Describing a great variety of funeral rituals from major world religions and from local traditions, this book shows how cultures not only cope with corpses but also create an added value for living through the growth of afterlife beliefs. The key theme of this book is the rhetoric of death - the way cultures use the most potent weapon of words to bring new power to life. Human identity and its transformation through mortuary rites are explored through the mummies of Chile and Egypt, African sacrificial deaths, Indian cremations, immigrant cemeteries in the USA, ancestor rites in Eastern religions and in Mormonism and the freezing of the dead in cryonics.