Ascension of Christ, Dosso Dossi
As it is written:
What eye has not seen and ear has not heard,
and what has not entered the human heart,
what God has prepared for those who love him,
and what has not entered the human heart,
what God has prepared for those who love him,
this God has revealed to us through the Spirit.
The problem lies in Heaven being the pinnacle of perfection, the ultimate reward, so most authors and filmmakers end up feeling not quite up to the task of portraying it (not to mention, one person's heaven is another person's Hell). The easy way out is to use Fluffy Cloud Heaven, The Theme Park Version of Heaven.
When that doesn't fit the theme of the setting, the solution is to not show it at all, save perhaps as a tunnel of light for the departed to enter. Or an escalator. An older version was to have an angel show up as Psychopomp, perhaps after disputing with a devil trying to bear the soul off to Hell. In comic form, Winged Soul Flies Off at Death implies entry here.
A less simplistic and more dramatic approach is as a "nebula of lights", with each soul a star, each angel a comet, and God the Quasar in the center. Another alternative is to use an allegorically benevolent 'purgatory' in the shape of your grandparent's house (complete with apple pie in the oven) or whatever place you were happiest. Even then, those "living" there will inform the new arrival that what they're seeing is a kid-friendly level so that they aren't blown away by the sheer awesome, or because they'll be resurrected shortly and it wouldn't be right for them to feel unhappy on Earth.
Still more forms of Heaven include reliving parts of your life, so you will be reunited with all your loved ones and experience your most fond memories over and over again. Heaven may also be one of glorious combat, where you can be a warrior for all eternity. However, it might also turn out that Heaven is a downright nightmare for one person. Whatever the depiction, Heaven is universally associated with the sky, an association known as Heaven Above.
Hell, of course, doesn't have this problem and is aaall about the visceral and gory Discretion Shots, so you'll see absolutely Dante-esque hellscapes to put Mordor to shame. The Underworld, being neither particularly pleasant or unpleasant, likewise doesn't have this problem, though if sections of it are equivalent to Heaven, we probably won't see the whole thing.
Frequently, those who've gone into heaven are revealed to have Died Happily Ever After via various means. However, you probably shouldn't try to get them to come back... you wouldn't like the results. See also/Compare A Form You Are Comfortable With.
Not be confused with that film
with Cate Blanchett in it.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Dragon Ball Z has Heaven (or the Upper World in the English dubs). However, it's more or less considered a more peaceful version of Limbo rather than a wonderful utopia of any kind. It does manage to turn former bad guys into pure goody-goods if they stay long enough, as seen through Dabura.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica: It's implied that Madoka created one of these after she became a god and Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence; she takes the souls of dying magical girls there before they witch out.
Art
- Through the windows from The Last Supper, one can see a lush landscape filled with beautiful mountains and rivers. The lack of any buildings from the view and its sheer beauty give some indication that the scenery is meant to represent Heaven.
- Samuel Butcher has several Fluffy Cloud Heaven murals in the Precious Moments chapel in Carthage, Missouri. The sanctuary has a Fluffy Cloud Heaven ceiling painting with little angels flying back and forth, including a blue angel who represents God's grace in, he believes, helping him to get the ceiling done. The main attraction is Hallelujah Square, a massive work showing children who have died being welcomed into paradise, here shown with fluffy clouds, graceful buildings and natural wonders.
Comic Books
- Promethea portrays Heaven using the Tree of Life from the Kaballah. Heaven is also a mirror of the human soul, so in the different spheres of existence a traveler will meet different facets of his or her own personality. Some of the spheres are similar to standard depictions of Heaven (Chesed is a Van Gogh-esque cloudscape, Keter is basically pure light, etc.) while other spheres are... different.
Fan Works
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom, Kalash93 and TheDescendant both mention something called The Well of Souls. All that's known is that it's some sort of afterlife, although the way it is used in their stories makes it roughly an analogy for heaven.
- In the Pony POV Series this is the domain that the Father of All Alicorns is Dimension Lord over and also known as Elysium. It's apparently in his body and is described as paradise, but we never actually see it. Those who have been there and describe it mention it's one of those things you really have to experience to actually describe, but consistently describe it as paradise.
- In Sonic X: Dark Chaos, Heaven is a massive gas giant with twelve planet-sized moons in orbit. It is the original Angel homeworld and main world of the Angel Federation. The Angel capitol city, New Jerusalem, is on top of a massive floating station hidden in the storm-ravaged mantle.
- In Empath: The Luckiest Smurf, heaven for the Smurfs is referred to as "the smurfy hereafter", which in the story "Smurfing In Heaven" is called Elysium and resembles a Shining City version of the Smurf Village...except that in that particular story, the "Elysium" that Empath enters into is a magical illusion created by Ares the god of war.
- The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: The Bearers and many others have each gone on to Elysium, able to rest peacefully in a setting that makes them happy. Twilight, when she's finally freed and able to rest in peace, happily reunites with her friends and family when she arrives there.
- Celebrity Deathmatch fic, Final Stand of Death, heaven is more like mundane location with rather easygoing places, except for the fact no sex is the norm as it's seem as boring. It has a public bathhouse. Let's not forget the building where the angels can be upgraded to join the The Armies of Heaven or Council of Angels, if they are selected. Spice Girls were selected for this. Of course, there are decent places to relax, so it's fine. Not to mention, mainly neutral.
- Jimmy Two-Shoes the Movie: Misery Loves Company: Joyville, being the opposite counterpart of Miseryville, is this. It's a Fluffy Cloud Heaven populated by angels and ruled by Gabriel Righteous XII, owner of Joyous Inc.
Film — Live-Action
- Bedazzled (1967) uses the Royal Gardens at Kew as the location shot for Heaven.
- Seen briefly at the end of Ghost (1990) as Sam Wheat is welcomed into the afterlife.
- Constantine (2005): Constantine is burdened with the knowledge that he is a damned soul due to killing himself in his youth and subsequently being revived and has been trying to get into Heaven's good graces ever since. He succeeds in the climax when he performs a genuine Heroic Sacrifice by summoning Lucifer and asking him to release Isabel's soul to Heaven after Lucifer offers him a wish since he's a Debt Detester who now owes Constantine for informing him of Mammon's plot (which would ruin his own plans). Lucifer, angry that he's about to lose Constantine's soul, cures him of his lung cancer in the hopes that he will damn himself again. Incidentally, heaven is depicted at a distance in the film, looking basically like Los Angeles with prettier smog.
- The film Gladiator has a scene depicting Elysium, which looks rather like Arcadia. The titular gladiator is met by his wife and young son while a pleasant but ultimately incomprehensibly-lyricked tune runs in the background.
- It's a Wonderful Life uses the "nebula of lights" version in the opening, showing three stars flashing as the angels talk in a voice over.
- Very, very thoroughly averted in The Prophecy. After thousands of years of war the rogue angel Gabriel and his faction, and the angels loyal to God led by Michael, who are fighting over letting humans into heaven and humanity's place in God's eyes/favor, things in heaven aren't so pleasant anymore.
- Star Trek: Generations has The Nexus. It's not explicitly Heaven... but it is functionally. It's essentially a Happy Place in physical space that can give you your hearts deepest desire, free of any Aesoptinum fees. The difficulty lies in getting close enough to it unharmed.
- Pretty much half of What Dreams May Come is a depiction of Heaven.
- At the end of Les Misérables (2012), Valjean dies and is escorted to heaven by Fantine and the Bishop, where it is shown as a giant barricade where all the people of Paris have risen in freedom, and all those who died in the film (except for Javert stand on it and sing.
We will live again in freedom in the garden of the Lord/ We will walk behind the plowshare, we will put away the sword/ The chains will be broken and all men will have their reward!
- In Made in Heaven (1987), Heaven has a variety of environments, similar to what Modern Spiritualists believe; you remain active, working at something you like. There is even a school for children.
- Summerland (2020): Discussed extensively by Alice and Frank. She doesn't believe in the Christian idea, but tells him about Summerland, the old Celtic pagan heaven. Frank later says he can see it, and his father is there.
Literature
- The Allegory of the Long Spoons is a parable that describes a man being shown first Hell and then Heaven. Hell is a place where people sit across from each other at a table filled with delicious food. But the cutlery provided makes it impossible to feed themselves, so everyone there is starving (other versions have them unable to bend their elbows). Heaven is then shown to have the same set-up - but the people there use the cutlery to feed each other. The moral of course is that people in Hell think only of themselves, while those in Heaven think of helping others.
- In Adam R. Brown's Astral Dawn, Averya is a vast place humans would perceive as Heaven. Averya holds many worlds, including the Seven Heavens linked to them souls of Earth.
- The heaven of Dante's The Divine Comedy is the "nebula of lights" version, with radiant souls flocking around in symbolic constellations like a rose, a cross and an eagle— although in illustrations, there's usually some fluffy clouds there as well. Although Dante meets each Heavenly soul on a physical planet, it is made clear that all the saints live outside the universe in God's dwelling of love.
- C. S. Lewis:
- The Great Divorce depicts the edges of Heaven as a grassy utopia which is so real that anyone who has not accepted the grace of God will be crushed by Heaven's apples and impaled by its light.
- C.S. Lewis also has as a nontraditional heaven as part of The Chronicles of Narnia, which looks almost identical to the 'normal' world, or rather the 'normal' world is almost identical to Heaven; as Professor Digory Kirke puts it in The Last Battle:
"And of course it's different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!" - What Dreams May Come: As mentioned below, the book (and movie) features a Heaven which is more or less an idyllic version of Earth, just as Hell is a miserable version.
- In The Lovely Bones, Heaven is unique to each person; he or she is given things they most deeply want (except, of course, to be alive again on Earth). For protagonist Susie Salmon, the setting for her Heaven is the high school she never got to attend. Over time she finds that, like school, there are many other, "wider" places in Heaven that you can "graduate" to as you're ready. This is a Swedenborgian view of Heaven (see under Religion, below).
- In Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl", the eponymous girl dies, and her dead grandmother carries her soul to Heaven: "They both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God."
- Once: Thom Kindred, by undine Jennet, is magically given a glimpse of "the Waiting Place". A vast white void peopled by joyous souls, it's said to precede either Reincarnation or even further cosmic realms.
- The Star Trek Novel 'Verse has quite a few alien takes on heaven. For the Nausicaans, there's Heart of the Sky; for Bolians, the Vein of Mystery; for Trill, Mak'Relle Dur; for Betazoids' Great Fire; for Efrosians, Endless Sky; for Xenexians, Kaz'hera (a Warrior Heaven); for Cardassians, the Hall of Memory.
- The Culture novels have virtual reality "afterlives". Because a mind can be copied and digitized, it can then be put into a simulation, usually at the point of death. Whilst this means that Heaven (or whatever equivalent exists for each individual alien species) can be made real, it also means that Hell can exist too. And then there are the Sublimed, who may or may not be capable of creating genuinely "real" heavens.
- Dora Wilk's Heaven is a more material place, although not much of it is shown (main character spends most of the time blindfolded). It's described as quite pleasant place for the dead, but full of bickering and politicking angels.
- Warrior Cats has StarClan for Clan cats and The Tribe of Endless Hunting for Tribe cats. However, the cats in these heavens can communicate on rare occasions, and it is possible for a cat to belong to both.
- Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911), a social worker, feminist, animal rights advocate and tireless reformer, was also a Modern Spiritualist and wrote many books about Heaven, beginning with The Gates Ajar. She presented reasoned arguments in favor of a warm, homelike Heaven where we are reunited with loved ones. She did this partly on behalf of The American Civil War widows who were finding no comfort in stern, sterile Calvinist traditions.
- The Stormlight Archive:
- Vorin religion teaches of the "Tranquiline Halls," a spiritual realm where humanity once lived under the direct care of the Almighty. The Voidbringers attacked from the place known as Damnation, forcing humanity out of the Halls and onto Roshar, the physical world. The Voidbringers then followed them and tried to annihilate them completely, but were eventually driven off Roshar by humanity, led by the Heralds of the Almighty. The Heralds pursued the Voidbringers to the Halls, and now the greatest warriors fight in the Halls after death, trying to reclaim them for the Almighty. We don't know how much of that is true, how much of it was made up by the Heralds to motivate humanity, and how much was made up whole cloth by the church after the Heralds left. We do know, however, that the Heralds lied about the Voidbringers being driven off Roshar. The reality is they were just tired of fighting the Voidbringers for millennia on end, and abandoned their duties in favor of wandering the world in anonymity.
- In Oathbringer it's revealed that the original exile from the Tranquiline Halls was when humans, the first worshipers of Odium and the original Voidbringers, rendered their own world uninhabitable. They fled to Roshar, where the native parsh took them in, but the humans eventually conquered the planet—driving the parsh into the arms of Odium and making them the new Voidbringers. This is the Dark Secret that broke the old Knights Radiant. It's mentioned offhand in Rhythm of War that the Tranquiline Halls are actually Ashyn, the first planet in the Greater Roshar system; likewise, Damnation is the third planet, Braize.
- Heaven: A History by religious scholars Colleen McDaniel and Bernhard Lang is a comprehensive guide to Western/Judeo-Christian beliefs about heaven from the earliest days. The second edition catches up with the New Age and the angel fad of the 2000s. In their research and interviews, they found that one of the most common and most important beliefs is that we will reunite with our loved ones (human and animal) in heaven (as near death experiences also usually report the same).
- Saint George and the Dragon: The old hermit gives the knight a glimpse of a shining city in the clouds which is clearly this. He says that eventually the knight will go there, but only after he's done his duty on Earth.
- In The Faerie Queene, Scudamour makes reference to the Greek equivalent of Heaven, Elysium, in praising Venus' island. He goes so far to say those happy souls blessed in the afterlife would be jealous and miserable if they found out how much better this island was.
Live-Action TV
- In Angel, after Cordelia ascended to a higher plane, we see her in Heaven next season. It shows her as an angelic floating entity of light floating in a hazy pastel environment. Her first pronouncement? "I'm bored"
- This quote from Buffythe Vampire Slayer pretty much sums it up:
Buffy: I was happy. Wherever I... was... I was happy. At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time... didn't mean anything... nothing had form... but I was still me, you know? And I was warm... and I was loved... and I was finished. Complete. I don't understand about theology or dimensions, or... any of it, really... but I think I was in heaven.
- Buffy also sings about heaven, and her unexpected return from it, in Once More With Feeling:
Buffy: There was no pain / No fear, no doubt / 'Til they pulled me out / Of heaven. / So that's my refrain: / I live in hell / 'Cause I've been expelled / From heaven. / I think I was in heaven.
- Buffy also sings about heaven, and her unexpected return from it, in Once More With Feeling:
- Ghost Whisperer.
- The Good Place is about a heaven-like afterlife, referred to as "The Good Place". Eleanor, who lived selfishly on Earth, is sent there by mistake at the start of the series, and finds herself in the Good Place, in a neighborhood of 322 people paired in soulmate pairs. All the people there were in the top minority of humans who lived near-perfect lives. Each neighborhood has a "Janet", that is to say, an anthropomorphic vessel of knowledge who takes on the form of human woman and assists residents with all their needs (the Bad Place also has Janets, but unlike Good Place Janets their job is to annoy, insult, and be generally unhelpful to Bad Place residents). However, at the end of the first season it's revealed that they are actually in the Bad Place in an experiment to see if humans can unknowingly torture each other psychologically. Janet, however, actually is from the real Good Place, and is only there because Michael couldn't train any of the Bad Janets to act good.
- In Supernatural Heaven, you relive your best memories. Actually, this being Supernatural, it's not that great: you spend eternity reliving the same moments, knowing perfectly well they're not real (Dean compares it to the Matrix); unless you have a soulmate, you'll never see any of your loved ones again; and now, apparently, angels can use your soul as a weapon. It is, however, far preferable to Hell. Various allies of the Winchesters who had died throughout the series are seen there in one episode though, and they all seem very happy there.
- Stargate SG-1: An odd instance of 'not quite heaven' that obeys similar rules happens in the Astral diner from the episode "Threads". It's basically the ascended realm boiled down to a level that Daniel's unprepared mind can accept (because he hasn't yet made his final choice whether to ascend or stay mortal).
- Dead Like Me never shows Heaven, but does show what the passage there looks like: whatever the deceased most loved to do in life. One guy sees a cliff he once dived off. A girl in the first episode sees a carnival. The Reapers that take the souls can see these images too, but are not allowed to enter them. One Reaper does, halfway through the first season, and completely vanishes. Despite Rube trying to find out what happened to her, it's left entirely unanswered.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Hunt", an Appalachian mountain man named Hyder Simpson and his dog Rip died, and the afterlife was just like his everyday world. On a dirt road, a gatekeeper at what was ostensibly Heaven told him no dogs were allowed, so Hyder refused to enter a place that wouldn't take his dog too. Later on, another traveler informs him that was the gate to Hell (and dogs know), while Heaven was a way up further.
- In the series finale of Lost all of the main characters enter a bright light that is implied to be heaven.
- Star Trek:
- In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Body Parts", after apparently dying in his sleep, Quark wakes up in the Divine Treasury, which due to the limited budget of a TV series isn't quite as splendiferous as you'd expect Ferengi heaven to be.
First Grand Negus: That's because this is a dream, you imbecile!
Quark: So I'm not dead, I'm asleep. That explains why this place looks so tacky.
First Grand Negus: Don't blame me for your limited imagination! - In Star Trek: Voyager, Talaxian heaven is a beautiful forest in which there is a large tree called the Guiding Tree. In the episode it is mentioned in, "Mortal Coil", Neelix dies, and after he is resurrected, he is disappointed that he didn't see anything, even the Guiding Tree. It drives him into a deep depression as he'd lost his family in a war and hoped to see them again. He nearly decides on suicide in despair before being talked out of the idea by his friends.
- In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Body Parts", after apparently dying in his sleep, Quark wakes up in the Divine Treasury, which due to the limited budget of a TV series isn't quite as splendiferous as you'd expect Ferengi heaven to be.
- There's a definite afterlife in Charmed (1998), though it seems that certain spirits can return to Earth whenever they please. Penny and Patty routinely make appearances to check up on the sisters. Whether it's due to their Charmed powers or the house being on a spiritual nexus is never stated. It's a common joke among fans that the afterlife has hair salons, given that the hairstyles of the two change in every appearance. The series does feature Fluffy Cloud Heaven as well - but it's merely the headquarters for the Elders and not the actual afterlife.
- Night Visions: The episode "Afterlife" revolves around a man who miraculously wakes up during his own funeral, but finds it impossible to readjust to normal life with his family because of his memories of the afterlife, which is shown as a beautiful, idyllic landscape. He eventually tries to force his daughter to commit suicide with him so they can both share in it (though she's saved by her mother), and dies for good after jumping off a roof. As the reader is shown during the second funeral, the "heaven" he experienced was just the stained-glass window in the ceiling of the funeral parlor, which was the first thing he saw when he woke up in his coffin during the wake.
Religion and Mythology
- Oddly enough, despite the general belief of many Christians, The Bible DOES have fairly detailed descriptions of the Christian heaven from a physical point of view. The Book of Revelation includes dimensions, structures, geographical features, and the normal attire its residents generally wear. What's more, taking the descriptions literally makes more sense than strictly symbolically, which is unusual of John's visions. In particular, the New Jerusalem, the "capital" of the post-Doomsday Heaven and Earth, is described in Revelation 21-22 as a cubical golden box several thousand miles on a side, its walls supported by foundation stones of precious minerals, twelve gates made from a single (titanically large) pearl each (the original "pearly gates")note . Inside is Christ's throne, a golden thoroughfare down which flows a river of the water of life, and ever-bearing Trees of Life. Notably not present is a temple like the original Jerusalem had, since God the Father (who is now dwelling with his people, not in a special house) and Jesus "are its temple".
- Heaven in The Qur'an is called Al Jannah, which literally means "The Garden". It is an idyllic garden in which the faithful can enjoy all kinds of meals. They don't have to serve themselves, because there are servants tending to their every need, and they will be accompanied by perfect, virginal spouses.note There are rivers of pure water, wine, honey, and milk, as well as two springs. Also, the sun never sets. It is said that God will finally reveal His face to the faithful in Heaven.
- Emanuel Swedenborg, founder of the Church of the New Jerusalem (Helen Keller was a lifelong member) and one of the forerunners of modern Spiritualism, described the various regions of heaven in detail. To him, we will continue to learn and expand in spiritual wisdom, sort of graduating from one area to the next, and our "Heaven" is formed of our thoughts and ideals. The Lovely Bones and Made In Heaven have a kind of Swedenborgian heaven. What Dreams May Come (book and film) really does.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons: several canon and many homebrew campaign settings have their own heavens and hells, often several different ones per setting!
- In a particularly interesting case of "one man's heaven, another man's hell", most Heavens are alignment-based, so that there's a Lawful Good and a Chaotic Good heaven. The hells are "heavens of a sort", since they are the Evil part of the spectrum. Lawful Evil hell is even considered relatively nice, all things considered. To clarify, the main problem with going to one of the Lower Planes is that all the other people who went there are evil too, and you start at the bottom of the ladder.
- More notably the heavens are based on different "concepts" of heaven, from most lawful to most chaotic: Arcadia is all about order and Law and society as a perfectly regimented place, ruled with benevolence and justice. Celestia is all about disciplined and constant self-improvement (symbolized by climbing the mountain, when you reach the top... well, you don't come back. Bytopia is about the pleasures of honest living and hard work. Elysium is about calm and restfulness (so much that people have trouble leaving). The Beastlands is all about Ghibli Hills and unspoiled nature ala Rosseau. Arborea is all about swashbuckling and High Adventure, while Ysgard is all about competition and contest.
- Exalted: Heaven is just an enormous city where the top gods live. Ordinary humans have little to no chance of ever getting there, and the Odd Job Gods aren't based there either. The afterlife is the rather crapsacky Underworld, though most people reincarnate.
- In Nomine: Heaven, the divine half of the Celestial realm, is the home of the angels and of blessed souls. It consists of several regions resonant to some Word or another of the Symphony, mostly serving as the bases for the Archangels, called Cathedrals although only some of them are actually buildings, and the dead can hang out in whichever area suits their fancy. There's an endless party, a library containing everything that has ever been written and some things that somebody only thought of writing, a number of different places of worship (including one that always appears to be a perfect site of worship for any observer's religious leanings), a savannah housing the souls of deceased animals, and so on. This all occupies the lowest layer of several; all souls feel a tugging to move further up, but angels can only go up by invitation; souls who climb Jacob's Ladder to the Upper Heavens have never come back down to tell what precisely they found there, but it's known that it's a place of perfect transcendent joy. Despite these areas seeming infinite from the inside, Heaven always has room to fit a new realm or fresh souls, and its layout is determined more by thematic resonance than physical geography.
- Mage: The Awakening features the Aether, the Supernal Realm associated with the Arcanum of Forces (fire, electricity, gravity, sound, light, etc.) and Prime (the very essence of magic itself). It is a realm of endless, glorious light and limitless power, and it's home to angels, beings of pure energy and unflagging resolve. No souls seem to enter the Aether after death, however; most pass through the Underworld, and the only mortals who visit the Aether are mages who Awaken to the Obrimos path.
- Pathfinder: There are thee Good-alined planes, which accept the souls of different people based on where they fall on the Law-Chaos spectrum:
- The Lawful Good Heaven is a place of idealized societal harmony, where everyone works together for a greater purpose.
- The Neutral Good Elysium is a place of peace, unspoiled natural beauty, and harmony between all beings lucky enough to get in.
- The Chaotic Good Nirvana is a place of vitality, vibrancy, and zest for life, home to beings who dedicate their afterlives to art, adventure, and personal passions.
- Ancient Egypt had a wildly popular board game called senet. We're not quite sure what the original rules were, but various writings conceive of it as a model of the soul's journey to the next life, with various resting places, delays and hazards before you get there.
Theatre
- Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto has Dante Alighieri, who appears to the main character Cesare Borgia in a vision, singing parts of his Paradiso, specifically the part where he sees circles of endless white thrones arranged in circles that cross each other and form a rose, and that one throne is reserved for the Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich VII (Canto XXX). He ends up telling Cesare, or Cesare reaches the conclusion, that if he leaves the Corrupt Church and follows a path similar to that of Heinrich, such a throne could be his, too. The music comes close to reflecting heaven with ethereal beauty.
- The end of Les Misérables features Valjean's death and ascension to heaven. He is accompanied by Fantine and Eponine, and when he reaches heaven, Enjolras, Gavroche, and the other dead students are waiting for him, often on the barricade. The 2012 film provides a more complete picture by showing heaven a giant barricade across a large square in Paris showed earlier in the movie. Curiously, the lyrics describe heaven completely differently:
- "They will live again in freedom in the Garden of the Lord/We will walk behind the plowshare, we will put away the sword/The chain will be broken and all men will have their reward!"
- In the penultimate song of Hamilton, Hamilton catches "a glimpse of the other side" as Burr's bullet travels in slow-motion towards him. No description of heaven itself is given, but he does see his mother, his son Philip, John Laurens, and George Washington.
Video Games
- The 'Farplane' from Final Fantasy X-2 subverts it, as the Farplane isn't really Heaven, it's just a place where pyreflies will form the image of someone who has passed away. The image cannot speak, and doesn't seem to have any emotion or recollection of the person that summoned them. Dead people appear to go to somewhere else, and the pyreflies are what remains of their souls, although the game itself remains vague on the true nature of the Farplane.
- The closest thing to Heaven in The Elder Scrolls is Aetherius, a plane of existence of pure magic, where the Aedra come from, as well as existence and creation itself. As for the Heaven aspect of it, it's divided into various realms that serve as the afterlives of the various races. Nords get Sovngarde, Khajiit get the Sands Behind the Stars, and the Redguards get the Far Shores. The afterlives of the other races are currently unknown.
- Bayonetta: Subverted. Paradiso may LOOK like a shining gold and marble Fluffy Cloud Heaven, but it's more like the Light-Themed version of Inferno. Note that Hell is already a bad place and that the Angels are Eldritch Abominations. You do the math. Even more obvious in the sequel, where playing as the Masked Lumen in Tag Climax shows creepy heavenly hands reaching for you when you're low on life points, clearly meant to be the counterpart to the demonic hands that reach for Bayonetta or Jeanne in normal game play.
- Several in Touhou Project. The White Jade Tower where Yuyuko and Youmu dwell is a place for virtuous dead (or in Youmu's case, half-dead), while Celestials such as Tenshi live in a heaven for people chosen by the gods. Eiki implies that there are other good places for good people. The main characters can go to White Jade Tower as much as they like for partying, even if they are neither virtuous nor dead.
- The High Heavens from the Diablo series are finally explored in Diablo III. Unfortunately, when you do explore them, they're in the midst of a full-scale invasion by all the forces of the Burning Hells, spearheaded by Diablo who has become the very embodiment of Evil itself.
- The Overthere in Super Paper Mario is this.
Webcomics
- A flashback in Dominic Deegan discusses it. While Hell is easy to view, Heaven isn't. Apparently, it's so awesome and filled with the light of good will that seers who attempt to view it are blinded by the light.
- In Misfile, it's where the files that tell the universe how to be are kept and the angels hangout. To be honest though, the few glimpses we've seen of it make it look more like a backdrop from Star Trek.
- Heaven in The Order of the Stick is a good allegorical version; at the lowest levels, it's sort of an earthly paradise: "The Tavern of Infinite One-Night Stands," "the Debate Hall Where You're Always Right", and so on. However, eventually people go upward toward true perfect enlightenment once their fleshy urges are sorted out. Note also that this is one of half a dozen Good-aligned afterlives that living people can come and go from at will if they have the money or magical resources needed. Julio takes vacation in Arborea, for example.
- In Koan of the Day, the guru and the tortoise discuss what happens when you die.
Western Animation
- Danny Phantom: According to Butch Hartman, the Ghost Zone has its own version of Heaven called "The Elsewhereness", where fear, pain, and misery don't exist. Every ghost naturally wants to go there, but none have been able to find it save one: a nomadic ghost named Sojourn, who recorded The Elsewhereness' location in his journal, whose scattered pages are highly sought after.
Real Life
- Many people (regardless of their faith) who experience a Near-Death Experience see "Heaven," which usually takes the form of an idyllic countryside rather than the cliché Fluffy Cloud Heaven.
