Myths about Death. From the Islands of the Blessed and Harbingers to Devilish Knights and the Gift of Immortality

How do we "know" what awaits us "on the other side"? Paradoxically, often — from the accounts of those who have supposedly seen and felt these places: in dreams, in illness, on the brink of death. Or — from fictional stories about these accounts: for one of the main themes of mythology, religion, and literature has always been the inevitability of death — and the unknown of what comes after it...

It is about such "visions" of the afterlife and the otherworld — or "journeys" to these worlds? — that the philologist and medievalist, Professor Claude Lecouteux from the Sorbonne, writes in his book. It is based on a solid corpus of both well-known and rare sources: ancient traditions, theological treatises of the Middle Ages, chivalric romances, Icelandic sagas, folk tales, and testimonies of those who have experienced clinical death. Their "data" is very different — and very similar. As is the very attitude of people from different times and countries towards their own inevitable fate.

Which of the known stories of descending into hell is the oldest? Why can souls be painted in different colors? What does hell and paradise smell like? How are the "journeys" of Christian visionaries fundamentally different from shamanic ones? How did the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice refract in medieval poems? And how are the stories of medieval mystics similar to narratives about near-death experiences?

"Myths about Death" is an impressive excursion into the world of afterlife visions, where myths, creativity, and data from modern science collide.