100 Places to Go After You Die

Introduction

When Shakespeare called the afterlife "the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns," he was echoing a tradition as old as recorded human history. Death, our stories have always said, isn't a condition. It's a place, a journey.

For the ancients, this was a very literal kind of travel. People from Persia to Ireland to Polynesia speculated on which specific caves or islands in their landscapes might be entrances to the underworld. The Egyptians and Aztecs died with itineraries in mind, maps and guides to help navigate a confusing and high-stakes tour through the world to come. In the Middle Ages, visionaries and poets produced elaborate travelogues of heavens and hells and purgatories. Dante was the "world-building" champ of his day, the medieval equivalent of a George Lucas or George R. R. Martin, and centuries of readers pored over his careful geographies in the same way a modern audience might wander imaginary places like Hogwarts or Hyrule.

Of course, it takes a certain kind of fundamentalism to read Dante's detailed travel notes about a nine-level pit and literally expect to spend eternity there. We live in a time of unprecedented religious skepticism, but the afterlife is as lively a topic as ever—now with new options that Dante never considered, thanks to the West's comparatively recent discovery of reincarnation, astral planes, and ghost hunter reality shows. A 2016 study of religious participation and belief found that, even though the number of Americans who believe in God, pray, or attend religious services has declined steeply since the 1970s, the number of us who believe in the afterlife has actually risen slightly over the same time span. Even many diehard rationalists, it seems, are reluctant to imagine that death is a final ending. All that time and complexity and experience—for nothing? It would seem such a cosmic waste.

When you look at afterlife journeys from stories told over the millennia, from ancient Sumeria all the way up to The Good Place, the same routes and themes recur over and over. Ghosts are in at least their fifth century of moping around their old houses, moving objects by focusing very hard on them, and not even always knowing that they're dead. "Psychopomps," immortal guides, still appear after death to lead the soul away from mortal life. Heavens, whether Miltonian, Hindu, or Capra-esque, are still heavy on music and clouds and wings. Hell hasn't changed much between ancient China or Mesoamerica and South Park: still the same turnabout-is-fair-play "ironic" punishments, the same jaw-droppingly long torture sessions, even the same gross bodily fluids. Dim underworlds still lie across rivers. (This trope probably arose from simple geology. Early humans knew that wells were deeper than graves, so buried souls would have to cross a layer of water as they headed downward.)

But afterlife destinations have changed over time in smaller ways, revealing the preoccupations of the living. In early civilization, life was so punishingly hard that paradise was generally just an absence: a place without disease, a place without winter, a place without crop failures. Later, as we could imagine a more luxurious life, new abundances appeared, feasts and harems and precious gems. The twentieth century saw a rise in benign but bureaucratic heavens, mirroring our efficient new age: lots of sterile waiting rooms, lots of fussy angels with clipboards. More recently, we've downgraded heaven further to fit into our new gig economies (Dead Like Me, Miracle Workers) or worries about technology (Black Mirror, Upload).

In this book, you'll get the inside travel scoop on one hundred afterlife destinations, organized alphabetically within seven main categories—a chapter apiece for mythical afterlives, scriptural afterlives, movie afterlives, and so forth. There are even afterlife possibilities gleaned from paintings, video games, Sunday newspaper comics, superhero universes, and theme park rides. They range from the famous to the infamous, the well-known to off-the-beaten path. Browse them in any order you like, pausing on familiar destinations you'd like to learn more about or adding intriguing new ones to your post-bucket list.

As Hamlet pointed out, no one's ever come back from any of these places, but despite that, I've tried my best to sketch in their regional highlights and most notable attractions. And like any good travel writer, I try to give something more elusive as well: the overall impression of a place, the vibe. A smaller number of prominent afterlives get longer entries, with more detailed information on dining and accommodation and day trips.

There's no way to know for sure where you're going when you die—and it might, of course, be nowhere. But this book isn't just for armchair adventurers. Why not start assembling your own afterlife travel checklist now? If the gloomy Hel of the Vikings appeals to your inner goth, you'll need to start offering sacrifices to the old Norse gods and avoiding—at all costs!—a brave death in battle. If the blissful "Pure Land" of Eastern Buddhism is more your speed, start chanting the name of Amitabha Buddha to yourself every day, because you'll never understand the dharma without him.

It's never too early to investigate your options and start making travel plans. Eternity is an awfully long time to end up in the wrong place, and you never know when your departure is going to be. So turn the page and begin to discover the "undiscovered country" for yourself. These are trips that billions of people are dying to take!