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I would like to highlight a publication that has been in print for some time but is fairly new to me.
Otherworld Journeys (1987) is quite possibly 'the' most important book on near-death experiences ever published, and I state this sans hyperbole.
For decades, make that centuries, prior to medical science and Raymond Moody's Life After Life, there has existed within literature many an afterlife narrative; accounts dating back to medieval times and even earlier. There are the more familiar stories, such as the Egyptian 'myth' of Thoth with its weighing of souls on scales, or Plato's references to Hades.
A substantial portion of Carol Zaleski's Otherworld Journeys, however, concerns itself primarily with medieval and relatively obscure 'return from death' testimonies, culled from various sources of the period, including a look at a fascinating extracanonical text which expands upon the Apostle Paul's out-of-body trips to the celestial (and abyssal) realms, as only briefly alluded to in Scripture.
Whether it's the disturbing 'afterlife' account of a 6th-century hermit as told by pope Gregory the Great or the equally unpleasant 'afterlife' experience of a man named Drythelm as told by an 8th-century scholar named Bede, the common thread uniting all these multiple medieval narratives is a shared imagery, if not topography, highly suggestive of a postmortem world far removed from the warm and fuzzy, soul-inclusive stories common to our predominantly secularized culture. (Think Bosch.)
The latter half of Zaleski's examination compares the notable differences between these nightmarish near-death reports of medieval record with those of contemporary NDE literature; the latter being, it is to be noted, largely and curiously devoid of providential judgmentalism.
No, this book was not authored by a Christian. As meticulously researched by this former Harvard University lecturer (and seeming proponent of evolutionary theory), Ms. Zaleski's academic work stands apart from others in its field and makes for required reading for anyone interested in this subject and willing to examine it from an overall pre-Moody, broader historical perspective.
In the end, the question remains: What is one to make of the striking contrast in afterlife content as evidenced in Zaleski's phenomenal comparative study? Why has the afterlife realm apparently become far more pleasant and heavenly since the 20th century, despite our generally living in a more faithless age when compared to centuries past?
Otherworld Journeys is dense and suffice it to say does not make for light reading, yet I'm glad to have discovered it.
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