IMMORTALITY: Taxonomy, Seventeen Types, Four Axes, and the Hierarchy of What Persists

“The actions of the Augure resonate across the entire planet through eternity. ” — Philosophy of Virtues, Mattos, J. C. de Abstract Philosophy, theology, biology, physics, and transhumanism address immortality in isolation, each arguing for a single preferred conception. No prior framework has systematically enumerated the distinct things claimed under that word, provided formal criteria for distinguishing them, or derived a hierarchy of their depth. This paper presents the most complete taxonomy of immortality yet attempted, identifying seventeen structurally distinct types organised along four axes: persistence substrate, persistence mode, personal identity depth, and temporal structure. The taxonomy is grounded in the full bibliographic record across philosophy, theology, biology, physics, transhumanism, and psychology, integrating traditions and thinkers not previously combined in a single classification: Spinoza’s eternity sub specie aeternitatis, Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Lifton’s five modes of symbolic immortality, Scheffler’s collective afterlife, the B-theory of time, Aquinas’s natural law, the Tao, dharma, MacIntyre’s tradition-constituted rationality, and Becker’s Terror Management Theory. Seventeen types are identified, including three that have not appeared in prior taxonomies: Block-Time Immortality (Type 15), Normative-Order Immortality (Type 16), and Experiential Transcendence Immortality (Type 17). A seven-level hierarchy is derived by personal identity depth. At Level V, the two forms derivable from the Philosophy of Virtues programme architecture — Virtuous Immortality (Sₚost = Iₘ × Gᵥ × kᵐ) and Augure Resonance Immortality — are the only forms simultaneously formally derived, historically and phenomenologically corroborated, and personally significant. At Level VII, the Absolute Self-Origination framework’s self-originating act O (O) = O is identified as a fixed-point definition rather than a logical circle: the formal specification of the causa sui, the unique entity whose being is its own sufficient ground. The paper closes by directly engaging the Terror Management Theory challenge and showing that it does not undermine the taxonomy’s structural claims. By systematically classifying, this article resolves centuries of philosophical conflation and formally establishes that the moral inertia generated by a virtuous life constitutes the most rigorously grounded and historically corroborated form of human persistence. Keywords: immortality; taxonomy; Posthumous Theorem; Augure; Augure Resonance; Block-Time; B-theory of time; Normative-Order; Experiential Transcendence; Lifton; Terror Management Theory; Spinoza; Nietzsche; Scheffler; OVF; DFT; ASO; Philosophy of Virtues; seventeen types; four axes; Alguilas-AI