Books of the Dead: Manuals for Living and Dying

The art of dying and the posthumous journey 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. 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 soul’s journey, the danses macabres, and imagery of mortal decay that recalls Tibetan practices. The ‘books of the dead’ are universally relevant as maps of a terrain that each of us will one day traverse.