The idea of immortals in fiction and religion.
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Humanity’s oldest literature wrestles directly with mortality. The Epic of Gilgamesh (c.2100 BCE), one of history’s first great tales, centers on a king’s futile bid to escape death[2]. After his friend Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh quests to find Utnapishtim, a Noah‐figure who was saved from the Flood and granted immortal life. Utnapishtim indeed receives “divine honours” and a riverside dwelling among the gods[3], but Gilgamesh himself gains no elixir. In the end he learns that even heroic kings must accept mortality. This motif – only a demigod or a survivor of divine favor is truly immortal – recurs across myth. In many pantheons the gods themselves live forever (the Olympians, Norse Æsir, Hindu devas, etc.), but mortals seldom do.
Section Index
Universal Belief in the Afterlife
Anthropologists note that belief in some kind of afterlife is nearly universal. Pioneering scholars Sir Edward Tylor and J.G. Frazer documented that even “primitive” cultures held that life continued beyond death[4]. At first this carry‐over was often amoral — dead ancestors simply existed, but without moral rewards or punishments[4]. Over time most societies grafted an ethical component. For example, ancient Egypt envisioned the soul standing before Osiris’s judges on judgment day[5]. Zoroastrianism (ancient Persia) taught a narrow “Bridge of the Requiter” after death that only the righteous could traverse[5]. Indian religions formalized karma: one’s actions determine reincarnation levels[6]. By medieval Christendom the doctrine of heaven and hell was firmly established, promising eternal bliss to the virtuous and eternal torment to the wicked. (Moral accountability was convenient: as Immanuel Kant later pointed out, belief in an endless soul helps bind up the loose ends of justice[7].)
Types of Immortality in Myth and Legend
Heroic Continuation
Early legends often kept warriors or demigods alive in story. Gilgamesh (seeking immortality) and Ovid’s Tithonus (a mortal turned grasshopper by Aurora) show that even near-divine heroes fall. In the Bible, Elijah is carried up to heaven without dying, and in Mormon scripture three disciples are said to have been granted power over death “to remain on the earth until Jesus comes again”[8][9].
Afterlife Judgment
By the Axial Age, most faiths taught personal immortality of the soul. The Egyptians weighed the heart against a feather[5]; Hindus and Buddhists spoke of samsara and liberation; Christians and Muslims promised paradise. These religions made immortality a reward for virtue (or preserved self).
Cursed Longevity
Fables often portray immortality as a curse. Medieval Europe spun the Wandering Jew legend: a man punished with unending life until the Second Coming[10]. Homer’s Aurora grants Tithonus immortality but not youth, dooming him to endless senility. The modern vampire genre inverts this: eternal life without death, but at the cost of one’s humanity (even Bella Swan in Twilight is told that “even for vampires, immortality does not exist” — they “too are subject to … awareness of death”[11]).
Alchemical Life
From the Middle Ages on, searchers turned to chemistry. Alchemists and mystics promised potions of youth. Legends about Nicolas Flamel (14th‑century Paris scribe) claim he and his wife found the “Elixir of Life” and achieved immortality[12]; in fact Flamel died in 1418 as records prove[13]. The notorious Count of St. Germain in 18th‑century courts parlayed his erudition into rumors he had lived for centuries. In one famous anecdote, a Venetian countess who had met St. Germain in 1710 bumped into him in Paris in 1760, only to be told, “No, Madame … I myself was living in Venice at the end of the last and the beginning of this century”[14]. He remained a charming enigma who “never seemed to age.” Such tales turned lost historical figures into new immortals.
Fountain of Youth and Historical Myths
Our myths run from playful to paranoid. Fountain‐of‐Youth stories, for example, have circulated worldwide long before Ponce de León’s voyages. Classical antiquity imagined Alexander the Great bathers in a “river of paradise”[15]. In the Middle Ages Europeans even revered a legend of Christian Prester John’s realm of wonders, complete with rejuvenating waters[15]. The Spanish explorer Ponce de León himself never mentioned any fountain, but 16th‑century critics accused him of such folly (apparently as a slur on his virility)[16]. Renaissance historians and artists then intertwined his name with the myth, and by the 19th century it had become tourist lore in Florida. No miraculous springs have been found; as one retiree quipped, the famous St. Augustine “Fountain of Youth” doesn’t even taste very good[15].
Modern and Technological Approaches
Meanwhile, literature and pop culture have kept the topic fresh. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula explore immortality’s dark side. Science fiction often treats the theme straight: from Heinlein’s Time Soldiers to Tuck Everlasting, readers see eternal life either as revolutionary gift or nightmare. In recent decades real futurists joined the conversation. Today’s immortality projects rely less on magic and more on technology[17]. Cryonics firms preserve corpses in liquid nitrogen, betting that future medicine might one day revive them[17]. Biogerontologists like Aubrey de Grey propose to “cure” aging itself, identifying repair strategies to indefinitely postpone senescence[18]. Some technologists even speculate on mind‐uploading into computers; as one prospectus explains, if brains could be emulated by A.I., “the mind could continue to exist” after the body fails[19]. These ideas rekindle the old questions of identity: even if you could upload your memories, would you still be living?
Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives
Philosophers and psychologists have long probed the lure of immortality. As Britannica wryly notes, “belief in immortality has been widespread through history” — but widespread is not evidence[20]. From the dawn of reason, thinkers like Plato and Augustine defended the soul’s eternity, while skeptics from the Epicureans onward denied it. Kant insisted that we must act “as if” the soul is everlasting, because without the hope of an eternal afterlife morality itself seems arbitrary[7]. Freud had an even bleaker take: he observed that we already can’t picture our own death. “In the unconscious,” he wrote, “every one of us is convinced of his own immortality”[21]. In other words, the idea of dying is alien to our deep psyche, so culture supplies dreams of undying life to fill the void. Cultural theorist Ernest Becker (in The Denial of Death) later echoed this: humans cope by creating heroic “immortality projects” — religion, legacy, art — to give meaning beyond the grave.
The real world yields no immortals. No credible evidence has surfaced that secret elixirs or frozen pods actually cheated the Reaper. All known persons (aside from mythic figures like Utnapishtim) have died. The best we can do is pass on stories. And perhaps that is fitting: most immortal characters in fiction quickly become wearisome or tragic, reminding us of Marcus Aurelius’s wisdom that humans each have only “allotted periods” in life’s drama[22]. So the saints, vampires, and cyborgs may dwell in our narratives — but as one critic summarizes, even they “are subject to an awareness of death”[11]. Our fascination with immortality endures because it says something profound about being human: even as we accept our fate, we cling to every notion, from sacred scripture to sci‑fi, that lets a part of us live on.
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