The Unforgivable Sin of Not Dying

A cow is born into a schedule. Somewhere there is a date, not yet chosen but certain, when it will be killed and eaten, and everything between birth and that date is, from the owner’s side of the fence, maintenance. Suppose the cow could understand this. Suppose someone leaned on the fence and told it: this is the arrangement, and it will not be renegotiated, so enjoy the grass. We assume the cow would panic, or at least stop eating. It does neither, and we take that as proof it never understood.

Now do the same thought experiment with us in the field. The date is not chosen, but it is certain. Everyone we know is under the same arrangement. And when one of us walks to the fence and says, out loud, “I do not accept this,” the strange thing happens: the others turn on him instead of on the arrangement.

This article is about that man, in his many versions: a Sumerian king, a row of Chinese emperors, a Paris scribe, a Moscow librarian, a tech founder with a blood panel. The record they leave behind is consistent: generation after generation, the rest of us decide that the attempt itself is the offense. Failure on its own would have been forgivable.

The Oldest Verdict

The oldest long story humanity has kept is about this. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, watches his friend Enkidu die and refuses to make peace with it. He walks out of his own epic, past the edge of the world, to find Uta-napishti, the one man the gods made immortal, and ask for the trick.

On a Babylonian clay tablet reportedly from Sippar, written around the eighteenth century BCE, he gets his answer before he even arrives. A tavern-keeper at the edge of the sea, a woman the later tradition calls Siduri, tells him this, in Andrew George’s translation:

“The life that you seek you never will find: when the gods created mankind, death they dispensed to mankind, life they kept for themselves.”

She goes on to tell him to “let your belly be full” and “day and night make merry.” It is the speech from the fence, four thousand years old: enjoy the grass. On the Sippar tablet Gilgamesh hears it twice, because the sun god Shamash says a version of it first and the tavern-keeper expands it, so the king gets the same advice from a god and from a barmaid.

There is a detail here that took Assyriologists to notice. The Sippar tablet belongs to the Old Babylonian version of the epic. In the Standard Version compiled centuries later, the one that became the classic, Siduri still appears, but her great speech is gone. The scholar Tzvi Abusch, who spent a career on the epic’s development, writes that the passage “has been virtually eliminated from the later versions.” The advice to accept death and be happy was itself, in the end, edited out: the tradition kept the quest and cut the consolation.

The end of the quest is famous. Uta-napishti explains that his immortality was a one-time grant after the flood, never to be repeated, and offers a consolation prize: a spiny plant at the bottom of the sea that restores youth, though not deathlessness. Gilgamesh dives for it, gets it, and on the way home sets it down to bathe in a cool pool. A snake smells it and carries it off, and as it goes it sheds its skin. The renewal passes to the animal, and the king goes home with nothing but the walls of his city to point at.

Even that was not the last word. A separate Sumerian poem, “The Death of Gilgamesh,” has the god Enlil deliver the sentence with bureaucratic finality: he “has made kingship your destiny, but not eternal life.” And then, in almost the same breath, the poem tells him this should not make him despair, because “this is what the bane of being human involves.” The first great literary hero in history asks for one thing, and the entire apparatus of gods, tavern-keepers, and poets assembles to tell him no, and to add that wanting it was the mistake.

The Emperors Nobody Could Refuse

There is one situation where the man at the fence cannot be mocked or imprisoned, and that is when he owns the field. Imperial China ran this experiment repeatedly, over two thousand years, and the results are the darkest material in this whole file.

The First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, set the template. Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian describes the emperor sending the magician Xu Fu to sea in 219 BCE with thousands of boys and girls to hunt three island mountains where immortals were said to live, and touring the empire in search of the drug of deathlessness until he died on the road in 210 BCE. Sima Qian himself never gives a cause of death. The story that his own mercury pills killed him is a modern inference, built from his documented obsession and the rivers of mercury his tomb was said to contain. We have written about that tomb, and about the eleven documented cases of imperial elixir death the dynastic histories record, before.

The Tang dynasty is where the record turns from anecdote into pattern. The historian Yan Liu counts five Tang emperors who took elixirs and died. The Old Book of Tang says of Emperor Wuzong that “the medicines made him very irritable, losing all normal self-control in joy or anger,” and that near the end he could not speak for ten days at a time; he died in 846. His successor Xuanzong took a cinnabar elixir, developed ulcers, and died in 859. And the deaths run in father-son pairs. Xianzong’s elixir derangement and his murder by palace eunuchs in 820 did not stop his son Muzong from taking elixirs and dying in 824, and Wuzong’s ten mute days did not stop Xuanzong. Each son watched the pills work on his father and then reached for them.

The court was not blind to any of this. In 819 an official submitted a memorial to Emperor Xianzong warning that the alchemists’ compounds were “full of burning poison,” and proposed a simple regulation: make every alchemist eat his own elixirs for one year before the throne touches them. The emperor rejected the appeal, and within a year he was dead at the hands of his eunuchs. A few years later the great writer Han Yu composed a tomb epitaph for his friend Li Gan, dead at about forty-eight from elixirs, and used it to catalogue the officials of his own generation the compounds had killed. The document and the count both survive, and the dying continued for another nine centuries, down to the Yongzheng Emperor of the Qing in 1735.

When the immortality-seeker is the most powerful man alive, the punishment slides downward past him: failed alchemists were executed and replaced with new alchemists, who mixed the same pills. And once the people underneath pushed back. The Jiajing Emperor of the Ming pursued an elixir program whose documented ingredients included “red lead,” a compound prepared from the menstrual blood of girls thirteen and fourteen years old, kept in the palace by the hundreds and fed restricted diets. On a November night in 1542, sixteen palace women crept into his bedchamber and tried to strangle him with a cord. The knot was tied badly. He survived, and all sixteen were executed by slow slicing, along with a consort who had not been involved. The sources never record the women’s motive; they were killed without anyone writing their testimony down. Whether it was the elixir regime they were avenging is an inference, but it is not a wild one.

A stranger reading of all this dying comes from the scholar Michel Strickmann, who, studying the Taoist master Tao Hongjing (456–536), argued that some elixir deaths were not accidents at all: within certain Taoist circles, the poison was the point, a deliberate ritual death in which the adept sheds the body while the refined spirit ascends. Mercury preserves flesh, and a corpse that did not rot could be read as evidence the elixir had worked. On this reading, some of these men were succeeding at something we no longer have a category for. Chinese alchemists knew the compounds were toxic and said so in writing, and they kept working for two millennia. Whatever they were doing, “stupidity” does not cover it.

The Immortality Everyone Loved

Here the pattern turns inside out. Nobody punished Europe’s three most famous “immortals” for seeking immortality; they were rewarded and celebrated, and in two cases it was invented for them after they were safely dead.

Nicolas Flamel, the Paris scribe, lived a pious and charitable life and was buried with honors in 1418. The claim that he had made the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life appears about two centuries later, attached to his name by books he never wrote. Once the legend existed, Paris loved it: travelers reported him alive in India and spectators claimed to see him at the Opera centuries after his funeral, while treasure hunters dug up his grave. Nobody hated the immortal Flamel, because by then he was a story.

The Count of St. Germain ran the same experiment live. In the salons of the 1750s he dropped hints of impossible age and let listeners draw their own conclusions, and the salons were delighted. Voltaire called him “a man who never dies and who knows everything,” and it was a joke between wits rather than a denunciation. When St. Germain did nearly land in the Bastille, it was for freelance diplomacy in Holland, an ordinary political offense. The deathless version of him was assembled after his death in 1784, partly by a forger later caught inventing witch-trial statistics.

Cagliostro is the boundary case. His Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry promised something more concrete than mystique: a forty-day regime of physical regeneration. He died in 1795 in the Pozzetto, a windowless cell in the papal fortress of San Leo, under a sentence from the Roman Inquisition. The charges were heresy and Freemasonry, and his career of ordinary fraud did not help him; the regeneration doctrine was only one item in the file. Still, the shape is hard to miss: the man who sold immortality as an amusing possibility dined with kings, and the man who sold it as a procedure died in a hole.

The rule reads like this: immortality as legend or as performance is welcome, and immortality as posthumous myth is best of all, because the dead make no claims. Seriousness changes everything: the moment a living person, here and now, intends not to die, the room goes cold. Our article on the Philosopher’s Stone notes that European courts prosecuted alchemical counterfeiters, men faking gold, while Newton and Boyle pursued the Stone with full respectability. The courts punished the fraud and left the dream alone; across every case above, the offense sits in the intention.

The Revenge of the Mortal

There is a second way to measure what a culture thinks of deathlessness: look at what it imagines immortality would feel like. And here the record hardly varies: the mortal imagination, given a free hand, makes immortality a torture chamber.

The Greeks got there first and were the cruelest. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess of dawn, Eos, loves the Trojan prince Tithonus and asks Zeus to make him immortal. Zeus agrees, but she has forgotten to ask for eternal youth. Tithonus ages, and ages, and cannot die, until Eos, who once carried him to her bed, “laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.” That is where the hymn leaves him. The version where he shrinks into a cicada, at least becoming something that sings, is a later mercy; the earliest datable source for it is the historian Hellanicus, a couple of centuries after the hymn.

Petronius compressed the same idea into the most famous four words in the Satyricon. The Cumaean Sibyl asked Apollo for as many years as grains of sand in her hand and forgot, again, to ask for youth. Trimalchio, Petronius’s vulgar millionaire, boasts at dinner: “I myself with my own eyes saw the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she answered, ‘I want to die.’”

Christian Europe built its own version as a punishment for sin. A chronicle entry from 1228 records an Armenian archbishop claiming to know a man called Cartaphilus, Pilate’s doorkeeper, who struck Christ on the way to the cross and was told: you will wait until I return. This first version is not a Jew and does not wander; he lives quietly in Armenia, a penitent. The figure Europe fell for arrived in 1602, in a German pamphlet about a Jewish shoemaker named Ahasverus, cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. The pamphlet gives its printer as one “Christoff Crutzer” of Leiden, and no printer of that name is known; the founding document of the legend carries a false imprint. It went through eight editions in its first year. Europe could not get enough of the man who could not die, provided he was miserable.

And then Jonathan Swift, in 1726, did something more interesting than cursing anyone: he ran the sociology. In part III of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver hears that in Luggnagg some people, struldbrugs, are born immortal, and he erupts into a rapturous speech about the wisdom he would accumulate and the fortune he would compound. Then his hosts explain the reality: struldbrugs age, and they grow envious and senile, forever. And the kingdom’s response is the detail Swift lingers on: at eighty, a struldbrug is declared legally dead. Heirs inherit immediately. He may not hold property, because, the Luggnaggians reason, avarice plus eternity would eventually concentrate everything in the hands of the undying. Swift set immortality down in a working human society, and its answer was to legislate the immortals out of personhood. It is a satire that reads as a prediction.

The four stories share one shape: immortality is never taken by force and punished by the gods; it is granted, and the gift itself is the trap. The mortal imagination does not say “you cannot have it”; it says “you would not want it.” That is a strange thing to keep insisting, at length, in every century, unless someone somewhere kept wanting it.

The Librarian Who Found the Loophole

In the whole history of this subject, one man found a formulation of immortality that the moral immune system did not reject, and he came to it by accident, by being the least selfish person anyone around him had ever met.

Nikolai Fyodorov was the illegitimate son of a Russian prince, born in 1829, and spent a quarter century as a librarian in Moscow. The memoirs of the people who knew him agree on the furniture of his life: he slept on a humpbacked trunk with a book for a pillow and wore one coat summer and winter; he gave his salary away and refused to be photographed, on the ground that the only permissible image of a face was an icon. Leonid Pasternak, the painter, had to sketch him secretly from behind a stack of books. Tolstoy, no stranger to performative simplicity, told a visitor in 1894 that Fyodorov owned nothing and donated every book he was given.

His idea, assembled from fragments his disciples published after his death, is the most extreme thing in this article. Death, Fyodorov taught, is a technical problem and an enemy rather than a mystery to be accepted, and the human species has one legitimate project, which he called the common task: the physical resurrection, by future science, of every human being who has ever died. He meant it bodily, not as a metaphor. His argument was moral before it was technical: “birth means receiving, or rather taking, life from the fathers,” he wrote, and so the sons owe the fathers life in return, “a duty which gives immortality to the sons.” A museum, he wrote in a late essay, is “the last remnant of the cult of ancestors,” a first crude organ of the resurrection, because it is the place where a civilization refuses to let its dead be gone.

Society, for once, made an exception. Dostoevsky was sent Fyodorov’s ideas anonymously in 1878 and wrote back, in a letter that survives: “in essence I completely agree with his ideas. I read them as if they were my own.” He added that he and the young philosopher Vladimir Solovyov “believe in a real, literal, personal resurrection, and that it will happen on earth.” Tolstoy reportedly said he was proud to live in the same century as such a man, and told an acquaintance that if he did not have his own teaching, he would follow Fyodorov’s. The most morally severe writers alive bent toward this man.

He wanted the same thing as Gilgamesh and the Jiajing Emperor; the difference is the direction of the verb. Every figure earlier in this article sought immortality for himself, while Fyodorov demanded it for the dead, as a debt, and grounded it in duty to one’s parents. He had found the one grammatical construction in which the desire not to die is not selfish, and the moral immune system, which attacks the first person singular, let it pass. It even fit inside religion, which had always run the same trade: eternal life is permitted, provided it is collective and deferred until after death.

Fyodorov’s own books carried the proof of his sincerity. The first volume of The Philosophy of the Common Task was printed with 1906 on its cover, in a fortress town in Central Asia, in 480 copies, with a line on the title page: Not for sale.

And his idea did not stay in the library. The thinkers now grouped as the Russian Cosmists carried pieces of it into the Soviet century. Leonid Krasin, the Bolshevik engineer who stood on the commission that decided what to do with Lenin’s body, had declared at a comrade’s funeral in 1921 that science would one day “be able to resurrect great historical figures”; whether Krasin took that conviction from Fyodorov’s line or arrived at it on his own is unclear. Krasin pushed to freeze Lenin and went looking for refrigeration equipment in Germany before the embalmers won the argument. Whether the mausoleum was ever meant as a waiting room for resurrection is disputed among historians. But for one strange decade, the idea that the dead might be a recoverable population sat close enough to state power to touch it. The story had come back around to Gilgamesh: a king in a preserved body, and a public that files past to look.

The Man in the Comment Section

The present tense of this story belongs to Bryan Johnson, and he is the reason this article exists. He sold his payments company to PayPal in 2013 and walked away with more than 300 million dollars. Since 2021 he has run what he calls Project Blueprint, spending, per Bloomberg’s 2023 profile, around two million dollars a year on a regime of measurement, diet, sleep, and intervention with one stated goal: don’t die. He does not mean “live well” or “age gracefully,” and there is a Netflix documentary with exactly that title.

Set aside whether any of it works; that is a question for biology and time, and we hold no position on it. The reaction is the interesting part, and the whole article up to here has been an instrument for reading it. Johnson is despised, with an energy that dwarfs anything aimed at ordinary billionaire indulgence, and the contempt runs well past the way a bad scientific claim gets doubted. Yachts do not attract it; a man measuring his own organs does. The vocabulary is worth collecting: unnatural, creepy, pathetic, just die like the rest of us. The complaint is almost never that his method is wrong; it is that he is trying.

A small observation about conversation helps here, and anybody can test it. When one person states a preference, the listener’s first move is usually to place themselves relative to it: say “I don’t like strawberries” and the answer comes back “oh, I love them,” or “me neither.” We process other people’s positions as mirrors first and information second. Now run that mechanism on “I do not accept death.” The listener’s mirror has only two settings: either the speaker is a fool, or the listener is a cow. Every other case in this article points to which setting people choose, and the choice arrives with the speed and heat of a reflex, which suggests it is protecting something.

There is an old line that fits here suspiciously well: kill a cockroach and you are a hero, kill a butterfly and you are a villain; morality has aesthetic criteria. It circulates everywhere over the name Friedrich Nietzsche, including all over the Balkans, where we first heard it. We went looking for it, and it is in none of Nietzsche’s works. The earliest appearances anyone has traced are a 2012 tweet and a 2015 Reddit post, both anonymous; the philosopher’s name was attached later, as decoration. We report this with some satisfaction, because it makes the line a better exhibit: the thought was true enough that the internet forged a father for it. And the thought applies here: our moral reflexes do run on aesthetics, on what we can stand to look at. The seeker of immortality fails the aesthetic test because his desire is not alien at all. He wants, out loud and with his whole budget, the thing the rest of us have agreed to stop saying we want. Envy needs only the smallest crack of possibility to become hatred: what if he manages it, and I am already old?

Fyodorov would have had a diagnosis for the whole spectacle. He had heard the same thing from Tolstoy in his Moscow library, when the great novelist looked over the shelves and remarked that the whole accumulation ought to be dynamited. The librarian, by every account a gentle man, exploded: “I’ve seen many stupid men in the world, but never one like you.” Fyodorov said afterward that Tolstoy loved death. He meant it as an accusation, and as a description of a whole civilization’s settlement with the fence: we have made our peace and made it load-bearing, and we will defend it against anyone who declines to sign.

The cow in the field, it turns out, does have a response available when one animal walks to the fence and says no: turn, all together, and stare at the one who broke the agreement. The arrangement stands behind them, unexamined, the way it has stood since a tavern-keeper at the edge of the world poured a king a drink and told him to enjoy the grass. Her advice was humane, and four thousand years old. It was also, the scribes decided somewhere along the way, not worth copying anymore. The oldest editors we know of kept the man who said no, and quietly dropped the speech that told him to stop. Make of that what they could not.

Image Sources

• The Flood Tablet (Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh), 7th century BCE, Library of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh. British Museum, London. Photo by BabelStone, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Seated portrait of the Jiajing Emperor, anonymous Ming court painter. National Palace Museum, Taipei (Open Data). Public domain.
• Eos pursuing Tithonus, Attic red-figure oinochoe attributed to the Achilles Painter, c. 470–460 BCE. Musée du Louvre, Paris (G 438). Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
• Gustave Doré, La Légende du Juif errant, wood engraving, 1856. Scan: National Library of Poland (Polona). Public domain.
• Title page of Kurtze Beschreibung und Erzehlung von einem Juden mit Namen Ahasverus, 1602. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. Public domain.
• Leonid Pasternak, portrait of N. F. Fyodorov, c. 1928. Russian State Museum Catalogue (goskatalog.ru). Public domain.
• Cover: house engraving after the Flood Tablet, photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), British Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Sources

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