QI The Book of the Dead

trauma or illness, all point us back to the mystery of consciousness itself. We don’t know where consciousness comes from, how it works or why it appears to stop. The question of where ‘we’ go once our bodies cease to function continues to intrigue us. Here are five lives dominated by the question: what happens to us when we die?

     
    St Cuthbert (634–87) is the most famous saint of northern England. As well as having the gift of holy visions, he was a hermit, healer and bishop of Lindisfarne. Most of what we know about him comes from the Venerable Bede (673–735), a fellow Northumbrian monk and author of the first major work of English history, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731). Bede’s Life and Miracles of St Cuthbert was written in 721, only thirty-four years after the saint had died. It includes many firsthand accounts by people who had known Cuthbert well. Though studded with improbable mystic occurrences, it has a historical immediacy that the lives of many other medieval saints lack.
    Cuthbert was a shepherd boy in the far north of the kingdom of Northumbria, near Dunbar. He walked with a limp, thanks to a painful tumour on his knee. All attempts to cure it failed and his condition grew so bad he was unable to walk. One day, as Cuthbert sat disconsolately outside his hut, a horseman pulled up beside him. He was dressed from head to toe in white. He examined the knee and instructed the boy to apply a poultice of wheat flour and milk. Cuthbert followed his instructions and wascured immediately. Only after the horseman had gone, did he realise the stranger had been an angel. Deeply affected by this, Cuthbert returned to his work. He became increasingly devout. When five monks were swept out to sea while salmon fishing, he knelt on the shore, surrounded by people weeping and blaming the disaster on their sinful nature, and calmly prayed for a change of wind. To everyone’s amazement, the wind obeyed and the monks were saved. Soon after this, aged sixteen, he was watching over his sheep one night on the hillside, when he saw the soul of St Aidan, the Irish monk and founder of the abbey at Lindisfarne, being carried up to heaven by angels. He didn’t know who Aidan was at that stage (and he certainly didn’t know that Aidan had died at that moment) but he knew he was a great man and wanted to follow him. The next day he abandoned his flock and became a novice at Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders. Many years later, he would succeed St Aidan as Abbot of Lindisfarne.
    Cuthbert was destined to become famous for his piety and for his miraculous gifts. Rather than spend time in the monastery, he chose to be an itinerant missionary, preaching and healing among the remote villages and hill farms of northern Britain. He founded a chapel at Dull in Perthshire and built a monastic cell in Fife, which eventually became the monastery out of which the University of St Andrews was founded in 1413. Like St Francis of Assisi, Cuthbert loved nature and had a particular affinity for wild animals. On one occasion, after spending the night up to his waist praying in the icy North Sea, he was visited by two otters, which first breathed on his frozen feet to warm them and then dried them off by tousling them with their furry backs. Another time, an eagle saved him from starvation by bringing him a fish, which he insisted on sharing with the kindly bird.

    In 669 his wanderings came to an end when the Abbot of Melrose sent him on a special mission to Lindisfarne. He was given the task of persuading the monks there to accept the authority of Rome, as ordered by the Synod of Whitby in 664. The Synod was a major turning point in the early history of the British church. It marked the end of independent Celtic Christianity, a loosely administered, missionary-based religion, introduced into Ireland by St Patrick in the fifth century and taken to Scotland and northern England by St Columba. Theologically, the Synod had concerned itself with technical matters such as the date of Easter and whether or not monks should shave their heads into a tonsure (a Roman custom symbolising the ‘Crown of Thorns’). Politically, however, it was about Rome imposing a central set of rules. Many British monastic institutions (including Lindisfarne, which had been founded in the Celtic tradition) were resistant to the changes.
    Cuthbert was the perfect man to make them see the light. He had all the credibility that came from