How do we encode death if not by measurements of before and after, of finitude and disappearance.  Death is inscribed into history by words, art, burial, and the erection of memorials, after all, the threat of oblivion induces commemoration. The shape of death is ontologically both fixed and metaphysically abstract. It is one half of life’s binary, being and nothingness, one determined by realism and rationalism, and the other represented as abstraction and the unknown. William Blake’s artistic vision of humankind in the age of materialist progress against a backdrop of the dark, secularised industrial world, escorted us to the underworld with Virgil and Dante. The translation of death by western cultures and socialised religions, or Eastern spirituality contain complexities that hound or round on each other through theological and philosophical circuits. This paper investigates ways of understanding and seeing the transition of human life, death and the enigma of the afterlife through the visual image, and how art helps us come to terms with the inevitability of mortality, as well as understanding the transcendental passages we use to tap into the aura of death.