Books of the Dead

The many guidebooks for the dead, from antiquity to current times, presume that death is not an ending but rather a transitional journey that requires attentive planning. Seemingly ironically, these guidebooks are simultaneously about living life to the fullest, comporting oneself while keeping body and soul together, and knowing that our spiritual destination is inextricably tied to our corporeal choice making and conduct.

Twitching as they do the veil from the greatest of life’s secrets, books of the dead are historically greatly cryptic, even characterized by secrecy. Speculatively, they are artifacts of the Sacred Mysteries of antiquity. (The oldest such works are so old that nothing is known of their origin; they contain allusions to literature and ceremonies from cultures lost to the historical record.) Books of the dead are certainly secret initiatory rites to prepare one for the intermediary state after death. The Egyptian Book of the Dead’s “Chapter on Unfastening the Opening In the Sky” makes this explicit: “This book is the greatest of mysteries. Do not let the eye of anyone see it. That is detestable. Learn it, hide it, make it. ... Do not reveal it to anyone, either thy rather or thy son, but keep it to yourself as a true secret.” So, too, was the Tibetan book of the dead kept hidden away for centuries.

It’s important to note that although books of the dead can technically be considered religious artifacts, they are not hymnals nor books of devotions, nor are they declarations of faith or belief. They are not ceremonial of burial or mourning. Rather, they are action-drama-fantasies, with a cast of characters (personifications of the senses, ghosts, angels, demons, grotesque monsters, hierarchies of deities), theatrical journeys, tumultuous storms, ambuscades and pitfalls. The books of the dead are metaphysical songs, rich mines of mythological archetypes, that offer perhaps the most grandiose window into human psychology. The great psychologist Carl Jung called the Tibetan book of the dead his “constant companion,” and to it he owed “not only many stimulating ideas and discoveries, but also many fundamental insights.”

This distillation of twenty-four books of the dead from around the world and across the centuries is a collection of painstakingly gathered hidden gems. Each book’s most intriguing, poetic, and useful revelations are presented here.