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Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times
by Carol Zaleski
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (1988-11-03)
ISBN: 0195056655
EAN: 9780195056655
Dewey Decimal #: 133.9013
Binding/Media: Paperback - 288 pages
SKU: 92-AG2Y-K1IL
Condition: Very Good
Comments: Trade paperback from Oxford University Press (1987), this is Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times by Carol Zaleski. Carefully researched survey of the phenomena of near-death experiences, covering medieval and contemporary accounts. Offers insight from medical folks, scholars, and skeptics. This copy is clean and tight.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Recent years have seen 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." This book is the most comprehensive treatment to date of the evidence surrounding these experiences. Drawing on modern and historical examples, Carol Zaleski argues that the "otherworld vision" is a key to understanding imaginative and religious experience in general.
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Customer Reviews
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a rare jewel among plain stones
Rating  (5)
Date: 2010-02-05
3 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
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 we are ever really to understand what these experiences are, and how they grew into being. Zaleski's book is one of the very few that correctly sees and understands this issue. Most modern publications along with their authors believe that the NDE either arrived in 1975, or else is fundamentally the same across geography and history. Nothing could be further from the truth and are literal representations of real events. Just read a few Thai NDEs, and you'll see the problem much more efficiently than by reading my words here.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in NDEs and you haven't read this book, I would say it is like being interested in movies and not having seen Gone With the Wind.
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An Important Study of the Near-Death Experience in Both Medieval Literature and Modern Accounts.
Rating (5)
Date: 2009-02-23
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
_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: The Vision of Drythelm, and The Otherworld Journey as Pilgrimage: St. Patrick's Purgatory. Many of the comments on purgatory and St. Patrick's Purgatory can also be found for example in such classics as the study on purgatory made by Jacques le Goff.
Part II of this book is entitled "Medieval Christian Return-From-Death Stories: A Thematic Treatment". The third chapter is entitled "The Other World: Medieval Itineraries". Here, the author considers such topics as the exit from the body (mentioning the exit of the soul through the gateway of the mouth from the body, as well as death as a violation of the unity of the body and the soul), the guide (mentioning the role of the guide in the other world journey), and the journey itself (mentioning for example such classic accounts as those of Dante in _The Divine Commentary_ or those of the seer Emmanuel Swedenborg). The fourth chapter is entitled "Obstacles". Here, the author considers various obstacles faced by the individual in the otherworld journey including such things as fire, the test-bridge, and the encounter with deeds. The fifth chapter is entitled "Reentry" and considers the reentry of the individual into the world after passing through the otherworld journey. This chapter considers such topics as the visionary transformed, the visionary as messenger, the narrator as messenger, vision and revision, and the interpretation of visions.
Part III of this book is entitled "The Modern Near-Death Narrative: A Thematic and Comparative Treatment". The sixth chapter is entitled "From Deathbed Visions to Life After Life". Here the author considers such topics as nineteenth and twentieth century precursors (mentioning such things as the work of individuals such as F. W. H. Myers and the Society for Psychical Research as well as other early researchers), the role of _Life after Life_ as a "new phase" (mentioning the importance of Raymond Moody and his classic 1975 work which coined the term "near-death experience"), and the researchers (mentioning the importance of such individuals as Kenneth Ring, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, and others and noting the conflict between new age type versions of near-death experiences and more fundamentalist Christian versions). The seventh chapter is entitled "The Other World: Modern Itineraries". This chapter considers such modern features of the near-death experience as attitudes towards death and dying, images of the soul, liminality, the journey, the light, judgment, "falling into heaven": mystical states and visions of the whole, otherworld topography, and otherworld demography. In particular it is interesting to note that modern versions involve less fear of judgment and a more pleasant experience of death than medieval versions may have. The eighth chapter is entitled "Back to Life" and examines such topics as approaching the point of no return, the visionary transformed, and the visionary and the interviewer.
Part IV of this book is entitled "The Interpretation of Near-Death Visions". The ninth chapter is entitled "Ecstatics and Statistics" and considers such things as the credentials of ecstatics and the possibility of verification of near-death experiences. The tenth chapter is entitled "Explanations and Counterexplanations". Possibilities considered in this chapter include the question of whether the experiencers were really dead, models of death, natural causes of the near-death experience, and various counterarguments. The eleventh chapter is entitled "Evaluating Near-Death Testimony". This chapter considers such topics as experiential claims, double vision, corporeal imagery, the question of interpretation, another world to live in, and the orientation of this study. The author ends by relating near-death experience to imaginative experience and states that near-death experiences have as much to say about the world after death as they do about ourselves as imaginative beings. The book ends with an appendix entitled "Chronology of Medieval Visions".
This book offers an interesting study of the near-death experience and the otherworld journey in the literature from ancient times and especially the medieval period and compares this to the modern day. Such a study is highly useful for those who seek to understand about the possibility for survival of bodily death. In particular, it is interesting to note how many features of the otherworld journey have changed (but also how many remain the same) since the medieval period. As such, this book remains an interesting study and account for those who seek to better understand life and death and the possibility of life after death.
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Its a bit difficult, not a casual read
Rating  (3)
Date: 2006-02-27
4 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
I have started reading this book and I am sad to say its a bit difficult to read. There is no subject that intrigues me more than the near death experience, and I read everything I can find on the subject. This is one of those books that you have to read in dead silence or you will miss something in her very long, very complicated paragraphs. I suppose it is Carol's doctoral thesis or something. Its written in a flat accademic fashion that is a bit cold and technical. I am still going to plod through this book, but I will have to sit at a desk to do it, with pen, paper and dictionary in hand. I hope the information gleened will be worth the difficulty of getting through the research. I can only hope.
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Scholary and dense but very informative
Rating (3)
Date: 2004-06-05
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experiences in Medieval and Modern Times by Carol G. Zaleski, is a scholarly look at "near death experiences" from the middle ages to the current times. It is a tad bit dated, but is still a wonderful jumping off point into this exciting area of study. She does her research very well, and presents a very thorough survey from both literature sources as well as first hand accounts, summarizing the major similarities between the time periods as well as their distinct differences. At the end she recounts some of the numerous theories out there surrounding NDE research, and gives her summation of the work she has completed. This book has a very scholarly tone to it, a very interesting read, but could be hard for some people to truly appreciate.
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Fair and Fascinating study
Rating  (4)
Date: 2000-08-01
15 out of 15 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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