Celestial Realms: A History of Heaven since before the Dawn of Time

by Tobias Churton

• Comprehensively explores the meanings, history, ideas, and experience of Heaven throughout the world’s exoteric and esoteric traditions

• Explores the heavens of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, the Abrahamic traditions, Far Eastern mythologies, and Indigenous nations

• Considers questions about our “need” for Heaven, further informed by popular culture, folklore, and personal experience

Across all ages people have wondered about the afterlife. Is Heaven a reward for good behavior, the home of the gods, or a state of being? As Tobias Churton reveals, such questions and beliefs about the nature of Heaven go back to humanity’s earliest days.

Churton’s exploration reveals a perennial search for spiritual meaning. Beginning with early civilizations, including mythology in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Far East, we find sophisticated conceptions within philosophy and the Abrahamic religions, many of which persist unchanged. Churton examines the complexities of Jesus’s teaching that “the Kingdom of God is within you,” and Islam’s ideas about paradise. He analyzes the beliefs of eastern mystics, Maori, Australian Aboriginal, and Polynesian traditions as well as heavenly conceptions among Indigenous cultures of the Americas. Readers will explore Renaissance-era understandings of Heaven’s connection to the body in the chemico-spiritual medicine of Paracelsus and mysticism of Jacob Böhme. Emmanuel Swedenborg, followed by William Blake, controversially associated Heaven with sexuality. Churton then takes us into the contemporary era, exploring Heaven from perspectives of “spiritualism,” psychedelic experience, communist materialism, and the arts, including John Lennon’s lyrical suggestion that we imagine that there is no heaven.

Whether Heaven is considered a specific place or a deeply felt state of being, this in-depth investigation emphasizes its resonance and significance for all people.

384 pages, Paperback

Expected publication April 7, 2026

About the author

Tobias Churton is a filmmaker and the founding editor of the magazine "Freemasonry Today". He studied theology at Oxford University and created the award-winning documentary series and accompanying book The Gnostics, as well as several other films on Christian doctrine, mysticism, and magical folklore, such as "A Mighty Good Man" (2002), a documentary on Elias Ashmole, his religious ideas and Masonic initiation in 1646. He is currently a lecturer on Freemasonry at the Exeter Centre for the Study of Esotericism, Exeter University. He lives in England.