Ancient Greece had Hades, with a certain amount of bureaucracy built in (crossings, boatmen, record-keepers).

Hinduism has the idea of Vaikuntha, a realm ruled by Vishnu, the Preserver. It’s where the truly good go, when they have balanced out their karma well enough to deserve the blue or coral complexion, lotus-shaped eyes, four arms and eternal youth of the gods.

Our preoccupation, of course, comes from the fact that we can have no answers.

“We can examine the smallest atoms and send probes to the outer reaches of the solar system. But there is no scope or probe we can use to get a glimpse of the afterworld. We can only imagine, philosophise and speculate about what awaits us,” says Kashyap Kompella, professor of artificial intelligence at the Institute of Directors.

How have we reimagined our hopes and fears in the modern era?

A unique book titled 100 Places to See After You Die (2024) offers an overview. In it, the American author Ken Jennings (also an amateur historian, and host of the game show Jeopardy!) builds a travelogue out of 100 locations drawn from imagined versions of the afterlife. These range from obscure religious texts to videogames, comics, films and TV.

What might rebirth look like? A “womb door”, with hints of what may lie in the life beyond, says one ancient source. What’s a fitting punishment for someone who mows their lawn at dawn every Sunday? An eternity in a ditch, says a comic artist.

The calculus of just deserts is probably getting insanely complicated, says Kompella, with a chuckle. How would Saint Peter or the Hindu deity Chitragupta, registrar of the dead, account for carbon footprint? “Do paper straws get you sent to heaven or hell? What if you ate lab-grown meat? These questions will likely influence the next generation of afterlife legends,” he adds.

For now, here are some of the most intriguing views from 100 Places…

Pre-history

In early civilisations, life was so punishingly hard that paradise was “a place without disease, without winter, without crop failures. Later… new abundances appeared, feasts and harems and precious gems. The twentieth century saw a rise in benign but bureaucratic heavens that mirrored our efficient new age: lots of sterile waiting rooms, lots of fussy angels with clipboards,” Jennings writes.

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Ancient lore: The Bardo Thodol

Tibetan-Buddhist lore has a guide for the dying that can feel, at least to the Indian reader, both familiar and really trippy. The Bardo Thodol was composed in the 8th century CE by the Buddhist saint Padmasambhava aka Guru Rinpoche.

The first thing to expect as one dies, it states, is a halo of light. That’s the consciousness hovering a bit, as it leaves the body. Next, expect visions of peaceful and wrathful deities.

Keep your eyes on the brightest light visible, and attempt to move towards it. Terrible storms, crowds and beasts will block the way. You will likely come up against white, black and red cliffs, representing anger, lust and stupidity.

At this point, the Lord of Death, Yamantaka, will tally your karma with pebbles: white for good deeds and black for bad. Make it past this stage and one gets to the womb doors, portals to the next life.

“Look for the door through which you can glimpse a gold temple—that’s the heaven of the godlike devas. Stay away from the other doors! A vision of a cavern means you’ll come back as an animal,” Jennings notes.

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The videogame: Grim Fandango

Aztec rituals are reinvented in this retro-futuristic videogame from 1998. Directed by the renowned game designer Tim Schafer, and developed and published by LucasArts, it features skeletal figures trying to navigate an underworld that leads from death to that truly final destination: The Land of Eternal Rest.

Lost souls without enough good deeds to their name must set out on foot, in a journey that can take up to four years. Some will lose hope and wash up at Rubacava, a coastal town by the Sea of Lament.

Those who persevere, or qualify for quick transports with good karma, end up at a stone temple amid snowy peaks. Here, they can board a bullet train to the promised Land. But in order to qualify for a ticket, one must have been truly pure and virtuous.

Board the train with a counterfeit ticket and it may morph into a demon that pushes you into an inferno. And that’s game over for you.

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The comic: The Hatlo Inferno

This is a rare newspaper comic set in hell. The series roasts the everyday characters we’d “most like to see in Hades!” as the tagline puts it.

These include the rogue biker who zooms past, splashing murky water on pedestrians, and the man who turns his lawnmower on at dawn on Sundays.

Jimmy Hatlo’s popular series was a special, Sunday colour version of his regular strip, They’ll Do It Every Time, that ran in The San Francisco News-Call Bulletin from 1953 to ’58.

Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321), Hatlo’s Inferno dreamt up symbolic torments for every sinner. Someone who chewed gum and then dropped it on the ground was compelled, in the afterlife, to plod through two-and-a-half million miles of sticky mire. The daybreak lawn-mower ends up in a fissure, with devils in overalls running lawn-mowers over him. And the couple that took pride in humiliating waitstaff is slow-roasted, over a large fire. They always complained that their meat wasn’t cooked just so, says the devil in charge, in the strip.

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The series: Upload

Launched on Amazon Prime in 2020, the series is currently in its third season. It is set in a virtual heaven built by an American conglomerate. To enter this paradise, customers simply walk into a hospital, have their consciousness uploaded, and “wake up” in Lakeview, a luxury afterlife resort with ever-expanding floors.

The resort is designed to resemble the grand Victorian-era hotels of North America. Personal valets, called “Lakeview angels”, care for each avatar. The food is picture-perfect. The thermostat resets the views and the weather. At memory parlours, one can look back on the life one left behind.

Glitches abound, though. In Season 1, early residents find they can’t eat, defecate or blink. By Season 3, users have been given palates so refined, they can detect umami. But these are upgrades that come at an extra cost. If the family or estate fails to pay, the client may be “levelled-down” to a sterile, fluorescent pay-as-you-go section where the rooms are bare, all meals are sponsored by Lean Cuisine, and all the books are blank except for a few sample pages.

There is no way back to the real world.

The series, created by Greg Daniels (Space Force; Parks and Recreation), is set in 2033.

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Bonus: The doggie paradise

In the animated film All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), viewers get a glimpse of where all the world’s good boys may be ending up.

This is a traditional heaven — clouds, harps, golden sidewalks — but the clouds hide delicious bones; and the canines arrive here in bursts of bubbles and stars.

Angels in silken robes usher them into a world of no fleas and no scratching, just a jewelled star pin for each good fellow.

Enter Charlie, a scrappy German Shepherd who wants a second chance at life (and revenge).

The film sparked a sequel, in 1996; a TV series (’96-’98) and a TV film, An All Dogs Christmas Carol (1998).

Its greatest gift, though, is the comfort it offers anyone who has ever loved a canine. If there is a heaven, after all, it seems likely that it would have been designed for dogs.