especially since airing of Bill Moyers' PBS interviews with
Campbell (1988) which made his work still more popular, many people have begun to look at
mythology in a new light. We all know, or thought we knew, what a "myth" was: just one of those
weird stories that people in other cultures tell to explain the world. Our similar stories, by contrast,
were called "religion," or "scripture," and were not weird at all. In fact, Joseph Campbell (tongue
firmly in cheek) once defined myth as "someone else's religion."

Myth is not only religion, of course, but something more inclusive. Myth might broadly encompass
such things as rituals and beliefs, but most especially myth is the collection of primitive stories that
we tell ourselves in order to have a narrative psychological framework with which to deal with the
world. In the largest sense, myth includes (but is not limited to) any story which answers the
difficult questions of life, such as: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is
the far future going to be like? What is expected of me? Who are the heroes? What's going to
happen to me when I die?

In life it is important to answer these questions (even if the answer is insupportable fantasy), since
excessive worry about them may detract from basic survival efficiency. We know from recent
psychological experiments, for instance, that compared with objective assessment, people with
normal "healthy" mental outlooks consistently overestimate their own abilities and strengths;
whereas people who are depressed are far more realistic in such judgments. Why would human
nature saddle us with a normal mental state which gives us an unrealistic view of the world? The
answer may lie in the fact that anxiety saps strength and mars performance (as many an Olympic
athlete has discovered). Anxiety is so bad for performance that sometimes it is worth a small cost in
objectivity to be rid of it. That is where we get good luck charms and magical thinking.

It may also be good for the species as a whole that a few people in every society chronically
underestimate danger, or overestimate the esteem the universe has for them. Such people get killed
more often, to be sure, but they also do things no one else dares, and the benefits their explorations
bring go back to their communities, and their genes.

A major function of myth (and of a large part of human culture) is to relieve anxiety by answering
unanswerable questions. Karl Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but perhaps
what he would have said today (given modern pharmacology) is that religion is the benzodiazepine
(Valium or Xanax type drug) of the masses. The same can be said of superstition. Superstition is
also yet another term for other people's religion.
Of course, there is also much art in myth. Myths may not be factual, but that does not mean that in
some sense they are not true. As Professor Campbell reminds us, all metaphors are (in the narrow
sense) lies. After all, the moon is not really a ghostly galleon, tossed on cloudy seas. Myths are
metaphors for something that cannot be said any other way. They are stories that probably speak to
a basic and very old part of the human consciousness— the part of the consciousness that holds
basic cultural programming.

Mythic stories (to adopt a technical metaphor) are a little like the programming in the "read-only
memory" chips of a computer; they represent programming that is more or less permanent. They
are thus a little like a first language— once you are culturally programmed the first time with them,
the brain changes and you are stuck with the change for good. After that (i.e., after a certain age),
any new cultural myths will sound foreign and alien to you. As any missionary can attest, mythic
re-programming is often not completely successful because of this. The same effect appears when
people lose faith later in life: we remember Bertrand Russell's famous thesis that Catholic atheists
are quite different sorts of people than Protestant atheists, because they don't believe in very
different Gods.

The Mortal Hero

Much of cultural programming is in stories, and since the time of James Joyce's introduction of the
idea of the "monomyth," it has been argued that there are only a few basic stories, and all good tales
are variations on these. The basic love story, for example, in all its permutations, never seems to
tire if told well. There are also basic creation myths, including a cycle of myths involving feminine
forces and goddesses (as Robert Graves reminds us) which seem to be important in artistic
inspiration. Finally, from the masculine side, there are stories of the hero, an often semi-divine and
usually male adventurer who is on a quest or a journey, and who must win a victory of some kind
before returning home with the power that he has won. (The traditional hero, being at once both
masculine and admirable, is presently out of fashion in many university English departments, but
Joseph Campbell's paradigms seem to work best for the science fiction themes we will cover in this
essay).

Although the mythic hero is often semi-divine, it is a feature of many hero tales that he be at least
partly human, and thus mortal. It is important to note that the rules of conduct are manifestly
different for Gods; Gods are beyond morality in myth, and many of the Greek myths about divine
behavior (especially as retold in later times by Latin authors like Ovid) are as amoral as modern TV
soap opera. Morality and the question of "The Good," however, are important for mortal humans
(who have only a limited time to learn from mistakes), and thus the tale of the mortal hero is often a
morality play. Hero tales are often stories of the mortal human who manages, as a hero, to make of
himself something more. Given this fact, one of the most popular and one of the oldest of the hero
myths is that of the hero who seeks the boon of immortality. We will now examine how this myth
is played out in religion, science, and science fiction.

Resurrection and the Hero

We suspect that tales of resurrection have been around for as long as there have been people.
Neanderthal graves have been found with tools and traces of flowers in them, and we are led
inexorably to the idea that these things were included in the grave because it was thought that the
deceased might one day need them or enjoy them. From this we infer that Neanderthals had some
form of language, since it would seem impossible to communicate something as abstract as "life-
after-death" with a few grunts and barks. By this loose chain of reasoning we can guess that even
Neanderthals had a culture, and that their culture told immortality stories.

The oldest written story we have yet discovered is a more than 5,000-year-old Sumerian tale of a
hero in search of immortality-- the story of Gilgamesh the King. Heros are often semi-divine as
well as royal, and King Gilgamesh is two-thirds god and one-third human. Gilgamesh's human part
presumably confers mortality on him, and in one of the Gilgamesh tales he realizes that he is one
day going to die, and so goes out looking for the secret of life. After he finds immortality in the
form of a plant, he foolishly loses it, and thus Gilgamesh becomes one of the first tragic heros.

Almost every culture has its tale of the divine but mortal hero in search of the gift of immortality
(although the hero is usually more successful than was Gilgamesh); for example, Adonis, Tammuz,
Dionysus, etc. One of the most important ancient myths, however, is that of the Egyptian Osiris, a
god who comes to Earth to be a teacher, and here gets assassinated and dismembered (if heroes are
fully divine, they are often still vulnerable). Later, after being reassembled by his divine brother
Horus, Osiris goes on to become God of the Dead. His sacred name is thereafter used in the ritual
in which the dead of Egypt make the journey through the underworld to be immortally reunited
with the breath of life. Egypt is the first society we know of to link the ideas of immortality and
resurrection with human technology-- in this case the technology of mummification-- but the
application of the technology was ritualistic and thoroughly religious.

The biblical Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead (as the Sadducees apparently did
not), and the myth of the resurrected hero was, according to the Gospel of Matthew, present in
Palestine in the time of Jesus. According to Matthew (16:14), Jesus asks the disciples who the
common people of the time are saying that he (Jesus) is, and the disciples reply in part that some
people think that Jesus is really John the Baptist. But John the Baptist has already been beheaded
by this time in this gospel (Matthew 14), so the disciples are obviously repeating a tale of a popular
hero who has gotten killed, and has come back to life to work miracles. And all this occurs while
Jesus is alive. Thus, anyone who takes the testimony of the Matthew literally must also admit that
mythic folk-stories of the return of a popular dead figure were then widespread even before the
death of Jesus. Christianity per se is not the source of them, as Christian scriptures themselves
show.

In more recent German mythology, the drowned body of Emperor Frederick I, (called "Barbarossa"
or red beard) sits in a tomb in the mountains, at a table with his knights, while his hair stills grows
(as is supposed to happen with bodies). In the myth, there is the promise that at some point
Frederick will wake from his sleep that is not death, and will return to save the Teutonic world
from all of its enemies. Such stories have psychological power (not for nothing did Hitler call his
fantastical Soviet invasion "Operation Barbarossa.") And although the Barbarossa myth may have
been influenced by Christianity, resurrected hero stories seem to occur in most cultures regardless
of Western contact. When the Roman Catholic church made it to the New World in the 16th
century, some of the resurrection myths the natives were telling of Quetzalcoatl were so close to the
Christian one that some of the Jesuits listening to them were convinced they were the work of the
devil.

A more Jungian view is that all these archetypal stories are reflections of the way the human
collective unconscious is constructed. Or, if you prefer the neurophysiological language, perhaps
such stories may tell us of hardwired similarities in our neural architecture. In any case, if we do
not exactly have a "God-shaped place" in our souls, we do at the very least seem to have a
"resurrected-hero-myth shaped place” in our psychological make-up.

Mal-resurrection and the Anti-hero

It is interesting to examine what happens mythologically when the resurrected individual is not a
hero, and no official religious process is involved. There has always been a darker side to
resurrection stories. It may be expected that kings and demigods return from death; but people do
not always want the same for their more mundane elderly relatives, particularly in areas of scarce
land or resources. Here we have a source of anxiety, with which it is the social function of myth to
deal. In mythology, the newly dead (unless royal) are always dangerous unless properly dealt with,
and are apt to give trouble to the living in various ways until they have completely decayed
completely into safe bone. It has been popular in many cultures worldwide, in fact, to ritually treat
a new corpse in various ways to insure that it stays in the grave and does not become a "revenant."
[1]

Originally, many mal-resurrection stories and myths probably had their origin in misunderstanding
of what happens to an unembalmed human body after burial. Today we know that the natural decay
process sometimes results in bloated corpses which look fatter (what have they been eating?),
which may exhibit a discharge of blood from the mouth, and have skin changes which appear more
life-like, rather than less. Unsophisticated people, on seeing these changes, apparently were apt to
infer that the corpse had been out and about, and feasting and growing fat on blood.[2] A collection
of such stories later loosely inspired an enduring personification of evil immortality and
resurrection-- Stoker's Dracula (1897).

The walking mummy of the Karloff movie is also closely related to the vampire. In mythic terms,
resurrection from the dead is possible, but without a standard religious mechanism, or at least a
royal or divine hero-patron (such as Osiris, Jesus, or Emperor Barbarossa), such resurrections in
myth are evil, and can be expected to produce monsters. In the case of the vampire and the
mummy, the result is a living dead man who is not the original person, but rather a transformed and
murderous demon. In fiction, as in myth, the general message to the common public about coming
back from the dead is: "Do not attempt this without religious seal of approval."

Resuscitation

Before we return to mal-resurrection, we must consider a second theme—that of technology and

medical progress. The critical element in science fiction is the speculative impact of technology on
individuals and culture, and it is technical progress and its implications which have, more than
anything else, made the mythic vampire and his cousins more immediate in our time. Dracula and
The Mummy are rather late figures in the history of horror, and as immortal personifications of
mal-resurrection, both are recognizably literary grandchildren of Mary Shelley. Long before
Shelley and the birth of science fiction, however, came certain developments in the science of
resuscitation which made people think differently about resurrection.

Historically, there is some suggestion of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the Bible (II Kings 4).
Although the story appears a bit garbled, like the story of the resuscitation of the child before it in I
Kings 17, both stories contain descriptive elements of chest compression, and there is clearly
something more than mysticism going on in the account. For centuries, however, the Western
world made little progress in the matter. In the middle ages, when much of the advancement of
medical science was in Moslem hands, Arabic medical books told of a little-known secret which
had been passed down as black art from midwife to midwife: if one blew into the nostrils of a
stillborn infant, sometimes it began breathing. We know that Arab physicians also did some
experimenting with attempting to resuscitate corpses using fireplace bellows, but word of this work
was not widespread either.

Then, in the middle of the 15th century, everything was changed by the invention of the cast-metal
movable-type printing press. Suddenly, written knowledge became relatively cheap to own,
because the work to manufacture it was now drastically less. Science, whose treasure-trove was a
wealth of experimental detail which did not lend itself well to oral tradition, was particularly
benefited by the printing press. Thus, closely linked to this most important device was not only the
renaissance and the protestant reformation, but also what we now know as the “scientific
revolution.”

One of the earliest influential books of the scientific revolution was Andreas Vesalius' atlas of the
human body, where (among many other things) Vesalius describes techniques for resuscitating
asphyxiated dogs with bellows. Similarly, Paracelsus, an alchemist and one of the great physicians
of his age, was also said to have attempted the resuscitation of a corpse using bellows, a trick he
perhaps picked up from Arabic medical writings. Physicians eventually learned that simple mouth-
to-mouth resuscitation sometimes worked on recently asphyxiated adults as well as it did on
newborns.

By the 1740s, several cases of successful mouth-to-mouth resuscitation had been reported, the most
famous of which was Tossach's 1744 report of the resuscitation of an asphyxiated coal miner who
had been clinically dead (no breath or heartbeat) after being suddenly overcome after descending
into a burned-out mine. By the 1760's, in the wake of such reports, a number of groups advocating
the resuscitation of drowned persons had sprung up in Europe. In 1774 a society was founded in
London to promulgate the idea that "dead" people in some cases (especially drownings) were not
really dead. Called, after a bit of experimentation, the Society for the Recovery of Persons
Apparently Drowned, it quickly evolved into the Humane Society (still later, with official
patronage and funding, the Royal Humane Society, which it remains to this day).

The Humane Society advocated techniques which were highly advanced. Three months after the
society's founding, as an example, a society member had the opportunity to minister to a three year-
old child named Catherine Sophie Greenhill, who had fallen from an upper story window onto
flagstones, and been pronounced dead at the scene. The society member, an apothecary named
Squires, was on the scene within twenty minutes, and history records that he proceeded to give the
clinically dead child several shocks through the chest with a portable electrostatic generator (!).
This treatment caused her to regain pulse and respiration, and she eventually (after a time in coma)
recovered fully.

The resuscitation of little Catherine Greenhill was probably the first successful cardiac
defibrillation, and it followed earlier suggestions by American scientist Benjamin Franklin and
others that electricity might possibly be used to "revivify" the human body. And so it proved able to
do, in selected circumstances. By 1788, a royal silver medal was awarded to Humane Society
member Charles Kite, who was by this time not only advocating the resuscitation of victims in
cardiac arrest with bellows and nasolaryngeal intubation, but had also developed his own
electrostatic revivifying machine which used Leyden jar capacitors in a way exactly analogous to
the DC capacitative countershock of the modern cardiac defibrillator. [3] (To the author’s mind all
these contraptions are as fantastic as devices in a Flintstone’s cartoon, yet they all actually existed.
A time-traveling physician could not have created a better resuscitation kit from the off-the-shelf
technology of the time). However, the enlightened state of the late 18th century as regards
resuscitation was not to last. From the very first, dark images from the human psyche began to
gather in resistance to the new ideas. Technology never intervenes in a major way into human life
without creating new anxieties and a certain amount of social backlash. Resuscitation had its
problems.

To begin with, the discovery that "death" was not a sure and objective state did not exactly sit well
in the public mind. Charles Kite of the silver medal was of the opinion that not even putrefaction
was a sure sign of permanent death, since it might also be due to advanced scurvy (!) The public
wondered: if one could be mistaken for dead, like Shakespeare's Juliet, when one was in fact
resuscitatable, did that imply that you could be buried alive? It did. Soon after the first word-of-
mouth reports of adult resuscitation began surfacing in the 1730’s French author Jacques Winslow
published a book descriptively named The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death and the Danger of
Precipitate Interments and Dissections. Now the real difficulty in defining death in a technical age
was out of the bag: What if you go the diagnosis wrong?

The result of this realization was a psychological terror familiar from Edgar Allan Poe's "The
Premature Burial”(1844). Poe, however, popularizing the problem for early l9th century America,
was actually fairly late to the controversy. In 18th-century Europe the fear of premature burial or
dissection was not just the preoccupation of macabre writers-- whole classes of people were
affected, albeit in different ways. Upper class persons took to fitting coffins and crypts with special
signaling devices which could be used to alert the outside world in case the occupant should
inexplicably revive. In the United States of 1799, the father of the new country George Washington
spent some of his very last breaths making sure it was understood that his body would be kept out
of the ground a full three days. Washington did not fear death, but he did fear waking up in a buried
coffin.

The lower classes had their own special problems, too, since anatomical dissection (long a part of
the punishment for heinous crimes because it denied the malefactor an intact bodily identity or a
grave) had now taken on a special meaning. To wit: it was actually the dissection which killed, not
the hangman. There is at least one historical account of a riot in the 1820's at Carlisle prison in
northern England, in which the family of a hanged man stormed the dissecting rooms and killed the
dissecting anatomist. Historian Ruth Richardson, who describes the incident, puts it into
perspective:

“Although … an extreme reaction, it was certainly the case that hanging the corpse in chains on a
gibbet was popularly regarded as preferable to a dissection. What later incredulous commentators
seem to have missed or misunderstood, was that eighteenth and early nineteenth century popular
belief, not only were the anatomists agents of the law, but they could be the agents of death.
Genuine cases were known of incomplete hangings, in which the “dead” were brought back to life,
and plans for celebrated corpse-rescues centered on the possibility that the noose had not fully
done its work. Folk-tales circulated by criminals revived by friends…. It was popularly understood
that the surgeon’s official function and interest in a murderer’s corpse was not to revive, but rather
destroy it. Dissection was a very final process. It denied hope of survival- even survival of identity
after death.” [4][5]

Resurrection in Science and Science Fiction

By the early nineteenth century, when the riot over the hanged man at Carlisle took place, things
had reached a fever pitch in the matter of uncertainty in death. With scientific resuscitation,
technology had finally intruded into the macabre. The horrific potential of the new
electromechanical resuscitative technology had its first fruitful literary influence on Mary Shelley,
a teenager who in late 1816 had first set out to write a ghost story, but had instead ended up
producing Frankenstein (1818), a cautionary tale of the technological resuscitation of a monster
composed of pieces of corpses by a medical experimenter. "Frightful it must be," writes Shelley of
her vision of the monster in an 1831 introduction to the book, "for supremely frightful would be the
effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."
Given the spirit of the times, Shelley's story touched a public nerve as though with one of the new
electrical machines, and Frankenstein's monster was an instant sensation. In keeping with its deep
archetypal nature, the tale, completed while Mary Shelley was still only nineteen, remains her most
famous and enduring work.

After the Frankenstein sensation, something strange happened. Shortly after the publication of
Shelley's famous novel, the new medicine began to go out of favor, and the science of resuscitation
began to suffer on both the technical and mythological fronts. It happened for several reasons.
First, after the discovery of oxygen by Priestly and quantitative experiments by Lavoisier, it was
assumed by the early 19th century that air exhaled and "used once” by one person did not contain
enough oxygen to support another person (nobody thought to actually check this belief for more
than a century, and when it was finally checked, it was found to be wrong). In the meanwhile,
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was mistakenly discarded for bellows and a throat tube, and these in
turn, were later discarded for technical reasons because they were so difficult to use, and apt to
cause damage.

Electrical resuscitation fared no better than mechanical "respiration" (ventilation). The new
phenomenon of electricity early-on was transformed into a quack cure by the practice of
"galvanism" (passing mild shocks through the body in an attempt to cure disease) and its reputation
accordingly tarnished. Then, and perhaps even more devastatingly, the charming new electricity
was in turn transmuted into a powerful and dangerous force by the giant alternating current
transformers of George Westinghouse (maligned from the first for their deadliness in a rival Edison
P.R. campaign) and also by the newfangled American electric chair (1890), which showed that
electricity wasn't always the stuff of life (Edison made sure the type of current used in the chair was
the A.C. current of Westinghouse). Technologies may suffer from social stigmas as well as people.
Mary Shelley had originally not specified the method of the revivification of her monster, but
Shelley's group of literary friends (as she tells us) had been discussing galvanism a few hours
before the vision of the artificial monster came to her in a nightmare. By 1931, in the new
electrified America, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster came into the movies electrically charged, and
soon even the electric chair itself was producing its own revived monsters in the cinema (e.g., Boris
Karloff"s The Walking Dead, 1936).

For more than a century after Shelley (and indeed to this day) the image of Frankenstein's monster
colored resuscitation as it appears in science fiction. With all of this, it is little wonder that our
modern cardiopulmonary resuscitation did not arrive until 1954. It was not so much that the
technology wasn't ready, as the fact that people's minds were not ready for the new techniques.

Medical Time Travel

An exception to the general rule regarding resuscitation from prolong sleep in the literature, is
Edgar Allan Poe's 1845 tale “Some Words With a Mummy,” which is social commentary and
satire, rather than horror. The mummy of the title is resurrected by galvanism, to be sure, but it is
one of a race of ancient Egyptians who have perfected suspended animation, and have used it to
travel rapidly through time at pleasure, as tourists and revisionist historians. As such, the tale is one
of the first positive fictional treatments of suspended animation.

Poe had an antecedent for the idea, for “Some Words With a Mummy” echoes some much earlier
optimistic thoughts on the subject by the famous physician-scientist Dr. John Hunter (1728-1793)
who had, in the year 1766, experimentally frozen live fish in an attempt to prove his idea that
human beings might be able to see the far future by being intermittently frozen for long periods (the
fish died and Hunter soon abandoned the idea).

Another very famous scientist to take an interest in suspended animation was Hunter's transatlantic
contemporary Benjamin Franklin. Franklin not only foresaw advanced treatments for aging as a
result of science, but in a 1773 letter to his friend Jacques DuBorg, the inventor wished that he
might be preservatively embalmed "with a few friends," in order to see eventually what might
become of his beloved America in the far future. Franklin thus is not only one of the first men to
speculate about seeing the future in such a scientific way, but he is also the first to see that such
thoughts inevitably move one to want to take some of your social network with you, for company
(Franklin during life was a social networker par excellence). Alienation is the archetypal penalty
for life prolongation for non-heros, and Franklin perhaps sensed it. Poe's story and the private 18th
century views of Hunter and Franklin stand in contrast to the much more common and much more
alienating views of long delayed revival of ordinary individuals, a time-travel-to-the-future genre
which perhaps can be said to begin with Washington Irving's dark and poignant “Rip Van Winkle”
(1820), and which continues with H.G. Wells' time traveler, and also with his famous “Sleeper”
who wakes.

Poe's other exploration of attempts to bypass the immediate effects of death, written at about the
same time as “Some Words With A Mummy,” is more typically macabre. In “The Facts in the Case
of M. Valdemar” (1845), the Frenchman Valdemar happens to die while under a deep hypnotic
trance. So deep is the trance that, although heartbeat and breathing have stopped, Valdemar's
tongue still obeys commands. "I have been sleeping— and now—now— I am dead," he states in
one of the most famous lines of the genre. For seven months this state of suspended animation
continues in Poe's tale, with the dead body (save for the horribly moving tongue) locked in rigor
mortis, but basically unchanged. Finally, at the end of the story, the experimenters decide to end the
trance, and the hypnotized man turns, in less than a minute, into a nearly liquid mass of decay.

In the long-delayed and unnaturally rapid decay of Poe's released hypnotic subject, we recognize
the traditional disintegrative fate of staked vampires, those other escapees of traditional mortality.
As in H. Rider Haggard's She, Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Grey, and Hilton's Lost Horizon, slowing
or arrest of nature's aging or dying process in fiction often runs up a kind of cosmic credit card bill
which may later become due all at once, with dire consequences. Such themes suggest a cultural
psychological heritage which views death and decay as inevitable forces which, like some bottled-
up natural flow or pressure, are apt to produce explosive and terrible results if held in abeyance
even temporarily.

To be sure, this kind of universal debt does not accrue to the original monster in Shelley, which
does not age. In Frankenstein, rather, the price which the monster pays for its artificial life is
social ostracism (it is ugly in a vaguely fetus-like way, with skin stretched over muscle). The
monster also suffers neglect and abandonment by its only parent— its creator. With few exceptions,
however, secularly resurrected figures in fiction since the beginning of the genre have usually paid
a more direct kind of price for their existences. The same is true of those who direct the
reanimation, as well, although the ignorant sometimes escape the ultimate price (as in W. W.
Jacobs' 1902 story “The Monkey's Paw”). This formula holds true also in the next major comment
on scientific reanimation, a little-known short story (“A Thousand Deaths”) by Jack London
(1899). In this story, London's first professional sale, the protagonist is used as a human guinea pig
in resuscitation experiments conducted by his estranged mad-scientist father. He is killed again and
again, suffering each time, and is left dead for hours or even months (with the aid of refrigeration),
but is always brought back to life. Here again we see a scientific reworking of the New Testament
theme ("..why hast thou forsaken me?"), with again the Frankensteinian (and Freudian) subtext of
misuse of technology, child abuse and patricide. Unlike Frankenstein's monster, however, the ill-
used protagonist of the London story eventually survives his creator.

Following Mary Shelley, London was not the only writer to begin a career with a Frankenstein-type
monster. H.P. Lovecraft's first professional sale, "Herbert West, Reanimator" (1922) was also an
open tribute to Shelley, although it would be some time in Lovecraft's own writing before he would
be able to explore the psychology of horror as deftly as Shelley had. “Herbert West, Reanimator” is
a straightforward story of a young medical student of a materialist bent who seeks to reanimate
corpses by chemical means. He is only partially successful—his reanimated beings are murderous,
even if they were good people in life (one of the demonic monsters is a late kindly and
philanthropic Dean of Medicine). Like Shelley, Lovecraft carefully never gives any of his
reanimated corpses what it takes to be fully human or be part of society: in Lovecraft, bodies that
are undamaged behave as animals, and those which have human intelligence and understanding, are
horribly mutilated. Thus, like Frankenstein's monster, Dr. West's resurrections are mal-
resurrections. And West, as creator of the unnatural beings, is inevitably destroyed by them.

Lovecraft’s re-animator stories have artistic and technical problems. Lovecraft hated them and later
tried to bury them, but after his death they took on a life of their own, and were resurrected in many
anthologies. As of this writing they are only Lovecraft stories to be adapted to film, as Re-animator
(1985) and Bride of Re-animator (1989). Such is the archetypal power of the mal-resurrection
story.

The Sociology of Resuscitation and Resurrection

Possibly for escapist reasons, the Great Depression had triggered a spate of American films about
horror, and in many cases their content was quite scientific and the lead scientist usually a biologist.
It was not until 1945 that the smock of the mad-scientist passed from biologist to physicist (it was
said the First World War was fought by chemists, the Second by physicists.) The film version of
Frankenstein starred Boris Karloff (1931), who also played the title role in The Mummy (1932). A
few years later (after the success of Universal's Son of Frankenstein), Columbia Pictures made five
Karloff horror movies (1939-42) with even-more explicit themes of scientific life-prolongation or
resuscitation. These followed the work of aviator Charles Lindbergh and Nobelist Alexis Carrel’s
work on an artificial heart, which was used by Soviets in 1940 to revive dogs that had been dead for
as long as 15 minutes. In the US, the Soviet experiments were mimicked in the late 1930’s by
Robert Cornish, a biochemist who had been excited by the first Frankenstein film of 1931.
Cornish’s specialty was reviving dogs that had been asphyxiated in nitrogen, and he proposed to
test his method on executed prisoners. These resuscitated dogs were neurologically damaged,
however, and were seen by the public as unnatural.

Meanwhile, in The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) Karloff plays a doctor who has discovered a
way to place humans into suspended animation with an artificial heart (or “glass heart”) machine.
In the script, the authorities mistake a suspended man for dead (the Juliet Problem again) and
Karloff is sentenced to death for murder. After he is hanged, his student uses the same machine to
resuscitate him. The resuscitated criminal is evil and vengeful, however (think of the hanged but
still-living Ygor from Son of Frankenstein), and soon sets about killing the people who convicted
him— another scientific resurrection that fails to do anyone any good.

A positive view of scientific resuscitation and life prolongation does not prominently occur in the
movies until the great Robert Wise film The Day The Earth Stood Still (Twentieth Century-Fox,
1951). This movie is the tale of a human-like alien named "Klaatu" who visits Earth in a flying
saucer, accompanied by a giant robot named Gort. While trying to deliver a warning to humanity,
Klaatu is killed by the army. In the film's climax Klaatu's body is recovered by Gort, and then
resuscitated with the aid of machinery inside the saucer. Klaatu, now risen from the dead, is free to
deliver his message and ascend to the heavens.
The Day The Earth Stood Still not only delivers a political message about the threat of nuclear war,
it presents deliberate and shameless biblical allegory— the resurrected hero myth recast in science
fiction terms. Klaatu is to be understood as a Christ figure who is sent from the heavens to warn
mankind of its sins. (Klaatu's Earthly pseudonym, helping the audience along subliminally, is "Mr.
Carpenter") Although Klaatu's coming is attended by wondrous events, his wish for a meeting with
the political leaders of the world is rejected. Like Christ among the common folk, Klaatu now finds
himself in the home of an ordinary citizen. His uncommonness is all too apparent, however;
Klaatu's teaching of the famous Einstein-figure Professor Barnhardt (played by Jewish Sam Jaffe)
is as much a personal self-revelation as that of the boy Jesus in the temple confounding the Rabbis.
Eventually Klaatu does go public, but being high priest of technology, he eventually demonstrates
his power not by calming the sea (symbol of nature), but rather by calming and silencing the
world's machines by neutralizing all electricity in use by civillization (hence the movie title).

In keeping with the allegory, Klaatu is finally betrayed and murdered for his trouble by the very
people that he came to warn. His body is taken to a jail cell (in lieu of a tomb), and there guarded
by soldiers. The cell is opened by a mechanical servant in place of an angel, and there is finally the
resurrection by Gort. (Patricia Neal is the Mary Magdalene figure, asking the questions for us).
Eventually, message of warning delivered, Klaatu ascends into the heavens. As a footnote, while
flying saucers or discs were first sighted in the late 1940’s, the flying saucer cults postdate this
film.

In many ways The Day the Earth Stood Still is not a typical science fiction movie of its time. Alien
beings from space are not seen in this film as marauding monsters. Even more intriguing is the idea
that high technology, as manifested in space transportation, would naturally be expected to go hand
in hand with youth-prolongation (Klaatu is 78 years old but looks 35; his people live twice as long
as Earthlings). Another film of this era, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) also features geriatric
aliens, but they come in spacesuits with built-in bifocals and hearing aids. A better name might
have been Earth vs. the Galactic Nursing Home. Here, the more conventional idea is that extreme
technological life extension leads to Struldbrugghood (the Tithonos syndrome— hardly an
appealing concept).

High technology is linked with advanced resuscitation capability in The Day the Earth Stood Still
but not with horror. This is archetypally a bit odd, and possibly in consequence historically it did
not go without controversy. Screenwriter Edmund H. North's script for the film (itself an adaptation
of a 1940 Harry Bates short story titled "Farewell to the Master") originally called for the alien
Klaatu to simply be resuscitated by Gort and thereafter to go about his functionally immortal
business. Unfortunately, the Breen Censorship Board (an autocratic self-censorship mechanism of
the movie industry especially active during the cold war years) was scandalized at the idea of Gort
the Robot bringing Klaatu to life, saying "Only God can do that!" North's protestation that the
movie was science fiction and that the action in question involved genuinely unearthly alien
technologies, got him nowhere.[6]

Eventually, a compromise was worked out: Klaatu was to invoke the idea of deity (in the final
script Klaatu asserts rather piously that the power of life and death belongs only to the "Almighty
Spirit"); and he was also to issue a statement admitting the eventual triumph of mortality (in the
final script we find that the life conferred by the saucer machine is good only "for a limited period,"
the duration of which "no one can tell" — meaning presumably that death has not been conquered.
With these bows to the censors, the Breen Board, apparently finally satisfied that it had protected
the movie-going public from the un-American idea of scientific immortality, withdrew its ban. The
scene in which Klaatu explains that scientific resurrection is (in effect) not all it is cracked up to be,
remains in the film as a monument to popular resistance to the idea of casting scientific progress in
any form resembling God.[6] (Notably, a similar bit of censorship is seen in the 1931 Universal
Studios Frankenstein film. Actor Colin Clive’s words “It’s alive!” are followed by the declaration
“Good God, now I know what it feels like to be God!” However, the last sentence sound track was
stricken from the film, although the actor can still be seen shouting the words silently.)

The Day the Earth Stood Still is considered one of a handful of contenders for best science fiction
movie ever made, this honor is at least partly a result of the film's reworking of the old resurrection
monomyth. The power of this particular theme may be gauged by the fact that the record box-office
opening movie of all time, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (Universal, 1982), pulls exactly the same
psychological strings as The Day the Earth Stood Still (as does the even later E.T. knock-off film
Starman). In E.T., we see the heavenly being visiting Earth with magic life-restoring powers (the
glowing finger). Again, there is an unenlightened government sending squads of soldiers chasing
after the visitor, who all the while is more content to spend his time with common folk and
children. Again we see the visitor's death and technological resurrection (the difference being that
in 1982 they had cardiac defibrillation, which is included). And again there is the ascension to the
heavens, this time to the heavenly parents, since E.T., after all, is only a child.

Since Riverside, California, the site of the fourteenth annual Eaton conference where this essay was
first presented (1992), is also the cryonics capital of the world,* I conclude my look at immortality
myths and technology by describing the device of cold storage as seen in real and fictional pursuits
of immortality.

Cryonics: A Modern Prometheus

Horror writers seem to have a love of the cold, and both Mary Shelley and Poe ("The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket", 1837) employ a frozen backdrop to good effect. Later authors
follow in the same tradition. The first writer to employ cryogenic preservation for monsters seems
to have been H. P. Lovecraft. In his novella In the Mountains of Madness (1931) an Antarctic
expedition unearths frozen half-animal/half-vegetable creatures dating from an earlier age. In a now
hackneyed scene (but Lovecraft did it first!) a scientist dissects one creature while the others are
allowed to thaw, unattended. The result is carnage. Later it transpires that the monsters are an
extinct intelligent species who long ago created all life on Earth— not only the familiar forms that
led to humans, but also a race of servant monsters that later end up turning upon their creators,
Frankenstein style. In Lovecraft, even the monsters are troubled with monsters.

One of the principal primitive emotional responses which Lovecraft seeks to evoke in his fiction is
the human dread of friendlessness and isolation. Lovecraft tugs at our fear, as social beings, of the
most horrible and final kinds of alienation, or state of being cut off from all social contact while
still remaining sentient. As noted, this theme goes back to the beginning of the science fiction
genre: Frankenstein may be more a tale of the horrors of social alienation (child neglect, physical
unattractiveness) than the horrors of scientific resurrection.

Lovecraft, like Shelley, seems to have been led to many novel fictional devices via an attempt to
simply pull all the "fear of isolation" strings at once, while at the same time trying to keep
mystical events to a minimum. For instance, consider Shelley's other science fiction novel The Last
Man (1826), which is about the last man on Earth. Since Frankenstein, social isolation has always
been the penalty for radical life extension. The Anne Rice vampire novels work this theme in
parallel— some of here immortal vampires are alienated not only from our culture, but from their
own, as well.

Lovecraft's readers are asked to confront the image of waking up in another body, or a mechanical
body. Or waking in a distant time, completely out of touch forever with all that you ever knew. Or
waking up as an isolated brain, after being reanimated by scientific means. So potent is the
peculiar vision of horror in these themes for Lovecraft that he cannot even wish them on his
monsters without empathy. Indeed, the narrator of In the Mountains of Madness at one point is
moved to pity for the resurrected Antarctic starfish/vegetable creatures, as regards their
anachronistic plight in modern times, where they are beset by men and sled dogs:

"Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were men of another age and
another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them as it will on any
others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or
sleeping polar waste and this was their tragic homecoming. They had not even been savages,
for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch —
perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them
and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia. [...] Scientists
to the last, what had they done that we would not have done in their place?"

What indeed? Perhaps that is Lovecraft's opinion in a nutshell: resurrecting someone (or even
something) unto social isolation is "madness, callousness, or cruelty." Lovecraft's cryogenically
preserved vegetable scientists pay a double penalty— the penalty of alienation for being
cryogenically suspended, plus the Frankensteinian penalty of death for creating life scientifically
(i.e., playing God). In movies to come later, the monsters may come frozen in ice, but
no one will stop to wonder how they feel about it. The prototype for the later type of movie is The
Thing (RKO/Radio Pictures, 1951), from a short story “Who Goes There?” by John Campbell
(writing as Don Stewart, 1938, no credit to Lovecraft), in which the vegetable-scientist “Thing” in
the Antarctic ice is mimed by a young James Arness. Other even less memorable efforts are The
Deadly Mantis (1957) and Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1961) and even a cold-preserved
Frankenstein's monster in both Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1942) and The Evil of
Frankenstein (1964). In all of these, monsters are simply monsters, and they do not scientifically
sin.

Cryonics in Fiction

This is more than we can say for Lovecraft's fictional physicians, to whom we again now turn.
Lovecraft may have been not only the first writer to consider the cold as a method of preserving
horrific creatures, but also "dead" humans who refuse to be done with life. In "Cool Air" (1928),
which obviously owes a great debt to Poe's "Valdemar," but introduces refrigeration in place of
hyponosis, Lovecraft tells us of one Dr. Muñoz, a physician-scientist who, because of a very
curious illness, must keep his rooms at all times at low temperature. The narrator befriends the
socially isolated doctor, but eventually finds that his new acquaintance has not only begun to
exhibit a strange odor, but (moreover) is requiring lower and lower temperatures as time goes on.
Eventually the air conditioning fails, and while the narrator is off trying to get a replacement part,
the good doctor dissolves in the manner of monsieur Valdemar. It turns out that he has been
clinically dead for 18 years, but has kept himself preserved by means of the cold.

Does Lovecraft with his cold doctor get credit for the basic cryonics idea? One of Lovecraft's
stories ("The Whisperer in Darkness," Weird Tales, August, 1931), uses the device of having
creatures from another planet remove human brains into mechanical containers, for shipment across
outer space, a treatment that makes them functionally immortal. It is used to excellent effect as a
device for horror. The Earthlings find themselves kidnapped, removed from their bodies as naked
brains kept alive by machinery, and taken away into space by fungoid creatures from Pluto— again
we find a Lovecraftian attempt at ultimate alienation. Lovecraft’s idea for a disconnected living
brain in a jar may have been inspired by J.D. Bernal’s The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1929).
Much the same technical idea is used by the next identifiable cryonics writer, Neil R. Jones, who
adds a period of cryogenic suspension, in "The Jameson Satellite" in Amazing Stories (July, 1931),
published a month before Lovecraft. Had Jones read Bernal, too? This story features a frozen
astronaut, Professor Jameson, who is discovered in Earth orbit in the far future by a race of alien
robots, who resuscitate him by implanting his brain in a mechanical body. The fundamental
difference between the Lovecraft and Jones stories is that Lovecraft is after horror, and Jones is not.
Professor Jameson in the Jones story has a functional robot body and is not in the power of his
“rescuers.” He eventually adapts, has many new adventures, and comes to believe that his strange
lot is better than death.

Would life in the far future be worse than death? Fiction writers have had doubts, and since
Frankenstein, the theme of social isolation as the price for resurrection has been almost universal.
Following Lovecraft, most science fiction stories of the depression era followed this form. In
Edgar Rice Burroughs' short story, "The Resurrection of Jimber-jaw" (1937), a resuscitated frozen
cave man finds that his views of women are politically incorrect enough to put him badly out of
touch with a more modern society (perhaps this story was inspiration for the Saturday Night Live
skit series "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer"). In a similar vein, the classic A.E. Van Vogt
story "Far Centarus" (1944) has a group of astronauts undergo long suspended animation during a
trip to the nearest star, only to find themselves social outcasts from human society of the
future, because people of the astronauts' era are considered to have horrible and unfixable body
odor. In both Burroughs’ short story, and the Timothy Bottoms movie Iceman which followed it
many decades later, the resuscitated caveman is so alienated that he ends by going voluntarily back
out into the snows, to be refrozen.

The First Cryonics Booster

In the real world during the Great Depression, there was a bit more optimism about the idea of
suspended animation. By 1935, Time Magazine (August 19) was featuring the predictions of a
Hollywood clinical chemist named Ralph S. Willard, who was claiming to be able to freeze
monkeys and resuscitate them. After the fashion of Dr. Cornish who was working at the same time,
Willard proposed to use the process on convicts in order to store them more cheaply, and even
on jobless people (until times got better), would-be suicides (until a cure had been found for
depression), and finally (of course) those curious about the future. The idea of cryonics was
very much in the news in the mid 1930's. As for Willard himself, today we are certain that he was
a humbug, but before he disappears into the mists of science fiction history, we see him one more
time, acting as “technical consultant” to a Boris Karloff film entitled The Man With Nine Lives
(1940).

The First Cryonics Film

The Man With Nine Lives was co-written by the man who wrote the resuscitation horror film The
Man They Could Not Hang (former Billy Bitzer assistant cameraman Karl Brown) and shares
some essential plot elements with it. Again we see the scientist who is conducting experiments in
human suspended animation. Again there are the authorities who visit the lab of the mad scientist,
see a frozen man, and decide that a murder has occurred. This time, however, the scientist is able to
take revenge before he can be sent to jail; his solution is to lock himself and the visiting authorities
(the coroner, the district attorney, and the local sheriff) into a freezer in the basement of his island
laboratory, where all undergo cryonic suspension. Ten years later, the lab is rediscovered, and the
four suspendees all revived by another researcher. Again, however, in the Brown script the
experience of resuscitation from sleep/death has turned scientist into mad scientist (the mal-
resurrection) and he begins to kill his fellow suspendees in a series of cryonics experiments. In the
end, the police arrive and put an end to him.

Cryonics in Reality

The history of the real practice of cryonics is less dramatic, at least at the beginning. Heedless
of the Boris Karloff characters’ fate, a young soldier took up the idea of cryonics in the 1940's.
While recovering from WW II wounds, Robert C. W. Ettinger read "The Jameson Satellite," and
then, in 1948, published a cryonics science fiction story of his own, “The Penultimate Trump” in
which he first suggested the idea of a man dying of old age might deliberately be frozen to wait for
advances in human rejuvenatuion technology. In The Penultimate Trump, the central character
finds out that cryonics works like Heaven to cheat death, but also finds out that people who are
cryopreserved must undergo a real purgatory on Mars for past sins that they themselves have been
made to remember and relate. Mars has been renamed Hell.

Ettinger eventually went on to become a college physics teacher. Finally, in 1962, in a full length
book titled “The Prospect of Immortality” (eventually re published by Doubleday in 1964), Ettinger
argued formally for a cryonics program to begin in the non-fiction world.

Ettinger's philosophy of cryonics was an outgrowth of the materialism begun by Democritus,

Epicurus and others, and which was formally restated for biology beginning with La Mettrie's
book Man, the Machine, published in France in the 18th century. Materialists held that life was
simply a mechanical and chemical process, and that it was in consequence not properly defined in
terms of metabolism, but rather in terms of structural informa-tion. As early as 1702,
Leeuwenhoek had noted that small organisms called rotifers could be dried, stored, and then
brought back to life with a little moisture. By the early 1970's it was known that some small
crustaceans and worms, and even mammalian embryos, could be cooled in liquid nitrogen or even
liquid helium (-269 C, only 4 degrees above absolute zero), to the point where all metabolism
stopped. They could then be stored there apparently indefinitely [7]. Here was structure, but no
function. Ettinger argued that because frozen organisms could be revived, "life" was not something
that necessarily disappears when an organism’s metabolic machinery stops running.

Ettinger's view of death was that organisms are like automobiles; thus an organism which is not
functioning may not be "dead" (in the sense of permanence) if whatever caused the failure to
function is repairable. The only criteria which mattered in revival were the same criteria which one
would employ in order to know whether one could repair a damaged automobile: What was the
original structure? Did enough structure remain that one could infer what was from what is? Did
one have the tools to effect such repairs?

Ettinger argued that we do not have such tools today, but that we may have such tools tomorrow.
He argued further that, just as the man whose heart had stopped 300 years ago was "dead" at that
time, but might be resuscitatable today, so today's "dead" people might be resuscitatable by the
standards of the future. Thus, we now probably conduct many autopsies on people who are, by the
standards of the future, only very sick (there is a parallel here with historical dissection of criminals
who might otherwise be revived). If such people could be delivered to the future instead,
reasonably intact and un-decayed (as by cryogenic preservation), and if future physicians were
also able to repair the damage which was caused by freezing, then it would make sense to freeze
people now who had been given up on (i.e., pronounced "dead"), just in case something could be
done for them later. In 1965, an early devotee of Ettinger suggested that the process be called
"cryonics," (by analogy with electronics) and so it came to be. The word is now in most
dictionaries (as opposed by cryogenics, the scientific study of the effects of cold anywhere).

Cryonics and the Mythic Hero

This is a talk about science and mythology, so let us return now, for a moment, to the myth of the
resurrected hero. The line between science and science fiction became further blurred on December
15, 1966, when Walter Elias Disney suddenly died of a heart attack, after recovering from an
operation for lung cancer. Reporters who covered the death had earlier in the day also happened to
cover another press conference, coincidentally announcing the formation of the Cryonics Society of
California (the first cryonics society on the West coast). Somewhere, in all of the melee, the story
surfaced that Disney himself had been frozen.

Though there was nothing to the rumor, Disney apparently once expressed interest in the concept of
cryonics. What makes the story interesting is not so much the rumor's truth or falsehood, but rather
its astonishing power. It was a rumor of amazing vitality that resisted the Disney family’s attempt
to drive a stake through its heart. It went so far as to insinuate itself as fact into at least one
biography of Disney, even though there was not a bit of physical evidence to support it. To this
very day, the idea that the great animator awaits reanimation somewhere in cold storage may still
come up in casual conversation anywhere. (as late as 1993 a comic strip featured Disney’s body in
a large transparent block of material with the banner “Disney on Ice.”). In fact, this factoid that
Disney is frozen remained for some time the only thing that most people "knew" about cryonics.*
All this is curious and ironic. But must we believe that it is inexplicable as well—the result of
unpredictable appetite for a story? In the Disney story we see that some of the essential elements
are present for a particular archetypal pattern. There is the element of (possible) resurrection and
attempt to beat death. Plus there is the fact that Disney was a hero to most Americans— a man who
symbolized magic, wonder, imagination, kindness, daring, love of children, and (not incidentally)
great wealth. He had ruled over his own Magic Kingdom, Castle, and Land. That a man with such
personal power should make a try for the elixir of life was a story that fit well into the collective
unconscious. There was simply something about the tale that made it "go" in the manner of the
Barbarossa tale, even as there also seems to be about modern myths that such public heros as John
F. Kennedy (King Arthur of his own Camelot) or Elvis Presley (The King of Rock and Roll) have
somehow managed to beat death, and are off in the wings somewhere, waiting to return. As the
National Enquirer would say “It tickles the public’s fancy,” which is merely a common way of
saying that an archetypal myth is operating.

The result of all this was that cryonics received its maximum press from the Disney death in
December of 1966.* When, shortly after Disney's death, a non-famous man actually did made
arrangements to be frozen at "death," and followed through with the process in January, 1967, the
news and the LIFE Magazine story were lost in the coverage of the fatal Apollo spacecraft fire. The
first man ever frozen to cryogenic temperatures was Professor James Bedford of Glendale
(California) College. He remains submerged in liquid nitrogen at 321 degrees below zero at the
laboratories of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Since 1967, fewer than
a hundred people [8] have followed Bedford's example.* But the movement is growing.

In film and story, the fate of cryonically preserved people is generally bad. Normal humans who are
involuntarily cryonically suspended may be allowed to get away with only a severe case of
alienation, as in contemporary films like Caveman (1984) and Late For Dinner (1991). However, it
is clear that any ordinary soul who deliberately attempts to cheat death in this fashion, popularly is
in for the full Frankenstein treatment. In 1985, a made-for-TV movie called Chiller (directed by
Wes Craven) featured a cryogenically suspended man who is revived, after which it is discovered
that (very much in the style of Lovecraft) that the revived one has returned without a soul, and is
now utterly evil. When Richard Kobritz, the executive producer of Chiller was asked how the
writers had finally come up with the plot for CBS (which wanted to do a horror movie with a
cryonics slant), Kobritz stated, "Why, we just asked everybody we knew what bothered them most
about the cryonics idea." [9] Mythically, cryonics seems in some ways to have been the recipient of
a great deal of the backlash against life-extension and resuscitation caused by half a century of mal-
resurrection horror films and stories.

Some actual encounters between real-world authorities and cryonicists, who have a unique world
view, have played out as though scripted for a horror film. In late 1987, when an elderly woman in
poor health died and was frozen at the Alcor laboratory in Riverside, there was an investigation into
the death. In 1930s B-movie fashion, the Alcor laboratory was visited by police and coroners
looking for a body which they considered dead, but which cryonicists considered in suspension and
possibly still revivable. At that time no cryonicist was aware of The Man With Nine Lives, but all
would have sympathized with that film’s protagonist. Several cryonicists briefly went to jail for
failure to produce the elderly woman's cryogenically preserved remains, which had been hidden by
her son against the possibility of autopsy. The action throughout was generally in keeping with the
fine old “mad-scientist” genre in which the crazy researcher sees something more in the clinically
dead body than do the proper authorities. In the Riverside case, the authorities never did get the
remains, and finally had not choice but to close the case.

The “Juliet problem” is inevitable, as my earlier discussion of fiction and history shows. To the
cryonicist, someone whose heart has just stopped, but who has not yet suffered brain decay, is not
necessarily permanently dead, but rather simply metabolically disadvantaged (or if you will,
"flexionally disabled," or perhaps "thermally different"). In any case, cryonicists do not consider
fresh corpses as things, but rather as very sick people (indeed, as patients). This view is bound to
cause friction with (say) a coroner or medical examiner who wants a body to necropsy; we have
already seen such violence erupting over the body of the hanged man being dissected at Carlisle
prison.

At present writing, cryonics remains legal in California, following a series of court battles between
cryonics organizations and the State, culminating with a final appellate court decision in June,
1992. The California Board of Public Health took the odd public position that cryonics was illegal
because there was no "cryonics" or "cryopreservation" box to check on the standard VS-9 form
which the State of California used to keep track of the disposition of human remains. It soon
became clear, however, that more philosophical and perhaps visceral problems worried the state. In
one appeal before the court, for example, the state attorney acting for the California Department of
Health Services asked:

Should cryonically suspended people be considered dead, or should a separate category of

suspended people be created? How should such people be registered in official records? What
happens to the estate and the assets of the "decedent" after the decedent is put in cryonic
suspension? What would happen to such estate and assets if and when cryonic suspension is
successful and the decedent is restored to life? Whose identity is the person to assume or be
assigned and what of the record of the person's death? [10]

We hear in this the anxious voice of the peasant, worried that the dead will come back to trouble
the living, and possible reclaim goods that properly should belong to younger people. Once upon a
time, an agency of the state of California actually argued that cryonics was illegal, and that it had to
stop until such provocative questions were answered. “Whose [identity] would the restored person
assume?” as though the answer might be something other than the obvious—demons, perhaps, or
soulless zombies. Just below the surface we sense something more than a frustrated bureaucrat who
doesn’t know what form to use. Just below the surface is horror.

Science, Religion, and Resuscitation

From the beginning of the scientific revolution, the emerging technology of resuscitation began to
suggest that the process by which human beings go out of existence is as much of a gradual and
hard-to-define thing as the process by which they enter it. From the beginning of human culture a
set of stories or myths has allowed mankind to deal with threats like death, and some of these
stories have come to be modified in the scientific age to allow humans to deal philosophically with
a limited power of resuscitation. Along the way, however, there have been plenty of nightmares.
In philosophical and religious matters, a fundamentalist can be thought of as a person who has no
tolerance for ambiguity. Fundamentalists are often Aristotelians-- binary thinkers who can see only
black and white in a world of continuous analog changes and shades of gray. In matters of death,
the role of the fundamentalist is played by the vitalist, and by the legal views of modern states
(legal thinking is usually binary-Aristotelian in positing that all actions are clearly either legal or
illegal). Such people reject the ambiguity which is suggested by resuscitation or cryonics.

My thesis is that historically, many mal-resurrection stories have arisen as fundamentalist or vitalist
reactions to the ambiguity in death which has been gradually introduced by science since the
middle of the 18th century. Riots over dissections, public worries over being buried
alive, the hard-to-explain failure of resuscitative techniques to catch on in medicine for more than a
century after they were invented, and California’s attempt to suppress cryonics, all suggest how the
anxieties of vitalists have shaped society’s ideas about resuscitation after a long period of clinical
death.

In the literature of science fiction, from Frankenstein to Poe to Lovecraft to Stephen King (Pet
Sematary, 1983), scientific or secular resurrection and resuscitation are rarely seen in a positive
light. Occasionally, non-horror scientific resurrection stories have even had to fight censorship
simply because they failed to add enough of the expected Frankenstein voice (e.g., The Day the
Earth Stood Still). So strong has the literary tradition of horror in scientific life-extension become
since Frankenstein, in fact, that even traditionally positive stories of resurrection have since been
re-cast by modern authors in darker terms: the walking mummy, for instance, is a re-working of
ancient Egyptian religious belief regarding a technological resurrection, and even in Nikos
Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ (1960), the traditional Lazarus tale has mutated into a
mal-resurrection.

As a society, we have tales of "out of body" experiences that let us cope mythically with short term
resuscitations: most of these "just-so" stories involve having the soul jerked back and forth between
the body and some kind of anteroom to Heaven (see, for example, the popular film Flatliners
[1990]). Such stories work well enough to allow even vitalists to deal with the realities of everyday
medicine. It is probable, however, that the mythic structure which lets us deal with such true-life
situations is due shortly to come under more strain. Consider the following case:

On June 10, 1988, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl fell into a mountain stream of melting-snow
runoff near her home in Utah, was quickly swept beneath the surface, and drowned. Her mother
called rescue operations, who arrived and could not locate the body, but managed to dam off the
flow to the side stream which contained it. Over time the water level gradually fell, until eventually
(an hour later) one of the girl's arms was uncovered sixty feet downstream, where the body had
wedged underwater near a rock. The little girl had been under water for sixty-six minutes. She was
retrieved cold and with eyes open, and there was no pulse and no heartbeat. Given CPR, she was
transported to a nearby medical center in Salt Lake City and resuscitated there with the aid of a
heart-lung machine. Although she had been clinically dead and without CPR for over an hour, she
recovered completely, save for a slight residual tremor.[11]
There is no reason to believe that an hour represents the limit for resuscitation from hypothermic
clinical death. One authoritative text believes that the ultimate limit even "in the warm" may be as
long as an hour[12]—long enough to put us in the realm of the resuscitation in The Day the Earth
Stood Still. Experimental dogs have already been revived in good health from three hours of
clinical death at the temperature of ice. Even these figures are to be regarded as applying only in
the context of how far into the future our present knowledge of physiology will let us reasonably
peer. What the ultimate limit is, only the future can tell. It is in the hope that the limits are wide that
a handful of cryonicists are frozen every year in the United States.

Whatever the limit turns out to be, our speculative fiction and our myths must find some way to
explain it to us at the emotional level; that is why we create them. Science fiction, in its ceaseless
speculation about the boundaries of technology and human experience, will surely play a
pivotal role in how we accept radical new resuscitation and life extension technologies, and how we
live with them. Science fiction, hopefully, will escape entirely from the fundamentalists in this, and
will remain free to explore all the possible answers and all possible questions. That may be difficult
to do, given mankind's long history of telling stories in one particular way, but we owe it to
ourselves to try.

--------------

* © Steven B. Harris, MD 1992 (sbharris1@earthlink.net). This essay was first presented as an

invited talk at the 14th annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy, held at
the University of California at Riverside, in April, 1992. The theme of this conference was Life
Extension and Immortality. The conference presentations were eventually published in book form
as Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1996), eds.
George Slusser, Gary Westfall, & Eric S. Rabkin, University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA. ISBN
0-8203-1732-2 [1733-0 paperback] This essay was published as Chapter 4 (“The Immortality
Myth and Technology”). It has also since been reprinted, in whole or part, by Skeptic Magazine
and by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Since 1992, a few parts of the essay have become dated. Riverside, California is no longer the
cryonics capital of the U.S., as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation moved several years later to
Scottsdale, Arizona. Meanwhile Walt Disney is no longer the most famous public figure associated
with cryonics, but rather baseball player Ted Williams, cryopreserved in 2002.

References

1. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death (Binghampton, N.Y.:Vail-Ballou Press, 1988), 189-
194.

2. Ibid. pp. 102-119.

3. Richard S. Atkinson & Thomas V. Boulton, eds. The History of Anesthesia (1989) International
Congress and Symposium Series #134, Parthenon Publishing Group, Park River, NJ.

4. Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (1988) Viking Penguin, New York, 75-76.

5. The denial of the body of the heinous criminal to the family has had a long history in law, and
we see it employed even in relatively recent times in capital crimes which particularly outraged the
public. For instance, after execution in 1865 the bodies of the four Lincoln assassination
conspirators were immediately buried in Army equipment boxes a few feet from the gallows in the
prison yard in Washington's Old Penitentiary, the same institution where the body of John Wilkes
Booth had been secretly buried some weeks earlier (years later, all these bodies were returned to
the families). In 1901, after anarchist Leon Czolgosz was electrocuted for the assassination of
President McKinley, his body was dissolved in acid in the prison basement. As late as 1946, the
bodies of Nazi officials executed at Nuremburg were cremated at Dachau despite an official request
from the U.S. Surgeon General for the brains for study. One cannot read such accounts without
appreciating the psychological power and potency of the newly-dead body. One may also read into
official penal policy here an almost unconscious desire to destroy what was perceived as the
continuing identity of persons already pronounced dead.

6. Kenneth V. Gunden & Stuart H. Stock, Twenty All Time Great Science Fiction Films (1982)
Arlington House, N.Y. p. 44.

7. D. G. Whittingham, S.P. Leibo, and P. Mazur. Survival of Mouse Embryos Frozen to -196 C
and -269 C. Science 178:411 414 (1972).

8. Cryonics 13(7):8 (July, 1992). Reprints of Cryonics are available from the Alcor Life Extension
Foundation, and in the library section at their website at www.alcor.org.

9. Cryonics 6(7):3-4 (July, 1985).

10. California Court of Appeals, 2nd Appellate District, Division 2, Case B055379. Also see
California Superior Court, County of Los Angeles, Case C697147. Reprints available from Alcor
Life Extension Foundation.

11. Journal of the American Medical Association 260(¬3):377-9 (July 15, 1988).

12. Peter Safar, Dynamics of brain resuscitation after ischemic anoxia. Hospital Practice 16:67
1981.