Even for those who do not believe in a life after death, the idea of the afterlife that a past culture held can serve as a marker in the evolution of human consciousness. Like a demarcation that begins a process of map-making, the description of the time and space of the life after death starts a process of exploring the nature of consciousness and the cultural ideas of individuation that derive from it. World literature is the chronicle of this cultural (...) process of individuation, and literary works of the past serve as milestones on the historical path of the moral and psychological development of humanity. (shrink)