THE DEVIL'S ATLAS: An Explorer's Guide to Heavens, Hells and Afterworlds, gorgeous item for the seeker who loves art, maps, mythology

THE DEVIL'S ATLAS: An Explorer's Guide to Heavens, Hells and Afterworlds
EDWARD BROOKE-HITCHING
Chronicle Books
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Packed with strange stories and spectacular illustrations, The Devil's Atlas leads you on an adventure through the afterlife, exploring the supernatural worlds of global cultures to form a fascinating traveler's guide quite unlike any other.

From the author of the critically acclaimed bestsellers The Phantom Atlas, The Sky Atlas, and The Madman's Library comes a unique and beautifully illustrated guide to the heavens, hells, and lands of the dead as imagined throughout history by cultures and religions around the world. Packed with colorful maps, paintings, and captivating stories, The Devil's Atlas is a compelling tour of the geography, history, and supernatural populations of the afterworlds of cultures around the globe. Whether it's the thirteen heavens of the Aztecs, the Chinese Taoist netherworld of "hungry ghosts," Islamic depictions of Paradise, or the mysteries of the Viking mirror world, each is conjured through astonishing images and a highly readable trove of surprising facts and narratives, stories of places you'd hope to go, and those you definitely would not. A traveler's guide to worlds unseen, here is a fascinating visual chronicle of our hopes, fears, and fantasies of what lies beyond.

DISCOVER THE BEYOND: From the depths of underworlds to the heights of heavens and everywhere else a life after death may be spent, this atlas explores the geography, history, and supernatural populations of the afterworlds of global mythologies.

A GLOBAL SURVEY: From the demon parliament of the ancient Maya, to the eternal globe-spanning quest to find the Earthly Paradise, to the "Hell of the Flaming Rooster" of Japanese Buddhist mythology (in which sinners are tormented by an enormous fire-breathing cockerel), The Devil's Atlas gathers together a wonderful variety of beliefs and representations of life after death.

UNUSUAL AND UNSEEN: These afterworlds are illustrated with an unprecedented collection of images. They range from the marvelous "infernal cartography" of the European Renaissance artists attempting to map the structured Hell described by Dante and the decorative Islamic depictions of Paradise to the various efforts to map the Garden of Eden and the spiritual vision paintings of nineteenth-century mediums.

EXPERT AUTHOR: Edward Brooke-Hitching is a master of taking visually–driven deep dives into unusual historical subjects, such as the maps of imaginary geography in The Phantom Atlas, ancient pathways through the stars in The Sky Atlas, and the literary oddities lining the metaphorical shelves of The Madman's Library.

Perfect for:

Obscure history and mythology enthusiasts Anyone with an interest in the occult

Spiritual curiosity seekers

Map lovers

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A browser's bonanza of images, facts, and ideas about what happens After. There's a lot of art devoted to this subject, pro and con, over the course of the centuries humanity's hhad enough food to enable people to sit around and think about Death instead of just living with death at every corner, on ecery bend of the road.

There are lots of wheels in the concept of the Afterlife. The Wheel of the Seasons, the sky's great, unending, repetitive turning (which was much more obvious in the time before light pollution ended the sky's dominance of nighttime) seems to have made us into the cycle-spotters that we are. Reincarnation, endlessly cycling through lives on Earth, flowed from this. So did the idea of the duality of Heaven and Hell, the top and bottom of the Wheel's spin.

The artwork, as you see, is gorgeous; the text, which you can't read, is fascinating, and shows the author's easy command of the topic at hand. Nothing in here will make you an expert. If, however, you're curious about how the ancient humans came to think what we now accept as pretty ordinary thoughts about the Afterlife, there is a lot of material in here to point you at areas of further study.

You knew I'd get to ancient Egypt, right? Me, who uses ma'at in all my death-related reviews?

Have a Bosch, just for fun! This guy had a very, very clear vision of what he thought Hell was going to be. Lots of butts in Bosch's hell. The author doesn't go into (!) that. The focus is not solely on Western ideas of Afterlife, lest I have misled you...

...all cultures that have thought about this and left visual representations of it are at least touched on. The author knows his audience. The curious, the art-eyed, the seekers after the paths our ancestors walked...all are doing to find reasons to enjoy this gorgeous gift.

Well worth your effort to source via the publisher's website linked above.