The most widely read work of Florentine politician and writer Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy dictates a tale of the three realms of the afterlife as believed by the Italians of the Middle Ages...
An ancient Egyptian board game that was similar to Ludo or backgammon is offering new insights into ancient religious beliefs. It was not only a game, but it was seen as a way for the dead to...
The idea that the human soul might take the form of a swan to journey from this world to the next could be one of the oldest fundamental beliefs of human kind, or so suggests a new discovery from the...
The idea of the human soul has fascinated humankind for thousands of years. Cultures around the world have sought to explain the soul or spirit in a wide and fascinating variety of ways. The soul is...
An amazing cache of mummies has been found in Egypt near one of the world’s oldest pyramids. Polish archaeologists discovered several hundred of them at the site. The unearthing of the mummified...
As god of embalming and the dead, the afterlife and lost souls, Anubis is one of the most prominent and mystical gods of ancient Egypt . He was known since the earliest periods in the history of the...
A team of Chinese archaeologists from the Nanjing Archaeological Institute and the Liyang Museum have made a highly-unusual discovery inside a tomb in eastern China near the ancient capital city of...
Ancient Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife shaped every aspect of their culture and society. A find in a 3,500-year-old shrine is throwing new light on the beliefs of provincial Egyptians. Experts...
More so than females, the male Norse explorers who took residence in Iceland more than 1,000 years were buried with their horses and new DNA evidence proves that the horses slaughtered to accompany...
Like many ancient societies, the Vikings believed in an afterlife, and these were based on the religious beliefs they held. The current understanding of Viking funerary practices has been discovered...
Once upon a Time, they all lived happily ever-after. In the 1891 publication The Science of Fairy Tales , the folklorist Edwin Sidney Hartland devoted three chapters to ponder over ‘The Supernatural...
Joanne M. Pierce / The Conversation When a family member or a friend passes away, we often find ourselves reflecting on the question “Where are they now?” As mortal beings, it is a question of...
2,500 years ago a woman in Sicily lost her battle with cancer. The scars of the disease left marks on her skull and may help researchers solve the mystery why she was buried in such a way that she...
500 graves dated to between the 12th and 16th centuries were found in a cemetery at Nyárlőrinc, a village in southern Hungary. They contained a unique set of bones. In 2005, Dr. János Balázs, a...
The ancient Norse were one of the few cultures to create a mythology that did not necessarily promise eternal life of any kind for the souls of the deceased. The world was believed to be heading...
Folkvangr (translated from Old Norse to mean ‘field of the people’, ‘field of the warriors’, or ‘field of the hosts’) is one of a few places where the dead could go to their afterlife in Norse...