There’s a certain folkloric idea that if you die at sea, your soul is sort of. Inextricably stuck in the sea. Because your body is irretrievable, your soul is also irretrievable, down out of the reach of the gods who look at the surface of the world. In Norse mythology, they said that the souls of sailors who died at sea are caught in the sea-goddess Rán’s net and dragged into her domain, a distinct and separate afterlife alongside Hel and Valhalla. Davy Jones Locker. The funayūrei. A lot of cultures agree that once sea has a hold on you, even when your body has rotted and dwindled and been made food for crabs, it still won’t let you go.
Do you think we’re going to wind up saying the same thing about astronauts.
Oh yes. I did a post a while back about gothic horror in space, in science fiction, and my mind was definitely circling these sorts of thoughts:
“When you die in space, out among the black, how do you make sure you’re not lost? Physically, yes, can the body be retrieved, cared for, but also spiritually. How do you make sure your soul, or similar concept, isn’t lost. In all that blackness, how can you make sure your soul will be found, or find its own way. What rituals would we build, some practical, some less so?”
“Is space full of ghosts, lost and wandering souls, made monstrous by incomprehensible loneliness and desperation? There are more dead than living, but how many would have to die to fill that void? Far too many. No. It’ll be smaller than that. A terror in itself. The ghosts are few and far between, because the void is just that big. But there are ghosts.”
“Beacons. Spacers carry beacons. Low range, low power, to last as long as possible. So that if a ship comes close enough, they’ll pick up the signal, and find your body. And it’s the responsibility of ships to find and retrieve bodies if they receive signals. There has to be a hope, however unlikely, that someday you would be found. Someday you’d get to come home.
And … spiritual beacons. So that whatever beings you believe in can find your soul. Tattoos. Amulets. Marks and engravings on your suit, on your uniform. Marks, so that your soul won’t be lost. So that those who look after souls can find yours.
But what else might those spiritual beacons draw in? Space is a hungry maw. Are there things out there to eat even ghosts? Things in the darkness. Eaters of souls. Can we ward against those?”
“Let’s give spacers tattoos so that angels can find their souls, and beacons so ships can find their bodies. Lets give ships duties, responsibilities, towards the lost and abandoned dead. Let’s create superstition, and ritual, and terror. Are all the frozen bodies brought back aboard uninhabited? In the back of a spacer’s mind, does every space walk run the risk of attracting the attention of a ghost in the darkness, desperate to touch some spark of life? What if it’s something worse than ghosts?”
“When you die out in the black, what do you become? When you vanish into the maw, what comes back? What sins are brought aboard in the form of bodies left frozen in the void? What crimes come back to remember themselves unto the living?”
Because I love nautical horror, and nautical folklore, and space horror/folklore has so many of the same vibes. I love it.
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