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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
What are we made up of? What holds material bodies together? Is there a difference between terrestrial matter and celestial matter – the matter that makes up the Earth and the matter that makes up the Sun and other stars? When Democritus stated, between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, that we are made up of atoms, few people believed him. Not until Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century did people take the idea seriously, and it was another four hundred years before we could reconstruct the elementary components of matter.
Everything around us – the matter that forms rocks and planets, flowers and stars, even us – has very particular properties. These properties, which seem quite normal to us, are in fact very special, because the universe, whose evolution began almost fourteen billion years ago, is today a very cold environment. In this book, Guido Tonelli explains how elementary particles, which make up matter, combine into bizarre shapes to form correlated quantum states, primordial soups of quarks and gluons, or massive neutron stars. New questions that have emerged from the most recent research are answered: in what sense is the vacuum a material state? Why can space-time also vibrate and oscillate? Can elementary grains of space and time exist? What forms does matter assume inside large black holes?
In clear and lively prose, Tonelli takes readers on an exhilarating journey into the latest discoveries of contemporary science, enabling them to see the universe, and themselves, in a new light.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quotes
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1. The mother of everything
A word with very deep roots
Mourning rituals and due respect for corpses
Matter in the thoughts of the great thinkers
An assumption about the stability and persistence of the material universe
2. Atoms and the void
The birth of atomism
Epicurus and Lucretius
An incredible discovery made by the secretary to an Antipope
Venus, Zephyrus and maggots in cheese
The birth of modern science and atomism
3. They’re just particles
The Dark Side of the Moon
Particle hunters
Particles which bond with other particles
The irresistible force of Eros
The realm of the shyest and most self-effacing of the particles
Five small phenomena
4. Clouds, soft matter and the last shamans
States of matter
The strange world of soft materials
The almost eternal life of the great material structures
The evanescent world of the most ephemeral forms of matter
5. The triumph and decline of a thousand-year-old assumption
Stories of fermions and bosons
But what really is mass?
The generation of ’64
Geneva, 8 November 2011
A strange field that occupies the whole universe
The strangeness of the Higgs and the many mysteries it hides
6. Shining stars and black stars
What stars are
The turbulent side of the Sun
The spectacular end of a tranquil star
Supernovas and neutron stars
Black holes
7. The obscure forms of matter that populate the universe
Mostly gas and a pinch of dust
Milkomeda and the Black Eye Galaxy
The dark side of matter
The light which sees dark matter
The dark kingdom of shadows
Delicate and gentle messengers
8. What supports the water in which Bahamut swims?
The critical density of the universe
What the vacuum is
Where matter comes from
What will happen to matter in the end
9. The magnificent illusion
The great euphoria of mechanistic materialism
State materialism
Modern materialism
But what is matter, really?
And what if particles were hiding unspeakable secrets from us?
Epilogue
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quotes
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Begin Reading
Epilogue
Index
End User License Agreement
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Matter
The Magnificent Illusion
GUIDO TONELLI
Translated by Edward Williams
polity
First published in Italian as Materia. La magnifica illusione (Varia collection). Copyright © Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore srl, Milano, May 2023
This English edition © Polity Press, 2025
The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS Segretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche
Via Val d’Aposa 7 - 40123 Bologna - [email protected] - www.seps.it
The translator would like to thank Dr Ryan Buckingham for his invaluable help in preparing the manuscript.
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6415-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024934246
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press.
However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
To the sweetest little Leon
“Matter is the great illusion. That is, matter manifests itself in form, and form is apparitional.”
JACK LONDON
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my dear friend, the great historian, Antonello Mattone, who helped me to relive Poggio Bracciolini’s cinematographic life, by telling me his story as a direct witness to the events.
A special thought for Emanuele Montibeller, who offered me the gift of putting me in touch with Michelangelo Pistoletto. I am eternally grateful to him for this and for our many chats about art and the life we have spent together.
I consider it an immense privilege having been able to spend time in recent years with maestro Pistoletto and the wonderful Maria. The long conversations we have had provided the inspiration for many parts of this book.
A particular thank you to Quirino Principe who introduced me to aspects of the world of music whose existence I hadn’t even suspected.
And finally immense gratitude to Luciana, my precious life partner, for having read and critiqued the whole manuscript, endlessly spurring me on to make it ever clearer and more incisive. Without her, not only would this book never have seen the light of day, but my own life would have been distinctly greyer and less meaningful.
Prologue
Posara, Tuscany, 11 August 1945
He’d finished the uphill stretch now. All that was left was the road down from Moncigoli to their village. He was looking forward to getting there and telling everyone the great news. They’d done it, he and his brother-in-law Attilio, the best mechanic in town. They’d found a house and signed the rental agreement.
The flat was in the centre of La Spezia, in a building on the corner of Corso Cavour and Via di Monale. It was beautiful and sufficiently spacious to accommodate their two families: nine people in all, plus a baby on the way, given that Anita, his wife, was pregnant. They had to sort out the sleeping arrangements for the three bedrooms, since the main room would serve as a tailor’s workshop. With the end of the war, people were returning to work and maybe, if things went well, they would soon need to employ a dressmaker or two.
The ride downhill was easy; the rod brakes of his sturdy Atala, the bicycle which had been his faithful companion through these difficult years, functioned perfectly in slowing down the movement into each bend. He’d set out that morning from Posara, the tiny village near Fivizzano where they’d moved to survive the war and had effortlessly covered the forty or so kilometres from there to La Spezia. It was a journey he’d done many times. He knew every bend by heart.
That black bicycle, with its crankcase protecting the chain, its bell with the die-cast maker’s mark and the dynamo which allowed him to cycle even when it was getting dark, had been an essential resource in ensuring his family’s survival. In the surrounding villages there was always one peasant farmer or another needing to turn a worn-out greatcoat inside out or mend the holes in a jacket which he had to wear for a wedding. He would hurry off and return home with eggs or a bottle of fresh milk. Everyone knew the tailor who travelled from village to village on his bicycle.
His wanderings soon became the ideal cover for taking messages to the partisan groups that were operating in the area. A note would be handed to him in the evening and all he had to do was remove the bike saddle and slip it into the seat post. On several occasions he had even read the notes, but the messages were incomprehensible; sometimes they were phrases in code which indicated the arrival of columns of Nazis or fascists from Massa to carry out a round-up. Or they simply contained dates and numbers, effectively the coordinates for weapon launches or Allied aerial supply drops for the partisans.
The tailor had been lucky; nobody had betrayed him, and he had never been found out. On a couple of occasions, he had even been able to embrace his brother Giuseppe, a political commissioner of a partisan detachment of the “Apuania” Garibaldi Brigade. Giuseppe had given him a pistol, a Luger P08, supplied with calibre 9 Parabellum bullets, which he’d seized from a Wehrmacht soldier who’d fallen in an exchange of fire. The tailor did not like weapons, and he had rushed back to Posara in terror of being stopped and shot dead at the first Brigate Nere checkpoint. But everything had gone smoothly and, once he was back home, he had taken care to hide the pistol. He’d wrapped it in a filthy rag and buried it in the cowshed, right under the animals’ feeding trough, where the hay was deepest, and he never touched it again.
He’d moved to Posara with his entire family at the beginning of 1942, as soon as it became clear that the tailoring business was definitively on hold. Nobody orders a new suit in wartime. In La Spezia everything that could be considered food had become impossible to find and too expensive, and with five mouths to feed he couldn’t afford to take risks. And so, the family had evacuated to the countryside, to his recently deceased father’s home village where his brothers and their families still lived. With their few furnishings of any value loaded onto a cart, they were all off to live in a single room set up above the cowshed. It was a kind of hayloft where they’d placed the solid wooden table from the tailor-shop, along with a portable sink for washing and three beds, where they would sleep in pairs around a stove which served for cooking and heating. For their physical needs, they went outside to a little wooden hut, where the sewage was collected to be recycled as fertilizer in the vegetable garden.
The peasant house was poor, the winters in the foothills of the Apennines were freezing, but there was no shortage of firewood in the woods of Turkey oak which surrounded the village. Higher up, in the autumn, they gathered chestnuts which, if dried, could be ground into flour. Everything else came from the animals: rabbits, chickens, three cows and a family of pigs. In the fields and kitchen gardens they grew potatoes, beans, cabbages, maize and various other vegetables. And there was plenty of fruit too, in season. A tough life for everyone, basically, but nobody starved.
The tailor often went to La Spezia, about once a month. He went to get general foodstuffs with the family’s ration coupons or to exchange produce from the countryside for packs of flour or pasta. He also took the opportunity to take some food supplies to Giulia, his mother-in-law, a powerful, stubborn woman, who had refused to have anything to do with the evacuation to Posara with the rest of the family.
They’d tried everything to convince her, but without success. She’d stayed behind, living alone, in a sad, dark basement in Via Napoli, convinced that, old as she was now, nothing really bad could happen to her. She’d been a widow for many years and was used to living completely independently. You could still see, in her facial features, the now faded signs of a stunning beauty; she was always smiling, and she never left the house without perfect make-up. Occasionally she would return to that basement, before the curfew, in the company of an elderly suitor. Giulia preferred to fast rather than do without lipstick.
When her son-in-law arrived, it was always time for celebration, because the tailor had knocked her up a new blouse out of some threadbare sheets, or he’d bring her a little cheese and some fresh eggs and would give her news of Anita and Giuliano, of Marisa and the other children.
Giulia hadn’t even been fazed when, on 19 April 1943, all hell had broken out over La Spezia. In the following days, using 173 Lancaster and five Halifax bombers, the RAF had dropped 1,300 tons of bombs, with the aim of destroying the naval base and the vast military arsenal, which was responsible for repairing the fleet. The bombs had instead devastated the historic centre and caused more than 120 deaths and almost a thousand injuries.
Even the building where Giulia was living was one of those bombed, but, miraculously, she was spared. The rescue teams had found her, with an elderly friend, in the basement, which she hadn’t left to run to one of the shelters when the alarm had gone off. Many years later, she would confess that they hadn’t actually heard the sirens, because her friend had brought with him one very last bottle of wine from his cellar which he thought had already been empty for some time and …
The tailor was thinking about all this as he went round the final bends. He was smiling, to himself, remembering Giulia’s flamboyance. He was happy because they were going back to the city, to his city. Anita and the children would welcome him with joy. A new life was beginning for all of them.
The five years of the war had been dreadful. In the last phase, in particular, the whole area had been subject to the bloody acts of the Walter Reder SS division and the Brigate Nere from Massa. In the Summer of ’44, first at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, then at Vinca and in scores of other small towns in the surrounding area, they had exterminated more than 800 old people, women and children. The situation had become too dangerous for Giuliano, the eldest son, who had crossed the front on Christmas night in ’44 to join the Americans.
The tailor himself had been lucky to save his skin too, when he’d been stopped by the X Mas military groups. It’d happened on 10 January 1944, when he’d been cycling home from one of his trips to La Spezia and had run into a mobile checkpoint. The partisan action groups (GAP) operating in the city had attacked a tram transporting X Mas officers and men, causing deaths and dozens of injuries. The checkpoints set up at all the entrances to the city were used to round up men who were caught on the street. The tailor was arrested immediately, his bicycle was confiscated, and he was shoved into a large room, at the back of the bunker which served as the base for the checkpoint, together with another ten or so hopeless cases. The militiamen who were guarding them were very young and extremely nervous; they had their fingers on the machine-gun triggers and were shouting non-stop. The tailor was terrified. They could shoot them straightaway, or after they’d tortured them. In the best-case scenario, they would take them to jail and then transfer them to some prison camp in Germany. He was in despair at the idea that he might never see his family again.
After some hours of anxious waiting, a young officer came in, barked out his name and took him outside at gunpoint. The tailor was ready to be shot when he heard his name being called. “What, you don’t recognize me? It’s Antenore, Nives’ son, your nephew.”
The tailor’s family were all communists and opponents of the regime. One of his brothers had emigrated to France to avoid arrest, because he had opposed the early actions of the Fasci di Combattimento. The rest of the family was made up of union members, artisans and workers, secretly members of the Communist Party and resistance fighters. With one exception: his cousin Nives’ son, a hot-head, a good-looking young man, intelligent and playful whom he remembered well when, as a child, he’d come into the tailor’s workshop with his mother, and he’d made him a little sailor-suit. Antenore had volunteered to join up with the Fascists as an act of rebellion, maybe out of a misguided sense of patriotism, and had been part of the Salò Republic. His family had wiped him from their memory. Nobody mentioned him again after they’d seen him marching past in uniform with Junio Valerio Borghese’s militiamen, the troops responsible for the most ferocious reprisals against the partisans. Chance would have it that Antenore was part of that patrol. Even before the tailor realized what was happening, he had led him out of the bunker and, taking advantage of the darkness which had fallen, had put him back onto his bicycle and pushed him off down the slope sending him away with an affectionate: “Good luck, uncle.”
The tailor has by now reached the last bend in the road and is feeling that all this is behind him. He can’t wait to get back to his family; the first houses in the village are already in sight. Enough tragedies. Enough deaths. All he wants is to celebrate, run up the steps and take Anita in his arms and carry her around the room with the other children gathered around them …
The lorry heading up towards Moncigoli is carrying furniture. It’s the only lorry driving around those roads. The driver is in a good mood and singing as he turns the wheel to tackle the first bend. He has no inkling that the cyclist, who appears out of nowhere heading towards him downhill, will in the blink of an eye end up under the wheels of his lorry and won’t make it out.
The tragic end of the tailor, dead before his forty-fifth birthday, marked the whole family, forever. The news of the accident had spread immediately through the little valley. His eldest son arrived at the scene of the accident, having run as if possessed to that cursed bend, a few hundred metres from the village. Yet there was nothing he could do but wrap his arms around his father’s body, which had been lying there, lifeless, on the tarmac, his face disfigured, and howl in despair.
All the dreams, the hopes of a better life shattered instantly. The lad, not yet twenty, won’t have time to mourn. It will fall to him to take on the burden of the family, his mother and four younger siblings, including the one due to be born in a few months’ time.
Years will pass before a smile appears on his lips again. And only when, for the first time, he holds in his arms the son his wife Lea has just given birth to. Five years since the accident, Giuliano decides to name the little one after his father, the tailor: Guido Tonelli.
1The mother of everything
The word matter contains the Latin word mater, mother, which seems to indicate its role as a primordial element at the origin of everything. In fact, its etymology conceals a number of nuances and is rich in multiple meanings.
When we think of matter, we are principally thinking of inorganic matter and thus imagining something inert and essentially arid. We fall into the trap of judging matter as something different from what we humans are, always rather presumptuous in considering ourselves to be made of a substance which has nothing to do with the ordinary. It almost seems as if the question of matter has little to do with us, as if we were made of a different substance, which is much nobler, so-called animate matter.
This is a centuries old assumption, which has given rise not only to great architectures of thought but also to arrogant attitudes which have made human beings prisoners of an infinite series of misunderstandings worth dwelling on. Everything stems from the role played, both in our lives and in our conception of the world, by our bodies, that is to say by the matter of which we are made, a role which we often tend to overlook, or even airbrush out completely.
A word with very deep roots
The Greek word corresponding to the Latin materia is ὕλη (hyle), among whose meanings we find wood, timber. It’s the same etymological root as the Latin word silva, which indicates a forest, but also matter, substance, and is connected to the rabbinic hiiuli, prime matter.
Giacomo Leopardi talks about this in the Zibaldone, his collection of reflections on literature and philosophy. This original meaning of wood from the forest reminds us that in primitive societies wood was the construction material par excellence. After this, the Greek word shifted to imply any undifferentiated prime matter which, through the intervention of an organizing principle, gives rise to the multiplicity of the real world. In the word ‘materia’ there remains this trace of the female, of a passive, malleable element. In other Latin languages, like Spanish and Portuguese, wood is still named thus: madera, madeira.
If we relate this to the world of the peasant farmer, the madre (mother) becomes the stump of the plant, the innermost part of the tree from which new trunks, new shoots are generated. A matrix, a vegetal womb which produces the new wood, which is soft and workable. Matter as the source of the most docile and versatile of all materials, capable of adapting to any function.
This intimate link to generation is echoed in the myth of Hylas (resonating with the word ὕλη, hyle), the beautiful youth that Heracles fell head over heels in love with, making him his personal companion. Together they set sail with Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. But during one break in the journey, Hylas, sent to draw water from the source of the river Pegae, encountered the nymph Dryope and her sisters, who in turn fell in love with the young man with the wonderful features. In order not to be separated from him, they led him into an underwater cave from which he never re-emerged.
The female divinities, the water and the submerged cave can only make us think of the creative principle. Of the body which in the darkness and humidity of its own belly generates, safeguards and nourishes life in embryo. That is how matter, a term paradoxically used to describe an inert, cold, inanimate component, acquires its maternal meaning from the first living matter with which we had a complex dialogue, for months: the female body which created us.
The rest of the story is simpler. Wood, the original primary material, lends its name to the more generic bodily substance which characterizes every distribution of mass in space. But its total, tangible concreteness, its body and substance, becomes the subject of speculation, a philosophical discipline which runs through the history of mankind, since even we humans, conscious beings, noble animate matter, as we define ourselves, are made of matter and, moreover, matter in its most fragile form.
In the specific case of us Sapiens, a specific species of anthropomorphic monkeys, things turn out to be even more complicated. Our being social animals is something more profound and integral than the simple fact that we live in organized groups. Our interaction with other members of the community, mediated through looks and language, bodily contact and exchange of food, acts of caring and emotional relationships, is a process fundamental to the growth of the individual. Effectively, we become truly human through the look and the exchange of emotions, interacting thus with other members of the social group.
The malleable and multiform brain of the new-born is formed in its relation to the world mediated through the adults who look after it, starting from its mother’s look. The child, who looks into the eyes of the person feeding it, modifies its synapses on the basis of the reactions which are produced in the course of this relationship.
The drive to nourish and protect our little ones has a biological origin; it is a behaviour necessary to the reproduction of the species. We belong to the class of mammals, and this ingenious invention of evolution, whereby the females of our species are capable of nourishing for years little ones who would otherwise be incapable of surviving, has proved to be an enormous evolutionary advantage. This characteristic, which in its primordial forms developed around two hundred million years ago, is seen by some as the reason for the planetary success of mammals which in fact quickly occupied all the ecological niches left vacant by the disappearance of the great reptiles.
This also happened to the anthropomorphic apes from whom we have descended. That primigenial exchange of food between mother and child, that interaction of glances in a silent dialogue of protection and gratitude, is maybe at the root of every social connection and language that will develop over the millions of years to come. The astonishment at seeing nourishment for everyone – even for adults in the clan when the scarcity of food put at risk the survival of the group – gushing forth from the swollen breasts of mothers, can be found in the earliest artistic records of the Sapiens: dozens of prehistorical Venuses, all representatives of an archetype of abundance, goddess-mothers with swollen breasts and imposing buttocks.
But each person’s material body, which plays such an important role in the creation of our first social relationships, the basis of our identity, is also an essential symbolic element at the other extremity of our existence, the moment of our death.
Mourning rituals and due respect for corpses
When an unexpected misfortune occurs, like the one that devastated my father’s family, the whole of the little community who knew the victim relive the most ancient of traumas. A young man, a robust body full of life which, in an instant, slumps and becomes something inanimate.
The extreme precariousness of human existence already resonates in the words of Achilles, the greatest of the heroes of Ancient Greece who speaks of life thus: ‘This thing which is so fragile and light; it lasts one instant and escapes so quickly through the mouth.’ Deciding the fate of every mortal are the three Fates (Moirai), the daughters of Zeus and Ananke, the goddess of necessity, created out of the primordial Chaos together with Chronos, time, around whom she is wrapped like a serpent, to indicate an indissoluble bond.
When Atropos, the inflexible, severs the fine thread spun by Clotho and wound onto the spindle by Lachesis, there’s no escape; even the strongest of the heroes collapses to the ground like a lifeless puppet, reduced to a heap of random limbs. In the terrible clashes which take place around the beautiful wall of Ilium, the robust bodies of the young heroes, who until a moment earlier seemed immortal, are transformed into shattered bones, disfigured faces, blood and guts; and with them the dreams, emotions and passions that drove them vanish.
Thousands of years later, despite the incredible progress that has led us to live more comfortable and much longer lives than those of our ancestors, an awareness of our intrinsic fragility is still with us. A fatal oversight, a tiny virus, a group of cells which goes mad during the process of infinite replications, a small blood vessel which suddenly gives way and even today we still have to come to terms with the trauma of someone’s sudden death. Every day my father Giuliano’s desperate cry: ‘Babbo! Babbo! Breathe! Speak to me! Don’t leave me!’ as he held in his arms the tortured corpse of his own father, Guido the tailor, echoes around our roads or in the intensive care units of hospitals.
To relieve the trauma of loss, since the dawn of time, human communities have developed rituals for mourning and the burial of corpses. Paying respect to the poor tormented body, washing it and anointing it with perfumed essences, colouring it with ochre-red, enhancing with make-up features disfigured by death, adorning it with the most precious ornaments, cladding it in its favourite weapons, beautifying it with death masks made from the most precious metals, placing around it best-loved toys or the jewels that had enhanced its beauty, the insignia of authority or the humble tools of an artisan. And the monumental tombs, inscriptions, portraits, frescoed walls, hymns sung to accompany the deceased on their journey into the beyond.
At the centre of every burial ritual is the body of the deceased, which the most ancient of all tabus protects from the mangling which wild animals could inflict, were it to be abandoned.
Achilles, the strongest of the Achaeans, has just pierced Hector’s throat with his lance. The Trojan hero just has time to say his final words while the most furious outburst of anger distorts the features of Peleus’ son. Achilles pulls out the bloody lance from his enemy’s throat and strips the body of the magnificent bronze armour which the Trojan had snatched from his friend Patroclus. He considers leaving the flesh of his dying enemy to be torn apart and devoured by dogs and birds, then, without hesitation, he pierces a large hole in Hector’s feet to slip a rope through. He ties the young man’s still warm corpse to his chariot and drives his horses at full gallop right up to the walls of the enemy city. Achilles butchers Hector’s body in front of the Trojans who watch on in horror.
His enemy’s body will lie, abandoned for days, near to Achilles’ tent close by the huge, beached keels of the Achaean ships. Through divine intervention, no dog or bird will approach to relish the flesh; on the contrary, his wounds will heal, including those inflicted, out of contempt, by the Greeks on the defeated man’s corpse. Not a single sign of putrefaction will profane the body of the hero who had died in battle.
The miracle will continue until, after twelve interminable days, Hector’s elderly father Priam hastens in the middle of the night to his enemy’s tent with a cart laden with riches to beg for the return of his son’s mortal remains. The old man humbles himself in front of Achilles, clings to his knees, kisses his hands which are still red with his son’s blood, just to have him back, even dead. He wants to pay due respect to the corpse, as is right and proper. And at this point, Achilles, the beast, capable of throttling someone without pity or burning twelve Trojan youths on Patroclus’ pyre, yields to the old king’s plea.
It is of such importance, to the ancient Greeks, to reaffirm the tabu of the inviolability of corpses, that this episode from the Iliad will become an ideal point of reference for all successive armistices. Even in the bloodiest of conflicts, there will be a moment when armies cease fighting to exchange the bodies of the fallen. It is impressive to note how this practice has survived up to our time; you simply have to look at the news coming from the Russia–Ukraine war. Even in the terrible conflicts of the twenty-first century, despite being fought with missile strikes and satellite technology, there comes a moment of pity, an ancient ritual in which weapons fall silent and soldiers load onto their shoulders the remains of their fallen comrades who had ended up in the hands of the enemy.
Still today the suffering felt from having to weep over a death without being able to honour the corpse is intolerable. This can be seen every time a flood or a tsunami makes it impossible to recover the bodies of some of the victims. It is an unimaginable suffering for relatives not to be able to place together in a coffin the poor remains of their loved ones destroyed by acid, as in some Mafia crimes, or thrown into the ocean from a military plane as happened to many of the Argentinian desaparecidos. When you want to inflict the most inhuman suffering, you commit murder and destroy the corpse or make it disappear forever, such that the relatives of the victims are denied even the consolation of crying and grieving while embracing what remains of their loved ones. Death transforms the bodies into a truly special material, impregnated with symbolic meanings, which we simply cannot do without.
The power of a body made inanimate can be even better understood by considering the mourning practices documented by ethnologists among groups of chimpanzees and bonobos. They just had to observe more closely what was happening in these small societies of anthropomorphic apes, who are very close to us genetically speaking. The death of a member of the troupe, particularly if they occupied a significant position in the social hierarchy, draws the whole clan into a whirlwind of extreme emotions in which laments and shouts, expressions of threat and submission alternate. The ritual can last for days on end and often leads to a refusal of food, a kind of collective fast, seasoned with forms of aggressive behaviour interspersed with demonstrations of comfort. In many cases the corpse is watched over, even at night, by individuals who touch it with light taps similar to caresses. The tiny corpses of little ones are cradled by their mothers, who hold them in their arms for days, delicately removing their fleas and keeping flies away from them.
The most intense reactions are triggered by sudden deaths, as if the group were incapable of absorbing the trauma of an unexpected loss. In this case too, relatives and close friends exhibit the most extreme behaviours. For chimpanzees and bonobos, just as for humans, the bodies of the deceased become powerful symbolic elements to reaffirm the unity of the group. Inanimate matter, which up until a moment before had belonged to a living body, acquires a fundamental importance even for species akin to our own.
This is what maybe gives rise to the most ancient burial rituals, already documented among the Neanderthal, the species which preceded the Sapiens by hundreds of thousands of years. The corpse of the deceased is at the centre of collective rites for processing grief, which sometimes even included forms of ritual cannibalism. The social function concludes with ceremonial burials in natural cavities or ones dug out purposely inside caves. The posture of the corpse, the ritual placing of stones or artifacts, the use of various kinds of pigments and decoration, are evidence that our most distant forebears carried out ceremonies which were destined to alleviate the trauma of loss.
Matter in the thoughts of the great thinkers
An awareness of the extreme fragility of all living forms emerges way back in the mists of time. And it’s not surprising that that awareness gave rise to the earliest religious beliefs. In the Latin etymology of the word religio, many people find a binding value of sacred obligations and prohibitions; I prefer to see in it a narrative which bonds, holds together a community ripped apart by anxiety and suffering. Religion is born from an act of rebellion; the end of the material substance of which we are made quite simply cannot mean our end. Something of us must remain. In a material world dominated by the natural world, which follows temporal cycles that repeat indefinitely, the intolerable thought arises that nothing remains of the single individual.
The great material structures like rivers and mountains, the Earth and the Sun enjoy the absolute privilege of an eternal existence, as if they were made up of incorruptible matter. It’s impossible that we, such special beings in so many other ways, are, by contrast, condemned to deterioration and death. Something of that substance which makes other things indifferent to corruption and to time must be hiding in our innermost structure too. It’s inevitable that we should think that even humans are connected to the subtle fabric which lives for eternity. The consoling power of a belief that something of ourselves resists the destructive force of time, that we shall see our loved ones again and that their broken existence might be pieced back together again in its affections and its relationships, builds an invincible armour that increases human resilience in the face of the worst catastrophes.
This, in all probability, gives rise to the earliest beliefs in a beyond, to ceremonials preparing the deceased for life in the other world, to burials in the belly of mother-earth, in contact with the immortality of its most profound structure, capable of regenerating the individual through a new birth.
When you imagine a noble element, a fundamentally alien, irreducible substance, which animates the corruptible matter from which our bodies are made and which survives forever the destruction of death, then it’s evident that the coordinates around which the bulk of philosophical reflection on matter will develop are already clearly defined. On one side, the idealization of this substance which will take the name of vital form or breath, of soul or spirit; on the other, the reduction of the body to dust, matter both quintessentially vile and malleable.
The most famous of stories is born from this: ‘The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living soul.’ The birth of Adam, the first man in the book of Genesis
