Human societies have all asked themselves the same questions about their future, but have found different answers. Many men have imagined places beyond what is seen, places to prolong life, places to connect people. They imagined worlds. Our paradise is only one of those invisible worlds, yet it obscures all others.
This book proposes to show the diversity of ways of imagining and locating the afterlife alternately paradise heaven or underground, hell, villages of the dead, worlds without judgment, Elysee, home of the ancestors, fields of Souchets, village of bananas, islands of the blessed, islands of the sunset, parallel worlds, worlds upside down, etc. In the first part, Guillaume Duprat presents the afterlife in Antiquity and the great religions (Egyptians, Babylonians, Mazdeans, Greeks, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists). The second part is devoted to other worlds imagined in indigenous cultures in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania.
Filigree of this journey in the "other worlds", several conceptions of the soul are shown: single soul, soul-shadow, multiple souls, doubles, spirits, ghosts, vital forces ... These entities move between our world and the others, the illustrations making these paths visible.
French
Guillaume Duprat