The Bardo Thodol is not a book about death so much as a script to be read at one. The dying and then the dead are addressed directly by name and told, in order, what they will encounter — the clear light at the moment of death, then peaceful figures, then wrathful ones — and reminded at every stage that these are projections of their own mind and that recognising them is release. It was revealed as terma in the fourteenth century and attributed to Padmasambhava. Its Western career began with Evans-Wentz's 1927 translation, which read it through Theosophy, and continued through Jung, Leary and the psychedelic movement, which read it through something else again; Tibetan teachers have spent decades explaining what it is actually for.