Bremmer is Professor of the History and Science of Religion, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands. It will be of interest to all those interested in what other cultures have believed about life after death, as well as being a standard work for students and researchers in ancient religions, cultural history, and the history and sociology of religion. This perceptive and intriguing book concludes that every period gets the afterlife it deserves. The new ways of thinking about the afterlife developed by the Greeks that the philosopher Pythagoras pioneered both the concept of the immortal soul and of reincarnation how the Greek Orphic ‘sect’ developed the idea of a type of hell the lack of influence of ancient shamanism on Greek ideas of the soul that the Jews, independently from the Persians, originated the idea of resurrection, but only after Alexander the Great’s conquest of Palestine that Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians all contributed to the birth of the Christian afterlife the origins of the term ‘Paradise’ how ancient necromancy and modern spiritualism converge and differ the similarities and differences between ancient, medieval and modern near-death experiences. Bremmer – one of the foremost authorities on ancient religion – takes a fresh look at the major developments in the Western imagination of the afterlife, from the ancient Greeks to the modern near-death experience. So where did these concepts come from and why did they develop? In this fascinating, learned, but highly readable book, Jan N. Originally Greece and Israel – the cultures that gave us Christianity – had only the vaguest ideas of an afterlife. Surprisingly, however, heaven, hell and the immortal soul were all ideas which arrived relatively late in the ancient world. The afterlife is still very much alive in Western civilisation, even though the truth of its existence is no longer universally accepted.

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