How did death arise? Who created it and why? Who controls it and can it be defeated? And if so, how? And what is death anyway - an absurd oversight of fate or punishment for human sins and guilt that can never be redeemed? All these questions tormented people from the very moment when they realized themselves as human beings. Whomever did they blame for the appearance of death: the deities who created man as insufficiently strong, the evil forces that insidiously interfered with the process of creation, the sun and the moon that prevented immortality, all kinds of animals who wanted to individually own land and water... The book of the writer and historian Vladislav Petrov is dedicated to ideas about death that existed at the dawn of human civilization. The author talks about the traditions and legends of different peoples - from the American Indians to the Australian aborigines, from the indigenous peoples of the Far North to the Bushmen in southern Africa - and tells a lot of interesting things about these peoples.