Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Last Things gathers twenty eight doctrines about death, judgement and what follows, and the traditions differ less over whether an ending comes than over what happens between dying and reaching it.

Judgement after death recurs with a strikingly consistent shape across unrelated traditions: a weighing or questioning that decides a soul's fate. Egyptian belief weighs the heart against the feather of Ma'at while the Negative Confession is recited in the Hall of Two Truths; Zoroastrian belief crosses the Chinvat Bridge where thoughts, words and deeds are assessed, ending in Frashokereti, the final renovation Saoshyant completes; Islamic belief sets the Mizan, the scales, beside the Sirat, the bridge over the fire, with the questioning of the grave, Fitnat and Adhab al-Qabr, coming first and Qiyamah, the general resurrection, still to come; Mandaean eschatology instead describes an ascent through watch-houses that detain whatever is not fit to continue.

Christianity divides sharply over the interval and its architecture: Purgatory is defined doctrine, Limbo never was despite wide belief that it had been, and the particular judgement each person undergoes at death stands distinct from the last judgement of all at history's end, itself the point where Christian eschatology's real disagreements, over the timing and nature of Christ's return, actually sit. Latter-day Saint teaching divides the outcome into three degrees of glory rather than two. Mappo names Buddhism's own doctrine of decline, an age in which only the teaching survives, and the Blessedness of the Initiated states the Eleusinian promise that only participation, not judgement, secures a better lot beyond death.