San Antonio College Library

An exploration of the rituals, beliefs, art, and mythology humans have used to understand death and the afterlife examines a wide range of practices and traditions--Mexico's Day of the Dead, Victorian funeral customs, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the burial of Pharoahs, cryonics, and ideas from the Bible--to show a variety of human responses to death.

"The Book of the Dead is the name now given to a collection of religious and magical texts known to the ancient Egyptians as The Chapters of Coming-forth by Day. Their principal aim was to secure for the deceased a satisfactory afterlife and to give him the power to leave his tomb when necessary. Copies of The Book of the Dead written on papyrus rolls were placed in the tombs of important Egyptians, each roll containing a selection of chapters. Many...

Does bodily death mean the complete destruction of a person? The first part of this scholarly book defends the view that the nature of man and the world he encounters implies survival of death as a conceptual possibility. The second part considers the empirical evidence for concluding that at least some persons have survived death. A new kind of understanding, among readers, might result from following the concepts logically developed in this work,...

Confluence is a man-made world, half fertile river valley, half crater strewn desert. It is a world at the end of its time, a place of savagery, bureaucracy and war, inhabited by countless flying micromachines and then thousand bloodlines ruled by devotion to absent gods. It is also the home of Yama, who was found as an infant floating down the river and raised by the prelate of Aeolis. Yama is the last remaining scion of The Builders, and now, awed...

The author examines the possibility of sharing the passing of a loved in death to the afterlife and discusses first-hand accounts from individuals that claim to have had shared-death experiences.

This book critically examines the case for and against the belief in personal survival of bodily death. It discusses key philosophical questions. How could a discarnate individual be identified as a person who was once alive? What is the relationship between minds and their brains? Is a 'next world' conceivable? The book also examines classic arguments for the immortality of the soul, and focuses on types of prima facie evidence of survival: near-death...