In Australian folklore the Bunyip are evil water spirits that live in the mud at the bottom of lakes and pull victims into the water and drown them. Eumenides is an underworld spirit with blue‐skin who strips the flesh from dead bodies leaving only their bones. In Jewish folklore the Dybbuk is a disembodied spirit of a dead person who cannot find rest because at some time while it was alive it was wronged by another and still suffers from the injustice. In Hindu mythology Yanna is the god of death and justice, and in Buddhist mythology he is the fifth king of Hell whom the deceased meets after death.
“This encyclopedia, derived from world mythologies, is a biography of the gods and goddesses, devils and demons, who inhabit the realms of the Underworld, and a geography of those domains”. In the prefatory list of subjects, there are more than five hundred “death gods and demons” listed – a few of which are Lucifer, Odin, Azrael, Quetzalcoatl and Voodoo's Baron Samedi. Others from this fecundity of nasties I spotted were Bakbakwakanooksiwae, a man‐eating monster bird of the Canadian Kwakiutl people, “God A” and “God F” of the Mayans, and the Grim Reaper. In addition to these gods there are 124 “underworlds” such as Gehenna, Purgatory, Styx and, of course, Hell itself. In these listings the gods/demons and the underworlds are usefully grouped by their cultures – Celtic, Egyptian, Inuit, Christian, Tibet, etc. Also included are entries explaining general concepts associated with death, for example, Apocalypse and Eschatology, and a handful of miscellaneous such as the Pyramid Texts, Halloween, and Revenants. “To be included, entries had to have had a recognizable connection with the afterworld realm of existence, popularly called Hell, based on the Christian ideas about punishment of evildoers following death … ”.
The book is pleasingly produced with a good type size, clear presentation, easy navigation, short entries with lucid non‐technical prose, a few line illustrations (William Blake is much to the fore), an excellent end‐of‐book bibliography (to which reference is made from individual entries) and an excellent index. Entries are arranged alphabetically and each is followed by alternative spellings and the identity of the culture in which the story is found. A source for each entry is listed at its end. Cross‐references are given to related entries and also any explanatory terms of concepts.
The 22‐page introduction is excellent. After suggesting that it is man's awareness of death that is the spur to his belief in a spirit world, hence religion, Dr Abel uses the archaeological record to show man's obsession with death and burial practices. “Death is not an end, but a transition” and leads on the concept of the afterworld and the need for ritualized burials. I liked the author's characterisation of myths being “…in essence a prehistorical archive of mankind's thoughts including how and why our world and its inhabitants were created, why people die, and what happens to them”. There follow sections on the origin of death – of why it is thought people die, the universal concept of the soul (or souls), the journey to the afterworld and the mode of burial, the Last Judgment, the geography of the afterworld (Heaven and Hell, but mostly Hell/Hades/Sheol), and the personification of death as illustrated by the many characters in this encyclopedia.
The author is a Professor of Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Psychology who has a lifelong interest in the “sociology of death and psychological influences on longevity”. Membership of the Association of Gravestone Studies may sound a touch ghoulish, but it does strengthen the author's credentials as someone seriously interested in death, as does his track‐record of forty books and 400 publications.
As evidenced here, there are a lot of “death gods” around – in literature, religion, folklore and mythology, and this user‐friendly no‐nonsense quick‐reference guide to them is welcome. While not necessary a criticism, I feel more could have been done with this book. The introduction is excellent, but the sober and reasoned prose does not sit easily with the lurid title, lurid cover, and lurid subject matter (I felt a mite self‐conscious browsing this on the train and wished for a plain brown paper cover!). The term “encyclopedia” flatters yet clearly the author had the opportunity to provide something more substantial, with more context. In this respect, the reference to only one source per entry seems over‐restricted. A guide to the literature would have been useful. As already noted, the introduction is excellent, but it is not ideal for reference purposes. More of its contents could have been distributed to the entries themselves. To be a reference book, either the content must be in the body of the dictionary/encyclopedia itself, or the introduction needs to be indexed, or at least cross‐referenced from the A‐Z entries; neither is the case here.
Such observations apart, this is a serious work by a knowledgeable authority and the book will be useful stock for the general reference shelves.
