From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

Content Warning: This section discusses death and funeral practices.

For the past 2,000 years, the cultural dominance of Christianity and the later dominance of empirical science have had the largest influences on Western conceptions of death.

In Christian belief, a person’s actions in life have a bearing upon their eternal afterlife, determining if they will go to heaven, hell, or, according to the Catholic Church, purgatory. Earlier cultures—like Ancient Greece—that influenced European medieval thought also had different afterlife locations. However, according to the Ancient Greeks, Elysium, which was a place of perfect happiness in the afterlife, was only accessible to heroes and demigods; most humans would spend their afterlives in the Asphodel Meadows. In contrast, the Christian concept of an afterlife deemed “that every person [would] be judged after their deaths and [would] be rewarded or punished according to their deeds” (Aramesh, Kiarash. “History of Attitudes Toward Death: A Comparative Study Between Persian and Western Cultures.” Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, vol. 9, no. 20, 2016, p. 3). This reshaped Western attitudes toward death and created a cultural fear around dying—people began to worry that they could be thrown into the Christian hell.