Not just a revised and updated edition of my "Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations," but largely rewritten, reorganized, and expanded. It's now the book it should have been, free of the strictures imposed on academic monographs. Still scholarly and rigorous but not defensive. Confident instead of tentative. Demonstrating rather than justifying. Arguing for rather than against. My goal was to draw the reader into my own exploration and process of discovery, to show how I got there as well as what I found -- and to do so in a readable and largely de-jargonized way but without dumbing down.
Gone is the subtitle "Universalism, Constructivism, and Near-Death Experience"! Gone is the 15-page chapter on "The Rehabilitation of the Comparative ‘Similar’"! Life's too short to try to convince naysaying scholars that two similar things can actually be considered "similar," and that it's justifiable to even compare them in the first place. No regular person wants to want to read about that any more than I wanted to write it! Remember that early internet gif of the stick-figure bashing his head on the computer?
The Foreword is by Emeritus Professor of Egyptology John Tait, one of the world's foremost experts on ancient Egyptian literature. He was my MA supervisor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, where he helped usher in my thesis, "Conceptions of Afterlife Experience in Ancient Egypt and Vedic India: A Comparative Study," where this all started.... He was wonderfully supportive of my work.
Publisher's page here: