Edward Brooke-Hitching - The Devils Atlas: An Explorers Guide to Heavens, Hells and Afterworlds

Detail of the title page of Alexandre PeriersDesenganno dos Peccadores (Disillusion of Sinners, 1724), engraved by GFL Debrie.

The Garden of Eden, from one of the most glorious medieval illuminated manuscripts in existence, theBedford Hours , commissioned in Francec. 1410-1430 as a gift for Henry VI by the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.

To Franklin and Emma

For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head Proverbs 1:8-9

Deaths coat of arms, from an early sixteenth-century German heraldry manuscript.

We take death to reach a star.

Vincent van Gogh

In the year of our Lord 2019, on the thirty-first day of January, an extraordinary event occurred. Youd be forgiven for having missed it, what with the days headlines reporting wildfires raging across Tasmania; a 73-year-old French yachtsman named Jean-Luc Van Den Heede winning a round-the-world solo race without instruments; and MIT researchers announcing their invention of a robot that had mastered the game of Jenga ( finally, I hear you cry). But there it was, marked in official meteorological records: Hell had frozen over. Literally. The temperature in Hell plummeted to a record low of 26C (14.8F), a depth of cold not experienced there for over a century. For the inhabitants of Hell, a small unincorporated community in Livingston County, Michigan, USA (population about eighty or so, town slogan Go to Hell!), the polar vortex that struck their homes was little more than an inconvenience, and not nearly as irritating as the national newspapers cackling over the irony.

For as long as weve lived in this world, weve been obsessed with the next. The idea for this book came about in 2011, when in the basement of a small London rare book shop I chanced upon a folded wad of rag paper, inauspiciously torn at the creases and heavily foxed. Opening it up to its full size, however, was a revelation. Entitled La carte du royaume des cieux, avec le chemin pour y aller(Map of the Kingdom of Heaven, With the Way to Get There), here was a vast, detailed map of heaven, purgatory and hell together in one grand design, an exhortatory broadside made to be pasted up around the streets of Paris c.1650 (see But how often has the attempt been made to map their metaphysical inspirations?

A torture of Zoroastrian hell, from ac. 1589 copy of the prophet ZarathustrasBook of Ard W r z

This sparked an obsessive quest to track down works created around the world, across the ages, to chart, depict and describe the afterlife. Over a period of nearly ten years a deathly collection began to form, culled from the archives of libraries, private collections and further lucky discoveries in dealers premises around the world. A rummage in an antiques store in Brittany, France, for example, turned up a truly jaw-dropping, sixteenth-century parchment painting of the Zoroastrian hell and paradise with a unique diagonal division (see ). A search in Madrid yielded a mesmerising hieroglyphic letter from the Devil; and so on.

This inspired journeys to other European cities to visit the great divine and infernal church-wall frescoes and celebrated Renaissance masterworks, as well as pilgrimages to find the medieval doom murals hidden in churches throughout the United Kingdom, like the 17ft- (5.2m-) wide example in Chaldon, Surrey (see ). This book is the result of those years of searching.

This is an atlas of the afterlife; a guide to the landscapes of the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, as Shakespeare describes it in Hamlet(Act 3, Scene 1). Here are the cities, mountains, palaces, underworlds, torture chambers, drinking halls, demonic parliaments, golden fields, rivers of blood and lakes of fire that make up the geographies of death of religions and cultures around the world.