The Aerial Toll Houses

An account of what the soul meets in the days after death: a passage through the air in which demons bring accusations, sin by sin, and the angels answer for what has been repented of. It is found in the Lives of the saints, most fully in the Life of St Basil the New, and in ascetic writers who use it to teach vigilance rather than to map the afterlife. It is taught widely in Orthodox piety and it is seriously contested inside the Church, and both halves of that sentence are true. No council has ever defined it, no Creed mentions it, and Orthodox theologians disagree about how far it is a vision given in the language of visions. This site records it as what it is: a strong strand of the tradition, not a dogma, and not a thing anyone is required to picture.