Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times

by Carol Zaleski

Book Overview

In the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in "near-death" experiences. Dozens of books, articles, television shows, and films have appeared in which people who have survived a close brush with death reveal their extraordinary visions and ecstatic feelings at the moment they "died". They tell of journeying through a tunnel to a realm of light, seeing a visual record of their past deeds, encountering a benevolent spirit, and returning...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195039157
• ISBN13: 9780195039153
• Release Date: March 1987
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

a rare jewel among plain stones

This is the best book ever yet published on the subject of near death experiences in the English language, and probably any language. Saying that, it wins through mainly because it understands itself not to be a scientific study (it is not) but a scholarly work of comparative literature. I have read just about every book (in the English language) written on the near death experience worth reading, as well as many that were not worth reading. This is one of the very best. It charts the history of the near death experience through the Western Christian traditions, showing how it has formed itself, at least in Europe and America, out of those traditions. This is far from being the whole mythic picture of NDEs, but Zaleski has done a wonderful job of showing how deep and evolving those roots are even from within Christianity. Go back 200 years and the experience is almost nothing like what it is today, with its "spiritual democracy" and "self empowerment" motifs, clearly developing in parallel with social changes in the intervening period. Folks who don't know this history, or who are blissfully unaware of it, often assume that there is a single changeless thing called a "near death experience" that remains constant and consistent across the world. This is not so. Any similarities that can be ascribed to "experiences at the boundary of death" are in fact VERY general, as anyone who cares to examine Thai experiences, Indian experiences, Chinese experiences, Melanesian experience, and the few other non-American groups who have ever been studied, will soon see for themselves. The myth of global consistency arises out of flawed methods of sampling. For instance, people will only report having an "NDE" if they know, first of all, what that term even means, and what it is taken to refer to. When submission is left to individuals supplying their own reports, instead of field study, what happens is that this creates a heavily weighted bias, even with "people from other cultures", for the Americanized template of what one of these experiences is supposed to be, which in turn reinforces the mythos that this template is "consistent". These other culture cases, for instance, are often people who have lived in America, have access to the internet, have read of other American-style experiences, and so on. When you break through all that assumption, you find what you find with Melanesian or Thai experiences, which is that they are RADICALLY different from the American Moody-esque "NDE template". This book was the first and original foray into this much understudied question of the cultural variance in death-boundary spiritual experiences. A truly comprehensive work on that topic could scarcely be written, because it would swell into a Golden Bough, requiring lifetime(s) of work in field anthropology to gather the necessary data, or even assimilate the scattered clues in old texts of various nations, cultures, and religions. Yet it is a task that must be done if

An Important Study of the Near-Death Experience in Both Medieval Literature and Modern Accounts.

_Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times_, published in 1987 by Oxford University Press, by religion scholar Carol Zaleski is a fascinating account of the near-death experience as found in literature from medieval and modern times. As the author notes the term "near-death experience" is defined as "the testimony of individuals who have revived from apparent death was well as those who have only come close to death" as explained by Raymond Moody. As the author notes definitions of such terms as death and deathbed visions, etc. often become blurry, thus it is necessary to use terms such as "near-death experience" and "otherworld journey" interchangeably. This book provides an excellent examination of such experiences and journeys in the literature from the medieval period as well as comparing it to modern accounts of near-death experiences. The author offers some useful reflections on the ubiquity of this phenomena and what this might have to say for the survival hypothesis. The author also examines cultural factors that might be involved in the near-death experience and how such factors play such an important role in interpretation. As such this book remains an important one for the study of near-death experiences and otherworld journeys from ancient and especially medieval times to the modern day. In the "Introduction", the author lays out the role of near-death experiences and otherworld journeys in the literature of all cultures. For example, the author considers the role of the otherworld journey in accounts from those of the Prophet Mohammed, Zarathustra, Mani, William Blake, and others and shows that these individuals share many common features in their accounts. The author then considers various accounts from a wide scope of cultures and traces the origins of the notion of the near-death experience to Raymond Moody's 1970s classic _Life After Life_. The author then provides a discussion of the material that will appear in this book. Part I of this book is entitled "Orientation". The first chapter is entitled "A Wide-Angle View" and considers the disposal of the dead beginning with Peking man and the Cro Magnons in the Paleolithic era up until the arrival of homo sapiens sapiens and into the ancient world. The author considers otherworld journeys in the accounts of shamans, in the epic of Gilgamesh, from the ancient Egyptians, from the epics of Homer and in ancient Greece, among the Chinese, in the _Republic_ of Plato, among the ancient Gnostics, among the earliest Christians, and the rise of the Kabbalah. The second chapter is entitled "Four Models of Christian Otherworld Journey Narration". This chapter considers otherworld journeys in medieval Christianity, making mention of for example such topics as: The Otherworld Journey as Apocalypse: The Vision of St. Paul, The Otherworld Journey as Miracle Story: The Dialogues of Gregory the Great, The Otherworld Journey as Conversion:

Fair and Fascinating study

I imagine it would be difficult to write an unbiased book about near-death experiences, especially if you had a religious bone to pick. However, Carol Zaleski succeeds in writing a very scholarly, fair-minded book, and avoids the trap of attempting to envangelize the reader. Either you believe people have out-of-body experiences, or you don't and Zaleski doesn't attempt to convert you. What she does do (and this is what makes "Otherworld Journeys" so fascinating) is examine the influence of culture and religion on near-death experiences. A twentieth-century American will not report the same near-death experience as, say, a thirteenth-century Italian. Why that is true is for the reader to decide, in light of the evidence presented by this interesting and well-researched account.I felt "Otherworld Journeys" was a definite keeper and well worth re-reading.

her study is a great contribution

i am not saying WOW (except for her photo-she is one of the most beautiful girls in the world) you gotta read this book but, i have spend an appreciable amt of time reading it twice and it is unbiased research giving solid reasons to both accept and disbelieve. only time will tell.

Excellent work, if by now somewhat dated

Carol Zaleski's book is clearly one of the best books on NDEs, still quite relevant even though a bit dated. This is interesting reading not only for her balanced presentation of the pro and con viewpoints of leading researchers on NDEs, but also for her contrasting NDEs of the latter 20th century with NDEs experienced by Christians of medieval times.