Where Nine Traditions Send the Dead

Start with a realm that makes no moral distinctions at all: everyone eats clay and drinks stagnant water under Ereshkigal's rule, however they lived. Reaching it means passing seven gates, stripped of something at each one.

In Shinto's telling the dead do not simply go somewhere, they become pollution, and even a husband who follows his wife there meets horror rather than rescue. The purification rite that follows is where several major kami come from.

Finland's land of the dead is neither Irkalla's dust nor Yomi's horror: a place of shade and silence across a dark river, entered only with a ferryman's help, where the Kalevala's hero goes looking for words he cannot find among the living.

Greece keeps a separate fate for its heroes and its wicked, and reserves this one for everybody else: a gray, muted existence for the ordinary dead, with no great joy and no great torment either.

China gives its underworld an administration. Fengdu is a walled city of offices staffed by the dead and run by magistrates who keep the registers, and a real town on the Yangtze grew into a pilgrimage site on the strength of sharing its name.

The lowest level of Aztec cosmology asks four years and nine hazardous levels of the ordinary dead before they reach rest. Compare the sheer duration of the journey against every stop before it.

Not every tradition here treats the afterlife as final. Indra's paradise rewards the virtuous with pleasure and splendor, but the reward runs out with the merit that bought it, and its inhabitants return to be reborn.

Named twice in the Quran as the summit of paradise, worshippers are told to ask for it specifically, by name, because it is the highest. The word itself is a loanword, walking the same route as the English paradise.

Close somewhere the language of the first eight entries stops fitting: Guru Nanak's fifth and final realm is not a destination for the dead so much as the soul's arrival in the presence of the Formless One. Compare what changes when a tradition stops describing an afterlife and starts describing union.