VICTORIA (CUP) — “I met Death today, and we are playing chess,” says a steely Max von Sydow in Ingmar Bergman’s classic 1957 film, the Seventh Seal. If only death — thought to be one of our greatest mysteries — could be solved in such an imaginative and imperative scheme as chess.

Death has, without exception, always been a fixation of the Western imagination. Our artists and philosophers have battled and braved its beauty and heartache to no end. Our most popular religions are, in many ways, lauded death cults promising an affluent afterlife, with fear of eternal damnation thrown in for added zip.

Romantic and starry-eyed notions of death are misrepresented in most schools of religious thought. This is particularly true in Christianity, where a desire for death is sublimated and visualized in iconic figures like Jesus Christ, who, as a martyr, experiences glorification and transcendence after dying.

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” Woody Allen has famously said. “I want to achieve it through not dying.”

While it’s deeply rooted in our makeup and our survival mechanism to fear death, it doesn’t necessarily follow any logical design to hold such apprehension and unease. A little levity, as Allen suggests, can be useful.

Throughout history most people have believed that after we cast off this mortal coil, we are reborn. This may not be the most rational of beliefs, but it comforts a lot of people, and it sure soothes the sting of losing those you love.

We endlessly beat ourselves up over ideas of oblivion, big thoughts on blackness and saying our goodbyes. What if we’d been conditioned from infancy to embrace the grave instead of fear it?

Imagine if our parents and public schools had insisted that death is a natural and not disagreeable process, that it be discussed and deflated? If this belief were in place from the kick-off, would there be a single one of us unprepared to grieve when we lose a loved one? All the emotions of lament and loss and the ethereal bottom line would be eased and excised.

Monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam are largely occupied with control, despotism and influence. Some religious groups — like Catholicism — control choice, conception and death until it’s something akin to fanaticism.

Dictating choices on abortion, prolonging death and using words like “sacrament” are all casualties before literal lives are lost. Circling the body on its deathbed like carrion birds, demanding repentance, seems spiteful, doesn’t it? And to what end?

Our most run-after religions, movies and television shows affirm again and again a fear of death and with it a rancorous alienation that is, quite frankly, absurdity and applesauce.

“For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force,” said the late psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. “The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.”

Now, finally, that’s something constructive to kick around before giving up the ghost.