148 Illustrations, 16 in colour

The art of dying and the posthumous jorney of the soul have been described and depicted in many cultures. `Dying before dying`. or practice in dying, has been sought throughout history, not just to overcome fear and give help at the moment of death, but to transfigure the quality of life. The `books of the dead` are universally relevant as maps of a terrain that each of us will one day enter.
Stanislav Grof considers some of the most striking and important of the so-called `books of the dead`: ancient Egyptian funerary texts; the Tibetan Bardo Thodol; Maya and Aztec myths of the death and rebirth of the Hero Twins and the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl.From Europe come Christian visions of the souls`s journeys, the danses macabre, and imagery of moral decay that recalls Tibetan practices.