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During the Upper Paleolithic, Ice Age peoples in Europe and Australia used their fingers to trace figurative and non-figurative images in soft sediments that lined the walls and ceilings of the limestone caves they encountered. The resulting images, while fragile, are preserved in at least 70 caves with the oldest dating to approximately 36,000 years ago. During the first 100 years of the study of Paleolithic cave imagery, these finger flutings were largely ignored. Though they make up a larger percentage of cave art than any other form, they are enigmatic and not always visually appealing. In 1912, Henri Breuil famously referred to them as “traits parasites” (parasite lines) and deleted them from his re-drawings of cave images, believing they detracted from the figurative art. Flutings have been interpreted alternately as doodling, serpent or water images, the residue of surface preparation for making, and evidence of the moment when a shaman touches the “skin” of the otherworld. In this paper, we argue that there are three reasons why finger flutings have taken on greater significance in the study of Pleistocene visual cultures. First, theories concerning the meaning and relevance of finger flutings were developed without supporting evidence as no methodology existed by which to study flutings until the beginning of the twenty-first century. Second, there has been a broadening of the definition of “art” in a Paleolithic context to include categories of materials, including finger flutings, which would traditionally have been excluded from consideration. Third, there has been a concomitant shift from a focus on the final product—“the artwork” to an exploration of the embodied process of manufacturing the imagery—the “work” of art. Finger flutings carry with them physical evidence of this process. Finally, by presenting a detailed study of finger flutings at Gargas Cave (France), we consider what is gained by including finger flutings in the study of Paleolithic art and what this “archaeology of intimacy” can tell us about the lived lives of Ice Age peoples.

Situated within the changing economic and political contexts of China’s modernization and globalization, children’s fantasy novels prove to be apt vehicles for exploring the plights and challenges that women and girls face in the new millennium in China. This article provides a feminist critique of two contemporary Chinese children’s fantasy novels, My Mother is a Fairy by Chen Danyan and Jiujiu From the Ghost Mansion by Tangtang, and examines the marginalization and silencing of the otherworld female/child characters in these narratives. It focuses on how they rework old literary tropes and conventions, employing female children as focalizers. These novels are found to construct a binary opposition between the fantastic-female-child and the rational-male-adult, with the latter dominating the female and the child by repressing their propensity for imagination and fantasy. However, although these fantasy novels might seem to conform to the ideological status quo in terms of the patriarchal family structure, they also have a subversive edge in the way that the binary opposition between male and female is transgressed. Such novels point to the formation of a new kind of intersubjective relationship that is based on understanding and tolerance rather than refusal and dominance.

The brunt of scholarship on Marie de France’s Lanval portrays Lanval’s fantastical “Otherworld” as “utopic” in the term’s oldest sense: it is a world that has “no place.” Such scholarship severs the linkage of Otherworld and reality indicated by the lai; the relationship between earth and Avalon, in which one achieves the other, is dis-placed for a simple and disjointed “multivalence of reality” (Hodgson 23). This article discusses Lanval’s Otherworld/Avalon using Anne Wilson’s psychoanalytic approach to a fantastical text “as if the text were a human subject.” Through this approach, this article hopes to reclaim the latent, universal significance of the notion of “Otherworld.”

Ringforts, the most numerous archaeological monument in the Irish landscape, have a dual character as places of early medieval habitation and as supernatural points of access to a fairy Otherworld. In my paper, I examine how these understandings interacted with, challenged and reinforced each other in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and how oral perceptions had a significant if generally unacknowledged role in determining supposedly scientific archaeological perceptions of these monuments.

Prophetic revelations in near-death experiences (NDEs) are a fourth type of flashforwards. Prophetic revelations are similar to another type of flashforward called the prophetic vision, which was identified in 1982 by Kenneth Ring. Like prophetic visions, prophetic revelations are a phenomenon in which NDErs are given a knowledge of the earth's future; they have a global or world focus. Prophetic revelations differ from prophetic visions in that events in the earth's future are told or revealed to the NDEr by a deceased relative or some otherworld person during their NDE, rather than in a visual display, and they are less detailed. Four categories of flashforwards have now been identified. In addition to the prophetic revelation and the prophetic vision are the other flashforwards, the personal flashforward and the otherworld personal future revelation (OPFR). The major features that distinguish these different flashforwards are their focus (global or personal), method of delivery, and detail. All flashforward types occur in a small number of cases and during deep NDEs.

This study looks at three popular works of short fiction, by Leo Tolstoy, Ambrose Bierce, and Katherine Anne Porter, in which the main character dies at the end. Some similarities between these deaths and recent near-death experience (NDE) accounts are that the characters experience various kinds of distancing from their bodies, light and darkness play a role, and two of the stories include a final life review. The principal contrast is that dying in these stories is a lonely and mostly grim business, unsupported by a process that transcends the individual or by progress toward an afterlife or otherworld. The comparison helps define the modern sensibility about dying that is part of the cultural context for interest in NDEs.

Since the mythical time of King Arthur, technology transfer has interested governments. Arthurian history revels in the exploits of the knights as they search for the Holy Grail. Always, it seems, finding it must mean the end to poverty, hunger, illness-all the sufferings of the kingdom. In early renditions of the legend, the Grail was a set of magical talismans to be stolen from the Celtic otherworld. With the coming of Christianity, the Grail evolved into a eucharistic vessel.

Kenneth Ring (1982) described two kinds of precognitive visions in the near-death experience (NDE): the personal flashforward and the prophetic vision. I describe a third category, the otherworld personal future revelation (OPFR). The OPFR resembles the personal flashforward in that it previews the experiencer's personal future, but differs from the personal flash-forward in that it is delivered to the experiencer by another personage in the otherworld rather than appearing in the visual imagery of a life review. The OPFR differs from the prophetic vision in having a personal rather than planetary focus. I cite four historic accounts to illustrate major features of the OPFR: entrance into the otherworld, encounter with others who foretell the experiencer's future, and later occurrence of the foretold events.

The positive aftereffects of near-death experiences (NDEs) are sometimes regarded as due to the possibility that they may be “visions of the beyond.” But that notion could be a serious misconception, similar to what I call the “Columbus Confusion.” Five hundred years ago, Christopher Columbus's belief that he had found a new route to India prevented him from realizing that he had discovered a new continent. Likewise, contemporary belief that NDEs are glimpses of an afterlife may prevent us from realizing their more profound nature. Belief in an afterlife has not historically brought humanity a high quality of life, but NDEs seem reliably to do so, and may offer important clues about why the expanded vitality, the “eternity-consciousness,” of the mystics is commonly blocked. Those clues are obscured by popular emphasis on that minority of NDEs that resemble otherworld journeys.

Allan Kellehear argued that the otherworld society envisioned in near-death experiences (NDEs) is similar to utopian societies. However, his cultural analysis, based on 9 Mormon NDEs, did not reflect the diversity of near-death visions from other cultures. I suggest that these Mormon NDEs were neither as utopian as Kellehear assumed nor representative of contemporary NDE reports, and that a more complete analysis would reveal a variety of NDEs and otherworld visions reflecting the experiencers' sociocultural back-ground. Robert Bellah's model of religious evolution provides a model for charting the NDE's change over time and cultures, and allows us to differentiate the perennial features of the NDE from the transient culturally-determined ones — a first step in understanding the role of NDEs in the quest for an ideal society.