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A spatial analysis of rock art located within the lower Pecos region of southwest Texas and northern Mexico reveals the presence of a recurring motif that depicts anthropomorphic figures passing through an opening in a serpentine arch. An extensive review of the ethnographic literature and archaeological record of cultures within Mesoamerica and the Gran Chichimeca indicates that this motif is widespread and generally associated with specific beliefs about the shamanic journey into the spirit world. Based on analogies drawn from the ethnographic literature, the lower Pecos region motif can be interpreted as a pictographic representation of the shamanic journey made by Archaic Chichimecans into the spirit world. The evidence also indicates that the cosmologies of the cultures within Mesoamerica and the Gran Chichimeca were well established in the Chihuahuan Desert at least 4,000 years ago.

Data from the NAN Ruin in the Mimbres Valleysw New Mexico, are used to trace architectural changes from pithouse to pueblo. These changes co-occur with changes in hearth type, storage practices, mortuary custom and cera1nic style. The architectural changes are traced from extended-entrance pithouses, a transition of modified pithouses beginning in the early 10th century A.C., to sunken floor rooms with cobble-adobe wall construction, and ending with surface pueblos of the Classic Mimbres Period in the early 11 th century. Taxonomically, the period in question has been labeled the Mangas phase and a critique of the concept is presented. The architectural changes have been linked to a greater reliance on agriculture and changing storage practices brought about by population increase. The shift to ceiling hatchways, slab-lined hearths, and sub-floor burials however, are changes that may be linked to symbolic expressions of the multi-layered universe and passage to the Otherworld, a cosmology common n...

Experts respond to the same incentives as people in other areas of human action, and in the same ways. This insight is a truism: Experts are ordinary people, not otherworld creatures. The disciplined pursuit of this common sense observation helps us to reach conclusions about experts that might be surprising or counterintuitive.

The question 'Where does the sun go at night?' may have occupied both prehistoric and Medieval minds. It may be depicted on some Bronze Age and Iron Age metalwork. Proof copy of an article published in W. J. Britnell and R. J. Silvester (eds), Reflections on the Past. Essays in honour of Frances Lynch, 337-50. Cambrian Archaeological Association, Welshpool, 2012. peer-reviewed

Straipsnio objektas – internetu plintantys naratyvai, kuriuose jaunimas dalijasi savo arba kitų patirtimi apie susidūrimą su anapusybe ar kitais antgamtiniais reiškiniais. Pamėginsime aptarti jaunimo internetinio folkloro, kuriame vienokiu ar kitokiu aspektu paliečiama kito pasaulio egzistavimo, antgamtiškumo tema, specifiką, paanalizuoti, kaip pasakojimuose apie mistines anapusybės patirtis atsiskleidžia jaunimo požiūris į pomirtinį gyvenimą, nustatyti, ar tokie šiuolaikiniai siužetai turi sąsajų su tradicinėmis sakmėmis. Bus nagrinėjami sakmiškų elementų turintys pasakojimai, o jiems artimi folkloro žanrai, tokie, kaip šiurpės ir burtai, aptariami tik fragmentiškai, nes daugiau ar mažiau yra nagrinėti kitų mokslininkų straipsniuose. Kadangi virtuali interneto terpė apriboja galimybes nustatyti tikslų kūrinių skleidėjų amžių, žodžiai „jaunimas“, „jaunuoliai“ čia vartojami sąlygiškai, turint omenyje ir vaikus, ir jau ūgtelėjusius paauglius (spėjamas amžius – maždaug 7–18 m.). Tyrimo metodai – lyginamasis, aprašomasis, analizės. The article is focused on the stories spread in the internet by the young people describing their encounters with the otherworldly reality. The somewhat naïve interpretation of the events and the manner of speaking typical to these stories allows us to assume that narrators of them are rather young people. When investigating the internet folklore, one is confronted with a variety of genres. The legend-like narratives about the supernatural beings are closely related to the horror stories and the children’s magic. In this article, those stories that aim at transmitting one’s own or someone else’s personal experiences related to extraordinary mystical events, are classified as the legend-like narratives. The public discussion of such experiences is supposed to validate the uniqueness of the experience in question and to prove the extreme courage of the young person. According to the internet stories, the children and teenagers are apt to attribute supernatural, unreal characteristics to the phenomena that could be rationally explained, moreover, subsequently interpreting the whole experience as an encounter with the supernatural world and its inhabitants. This leads the author to conclude that children and teenagers are much more than adults inclined to mythologize their daily surroundings, e.g. being much more ready to assume the opened door or a misplaced object to be the doings of a ghost or of some other supernatural being. Just like in the traditional folk legends, in these narratives the mystical events are considered to be real. Another indicator of the mythical thinking prevailing in the internet stories is the traditionally typical time and circumstances of appearance of the otherworldly beings. Places related to somebody’s death are avoided, while the existence of a special connection between the dead and the living is firmly believed in. The experienced encounters with the supernatural sphere result in ambivalent feelings of both curiosity and fear. The great number of such narratives reveals the hidden unease of the young people and their striving to be assured here and now, on earth, that life does not end with death. The only curious thing is that the modern young people, aided by magical practices, look for the signs of the otherworldly existence in the dark borderlands between fantasy and reality, instead of addressing religion and faith

A number of recent papers have discussed the episode atOdyssey10.156–72 in which Odysseus, on the third morning after landing on Circe's island, sees, kills, and transports a huge stag whose meat revives his men, who are exhausted in both body and spirit. Since the incident does not advance the main action, it invites interpretation, particularly since it is so richly elaborated. Naturally, it has received several: that the stag should be understood as a transformed human, and thus prefigures the rest of the episode; that the incident marks the liminality of Odysseus, who is about to lose some of his manhood in remaining for a year on the island; that the stag derives from the magical animal which, in folktale, often leads the hero into the Otherworld or the Underworld; and that it serves, both within its immediate context and within the narrative as told to the Phaeacians, as a figure for heroic action, removed from the battlefield and rendered ‘urbane’ by its emphasis on the cleverness with which Odysseus transports the dead animal rather than on the actual killing. I would like to point to a completely different aspect of the episode and to suggest that although some of these studies may be true pointers to its origin, its function within the narrative is straightforward and does not in itself demand such elaborate interpretation: the incident with the stag belongs to a series of incidents that test the ability of Odysseus and his crew to obtain meat, and so develop central themes of feasting, social order, and leadership.

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.

The 1991 bicentenary of Michael Faraday's birth brought forth a fair harvest of new works of which the three books reviewed here are a fair sample. They run the gamut from a new and important biography to a semipopular paperback with a charming and very useful assessment of Faraday's scientific career in between. Every biographer of Faraday has acknowledged the central influence of his religion upon his life but, because of the apparent paucity of sources, has been unable to deal with it except in rather vague generalities. Geoffrey Cantor has sought to remedy this by seeking and finding a real treasure trove of historical materials on the Sandemanian sect to which Faraday belonged. His first four chapters are devoted to a detailed and scholarly investigation of the sources, organization, rules, and general world view (or perhaps otherworld view would be more appropriate) of those brothers and sisters in Christ from whom, as John Tyndall pointed out, Faraday drew his sustenance for the workaday world. These chapters provide a rich and new view of Faraday's life outside his science and are a major contribution to Faraday scholarship. There were some questions that came to me as I read. Since the Sandemanians took the Bible literally, what did they do with the fact that it was not originally written in English? Given Faraday's sensitivity to precise meanings of words, is it not curious that he could apparently accept, without question, the words of Anglican divines? And what, precisely, was the Sandemanian doctrine? Did Original Sin condemn mankind to damnation without the intercession of Jesus? Good Works, we are told, were worthless in themselves, but what endowed them with grace? And how

Several insights should by now be clear to all students of Nabokov who have assimilated the critical literature of the past twenty years: that he is a Romantic who views this world as a parody of the otherworld, causing his works to abound in doublings, mirrorings, and inversions; that the glimmerings of another existence beyond our own may occasionally be discerned in nature, in fate's workings, in art; and that the puzzles and rich referentiality of Nabokov's texts to other literature are designed to send the reader on a quest for the transcendent. Early critics of Nabokov's work mistakenly viewed his fictional worlds as hermetic, as arcane self-referential systems designed as metaliterary manifestos; Page Stegner's Escape into Aesthetics is a frequently reviled pure example, but Alfred Appel's pioneering work, focused as it was on modernism, erred in the metaliterary direction as well.1 After Ellen Pifer dared to show us Nabokov's concern with universal human issues, Brian Boyd's book on Ada also stressed the humanity of Nabokov's

The current effacement of a deterministic, universal, scientific narrative to explain and control reality has left in its place a play of alternative narratives. The range of these explanations starts in a philosophical discourse we call deconstruction, an epistemology of textual criticism previously restricted to literary analysis. Now the entire infrastructure inherited from classic mechanics is being called into question, including its totalizing positivistic off‐shoots in the social sciences, leaving uncertain what is real, actual, or true. In this competition of narratives, the shamanic explanation provides additional answers to these categories. It distinguishes itself from alternative versions by a drive to bridge and unify the naterial here‐and‐now and the non‐material otherworld.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire are exemplary works of art that continue to push the boundaries of aesthetic and ethical literary theory. Critics and theorists alike once strove to categorize these tenets so central to Nabokov’s work, but in current reviews many have chosen to defer a deterministic analysis of the novel’s themes and instead relegate the philosophical and artistic value of his texts to the realm of “potustoronnost” (“otherworld”). This paper argues that the artistic puzzle that motivates such a critical assessment is in fact more complexly related to Nabokov’s strong opinions about art, aesthetics, and ethics, and ignoring a finer analysis of these themes renders a general term such as “otherworld” unsatisfactory. My research explores two principle motifs—reality and imagination—in an attempt to join Nabokov’s artistic mechanisms with his well-established aesthetic and ethical axioms. Additionally, I invoke the preceding work of Gustauve Flaubert, Madame Bovary, in order to demonstrate how Nabokov has, almost a century later, complemented Flaubert’s negative representation of art’s integration into his characters’ average realities (via a literary critique of interested aesthetics) with a positive, humanistic perspective that invokes moral sentiment. This essay strives to show how beauty and morality connect reality and imagination to aesthetics and ethics; and ultimately, how these interrelationships provide a dimensionality to art that invites the thoughtful reader to an elevated state of “aesthetic bliss.” I offer a refreshing perspective on Nabokov’s artistic priority of attaining “aesthetic bliss” that synthesizes and expands upon the current dialogue.

As beings neither angelic nor demonic, fairies constitute the ambiguous supernatural in romance. From their first literary appearances in the Old French Lais to their representations in the early printed romances of the late sixteenth century, fairies are portrayed as ontologically unique figures who possess the ability to do things that are unexpected, unprecedented, and otherwise impossible. They come from the Otherworld (distinct from the worlds of ordinary humanity and orthodox theology), and on account of these supernatural origins they are free not only from the physical laws of normal time and space, but also from the standard laws of logic, and from the moral strictures of ordinary human interaction. It is these qualities, above all, that give fairies their unique narrative interest and their imaginative depth. Romance authors recognized this creative potential, and in a fully fictional form that allowed for, and even privileged, the presence of marvels and the supernatural, these authors used fairies to explore issues and achieve narrative effects that could not be accomplished in any other way. This book traces these functions, examining how fairies are represented and used across romance to fit different audience expectations and aesthetic purposes. A study of fairies in romance, however, cannot only be about the fairies themselves.

Heltzel, Anne. Circle Nine. Somerville, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 2011. Print. Why are hapless females in YA novels always named Abby? I don’t know , the amnesiac narrator of Circle Nine would reply. That’s just what it says on my necklace . So begins Anne Heltzel’s debut thriller: a teenaged girl awakens on the pavement outside a burning building with no memories and no name, save the one she wears in gold around her neck. With her is a mysterious, charismatic youth named Sam, who claims to be her friend. Sam persuades Abby to retreat from the fire and into the woods, where they hide in the safety of his “cave-palace”: a glittering subterranean paradise full of shimmering fabrics and sumptuous furniture. There, the two of them sip pomegranate wine, discuss fine literature, and forswear all contact with the outside world, which Sam likens to an Aleghierian hell (hence the book’s title). We suspect this a fantasy, invented by Abby to protect herself from an uglier cave and an uglier Sam, to say nothing of the ugly events occluded by her smoke-kippered memory. The question is: whose fantasy is it? What sixteen-year-old with cheap bling on her neck would retreat into a happy place wrought with literary allusion, Platonic cave metaphors, and Oriental carpets? This is clearly the reverie of the author herself, still in love with her various muses. Abby’s fantasyland, though out of character, is not necessarily a detriment to the novel itself. Indeed, we could do without the predictable combination of flashbacks and sleuthing by which Abby reconstructs her true identity, and abide instead within her doomed and darkly luminous otherworld. For it is there that Heltzel’s storytelling is at its boldest, her writing most sensuous and wild, and it is here that the novel promises—if only briefly—to be something other than the dreary chestnut about a naive girl brought low by bad luck and sly men. Recommended with reservations: 2 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Sarah Mead-Willis Sarah is the Rare Book Cataloguer at the University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections Library. She holds a BA and an MLIS from the University of Alberta and an MA in English Literature from the University of Victoria.

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.

M a g i c , W i t c h c r a f t a n d t h e O t h e r w o r l d . By Susan Greenwood. Berg: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 1 85973 450 2, Pbk.

The default behavior of all commodity operating systems today is to restart the system when a critical error is encountered in the kernel. This terminates all running applications with an attendant loss of "work in progress" that is nonpersistent.Otherworld is a mechanism that microreboots the operating system kernel when a critical error is encountered in the kernel, and it does so without clobbering the state of the running applications. After the kernel microreboot, Otherworld attempts to resurrect the applications that were running at the time of failure. It does so by restoring the application memory spaces, open files and other resources. In the default case it then continues executing the processes from the point at which they were interrupted by the failure. Optionally, applications can have user-level recovery procedures registered with the kernel, in which case Otherworld passes control to these procedures after having restored their process state. Recovery procedures might check the integrity of application data and restore resources Otherworld was not able to restore.We implemented Otherworld in Linux, but we believe that the technique can be applied to all commodity operating systems. In an extensive set of experiments on real-world applications (MySQL, Apache/PHP, Joe, vi), we show that Otherworld is capable of successfully microrebooting the kernel and restoring the applications in over 97% of the cases. In the default case, Otherworld adds zero overhead to normal execution. In an enhanced mode, Otherworld can provide extra application memory protection with overhead of between 4% and 12%.

At the outset, it may be well to recall the ideas about the afterlife that the Scrolls inherited from the earliest apocalypses, those of Enoch and Daniel. George Nickelsburg has recently provided a very helpful review of the evidence. The Book of the Watchers , in 1 Enoch 22, famously speaks of four hollow places under a mountain where the dead are separated into various groups to await the final judgment. The fate of the wicked is described somewhat more consistently in the early apocalypses. According to 1 Enoch 22, the wicked who have not been subjected to judgment in their lifetime will suffer "scourges and tortures of the cursed forever" The books of Enoch (excepting the Similitudes ) and the book of Daniel were preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls in multiple copies, and their views on the afterlife were presumably known to the authors of the sectarian scrolls. Keywords: book of the watchers ; Daniel; dead sea scrolls; Enoch; George Nickelsburg

The Latin Vision of Ezra belongs to the tradition of Jewish and Christian apocalypses in which a visionary is taken to view the punishments of the wicked in hell and the rewards of the righteous in paradise. Two such apocalypses were translated from Greek into Latin and were read in the medieval West. The most popular of these two was the Apocalypse of Paul . The other was the Latin Vision of Ezra , which, like the Apocalypse of Paul , was redacted in the medieval period and is extant in four recensions of varying length. Both influenced the descriptions of the otherworld that appear in the many medieval visions attributed to named medieval people. The relationship between the Latin Vision of Ezra , and the Greek Apocalypse of Ezra and the Apocalypse of Sedrach , shows that the long recension is the most original form. Keywords: Apocalypse of Paul ; hell; medieval West; Vision of Ezra

This chapter focuses on a few preliminary aspects in approaching ancient imageries of the otherworld. In the context of the author's discipline, the study of religion, this chapter remarks upon the opportunities for, and attendant problems of, a comparative approach to such a vast array of conceptions of the otherworld. How might one engage in a profitable exchange with philological, exegetical and theological approaches to this topic? The author's thoughts on this question are articulated in three interrelated sections. Firstly, the author begins with a few hermeneutical remarks aimed at situating contemporary interest in otherworldly concepts in ancient religions. The second stage offers some methodological observations on comparative analysis. Finally, attention is drawn to the various media one is considering to reconstruct religious images on existential and cosmological dimensions of human life. Keywords: afterlife imageries; ancient religions; cosmological dimensions; otherworldly concepts

International audience; Gráinne Ní Mháille (aka Gráinne Mhaol, or “Granuaile”) stands out as a unique figure in Irish History and national symbolism; her fame and remarkable popularity come from the exceptional life she led, in exceptional circumstances: she was not only a chieftain, with a political and military role to play in troubled times for Ireland, under the reign of Elizabeth I of England, whom she met on a very public occasion in London, at Greenwich Castle. She was also at the head of a fleet that raided forts and garrisons in the West of Ireland and plundered local kingdoms.As a result, she was soon perceived to be “larger than life” and gave rise to numerous myths and symbols. As she was the product of a period when nationalism was largely unknown, this article will analyse the conjunction of historical facts and the birth of a national legend, to be found in a vast reservoir of myths that are part and parcel of the Gaelic heritage. Then the avatars of those myths, largely shaped according to political and military circumstances, will be examined and put into perspective.Part one will focus on Granuaile’s biography in relation to the role women were given in Gaelic society, in the field of matrimony, lineage and political power. Against all odds, Grace O’Malley managed to get some political recognition, as illustrated by the numerous battles she wedged against the most powerful representatives of English authority and her meeting with the Queen of England in 1597.Part two will be devoted to the mythological features of female Sovereignty and warfare (with the figures of the mythical Queen Medb and the warlike Mórrígu) that were gradually associated with Granuaile and form the basis of the legend that took shape throughout Irish history and political poems and songs, particularly when Ireland was struggling to shake off England’s grip on its political destiny. Such phenomenon is clearly exemplified in the 18th century with the adhesion of the Irish aristocracy to the cause of the Stuarts in the war of succession to the English throne, followed by the revolutionary uprising of 1798 called ‘the Year of the French’, then in 1916 with the Easter Rising, and the preponderant role of streets ballads and songs of rebellion.

This chapter concerns specifically on the representations of otherworldly realities in the Book of the Watchers . That is to say, many of the sites one might associate with the sacred from the perspective of the ancients were inaccessible and available to only the divine, celestial or liminal beings or certain elect few. There are aspects to Enoch's visionary experience and to the heavenly temple that are unique. The chapter examines three very different sites associated with the otherworld in the Book of the Watchers : the heavenly temple, the prison of the stars and the Pardes of Righteousness or Truth. One of these otherworldly sites functions as the eternal home for the divine, one serves as the temporary holding cell for disobedient celestial beings, and one relates to traditions concerning ancestors, the first couple and an unusual tree. Keywords: book of the watchers ; Enoch; heavenly temple; otherworldly sites

The way Paul phrases the visionary experience and the obstacle to exaltation raises several questions. Why does Paul speak in the third person singular about his own visions and revelations? What is unutterable about the things heard in the rapture to the third heaven? How could the second half of the passage about the restraints which keep the apostle from being too elated be understood? In other words, why does Paul phrase revelation the way he does it in this passage? In other passages of his Letters, Paul is all the more versatile about revelations concerning, for instance, the expected coming of the Lord (1 Thess 4:13-18) and resurrection of the dead . This essay reconsiders Paul's formulation in this passage in light of the larger context of the letter and of Jewish apocalyptic literature contemporary to Paul, in search of the meaning of the very restrained terms. Keywords: Jewish apocalyptic; Paul; visionary experience

This chapter explains what does the otherworld of the dead look like in the Epistle ? if there is very little in the document that describes the world outside of earthly life in the present, to what extent do the text traditions that preserve the Epistle provide clues from which to draw inferences? how does the eschatology of the Epistle relate to and reflect an understanding of the world which the writer(s) assumed? It argues that, to a significant degree, the cosmology of the Epistle was based on its reception and adaptation of an earlier Enochic seer's vision of places for the dead in the Book of Watchers , especially as described in 1 Enoch chapters 21-22. After a comparison between the earlier and later Enochic traditions, the chapter then considers how the religious and social climate underlying the Epistle may have affected its cosmology. Keywords: 1 Enoch ; book of Watchers ; cosmology; Enochic traditions; Epistle

ON a recent visit to a Cardiff bookshop specialising in Welsh publications, the writer of the present article counted eleven different published versions of the story of the fairy from Llyn Y Fan Fach. The tale, which first appeared in print in the nineteenth century, tells the story of a fairy woman from the depths of Llyn y Fan Fach in Carmarthenshire who married a mortal. She returned to her supernatural realm when her husband violated conditions she herself had laid down, but her children became the famous doctor-magicians, the Physicians of Myddfai.' The published versions, both Welsh and English, currently gracing the shelves of the bookshop at the time of this little ad hoc field exercise all contained suitably romantic illustrations ' la Arthur Rackham. The tale has become firmly fixed in the canon of 'Welsh folktales'. Somehow it seems so typically Welsh with its otherworld fairy bride, poignant sense of lost love, and its doctor-magician sons. Very few printed collections of 'Welsh Folktales' are without it, which presents the interesting situation, in regards to the variant associated with Llyn Y Fan Fach, of a Welsh tale having to be translated back into its original language.2 Print is of course the important word. The Llyn y Fan Fach story appeared in 1861 in the introduction to The Physicians of Myddfai which contained a translation of the medical texts associated with this family and an introduction containing a long, printed English version of the tale.3 This is the first time this story of an otherworld bride was attached to the quite genuine, but presumably independent, traditions and medieval medical texts associated with this family of famous physicians.4 The printed version is long, and rather over-written. The lake lady's hair 'flows gracefully in ringlets over her shoulders ... whilst the glassy surface of her watery couch served for the purpose of a mirror'. The sun 'gilds with its rays the peaks of the Fan' and the young man vainly 'strains his eyeballs' over the lake looking for the 'enchanting vision'.5 Although the elements of the tale are probably genuine and were collected by the Welsh publisher and antiquary William Rees, native of Tonn, which is not far from Llyn Y Fan Fach, the version is given here in English. Once again the Celtic Twilight seems about to cast its roseate and distorting glow on the folklore itself. Fortunately Llyn y Fan Fach is not the only source for information about the Welsh Lake Lady. About three dozen variants of the tale dating from the tenth to the twentieth century are known, and the very fact that the tale has attained such a curious, almost icon-like status, tells us much about perceptions of Welsh tradition in and outside Wales. The study of folklore is not simply a matter of disentangling the purely oral from the literary and fictitious. The strands intertwine, and despite the comparatively small numbers, the Welsh versions of the Otherworld Bride allow us to chart the development of the tale in a changing cultural context. The tale is part of a widely distributed supernatural legend tradition in which an otherworld woman marries a mortal, but eventually returns to her world leaving him and their children. The tale is widespread, particularly in northern and western European countries where the woman is sometimes in animal form and the loss and recovery of her animal skin motivate her marriage and return. Sometimes she

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.

In the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, no explicit reason is given for the reversal. The afterlife scene with its description of the torments of the rich man, the good lot of Lazarus, and the permanence of both fates serves Luke’s rhetoric of repentance. The exhortation to repent is aimed at those who resemble the rich man’s brothers. The reversal of fates between rich and poor also occurs in some writings. It is a favorite theme in many satires of Lucian of Samosata. In contrast to Luke’s account, Lucian’s poor are not especially rewarded but they find death a relief. The fate after death is permanent and cannot be changed in the otherworld. It is only after death that the rich man realizes that he failed to obey God’s will but it is too late for him to repent.Keywords: afterlife scene; fates; God’s will; Lazarus; Lucian; Luke; reversal; Rich Man; Samosata

When ethnographers study the foods and food practices of a community or a people, even when they concentrate their efforts on everyday foods and their production, distribution, preparation, and consumption in this world, they usually find that there is much more to describe than they had anticipated. When the study embraces religious uses of foods, and therefore includes foodways pertaining to the otherworld(s) as well as food practices involved with transitioning between worlds, the description becomes even more complex, for it must then include food for the deities and food for the soul, among other categories of foods along with such other food practices as those discussed below. Foodways that are part of religious practice are generally more ritualized, specifying also in greater detail the performers, practices, and paraphernalia involved than would be done with secular foodways. I hope to present, in a programmatic way, without dealing with the secular foodways and everyday foods of people in this world, some of the complexity of foodways involving consumption and religion.

The Internet presents us with a wide range of novel experiences for which we do not have corresponding "real-world" experiences that would help us in psychologically organizing our understanding of this new communication medium. Our difficulty in organizing our psychological experiences with the Internet and cyberspace results in our inappropriately applying models developed from "real-world" experiences to the new medium of cyberspace. This article proposes that, on a fundamental level, our experiences with cyberspace are being unconsciously organized around the archetypal theme expressed in the Celtic conceptualization of the Otherworld, or sidhe. The parallels between cyberspace and the Celtic Otherworld are explored and the implications for understanding our reactions to the Internet are discussed.

The environmental sense of text as image evoked by the color-term glas requires further examining of the Otherworld trope in relation to early medieval visual theory. The “problem” of landscape in Tain Bo Cuailnge and its context in the Ulster cycle provides a place to start. The Celticist Francesco Benozzo notes that Tain Bo Cuailnge offers “mere allusions to landscapes, sometimes so vague that they seem to belong to a stylised convention.” But the Tain’s allusive landscape also has been highlighted by an able translator, Thomas Kinsella (among many others), for showcasing topography, “a continuing preoccupation of early and medieval Irish literature.” While the Tain in successive versions does not feature modern-style landscape, it is grounded and focused on places, spaces, and terrain on Ireland, mythically contextualized around the time of Christ. To read the Tain as a literary landscape that in a modern sense is “not there” but nonetheless integrates tradition with physical topography is necessarily to consider its context in the Ulster Cycle and related stories in the Mythological Cycle, all featuring landscape in which otherworldly and human realms interweave with natural topography. The role of such landscape echoes textually Ernst Gombrich’s view of the function of colors in visual art as Benozzo restates it, metonymic in at once being part of reality and representing it,3 but with words in topography taking the place of colors in images. The landscape of the Tain as textual image related to environment subverts Augustine’s paralleling and hierarchizing of reading over viewing, so influential in the West.4

In the early Irish story Immram Brain, whose origins probably trace back at least to the lost eighth-century Book of Druimm Snechtai,1 the legendary Irish ruler Bran mac Febail is near home when he hears music behind him. Although he keeps looking back for the source of it, the music always stays elusively behind. He falls asleep finally in its sweetness. When he wakes, he is lying next to a silver branch whose white blossoms are hard to distinguish from the stem. When he takes the branch into the stronghold where his warriors are gathered, suddenly they see a strangely dressed woman, who sings a song of the otherworldly realm Emain and tells of how she has brought from there a silver branch of an apple tree. So sweetly she sings of her distant otherworldly island that Bran and a party of men sail off to find it, only to discover in their many adventures that the sea itself is an Otherworld, and that their home cojoins this multidimensional archipelago of elements and beings that ultimately makes it an Otherworld as well. While on his adventure, Bran meets Manannan mac Lir, a sea god who shows him that the ocean is teeming with hidden life. Addressing Bran, Manannan says: Caine amrae lasin mBran ina churchan tar muir nglan; os me im charput do chein, is mag scothach imma-reid.

In the early Irish story Tochmarc Etaine (“The Wooing of Etain”), the Otherworld ruler Midir and his former wife Etain are reunited, a millennium after magic had broken up their marriage, near the royal mounds at Temair (Tara) where she lived with her husband, the high king of Ireland. Midir reminds Etain, who has been reborn in cycles of new life, of his Otherworld realm in the landscape of Ireland and her old name in it, Be Find, or “fair lady.”

The ninth-century Periphyseon (De Diusione Naturae) by the Hiberno-Latin philosopher John Scottus Eriugena culminates early Irish Sea writings on nature from the standpoint of intellectual history, although the book was banned for centuries by the Western church and, despite renewed interest in recent years, remains little read (there is no easily accessible English-language translation, for example) and less understood given its early medieval experiential approach to philosophy.1 The work’s symbolism of nature—its sea of divinity and clouds of theophany, its cosmic tree uniting Paradise and earth, and its fourfold textualiconography of a cosmic landscape—remains indispensable, however, for understanding larger cultural contexts of the naturally miraculous Otherworld trope, which move it even beyond the Heideggerian sense of region explored in the last chapter into a more elemental realm. The cosmic-landscape symbolism of the Periphyseon more than its philosophy forms the focus of this chapter, which examines how, in effect, Eriugena’s cosmic iconography extends a place-region analogous in qualities to the Irish Sea Otherworld onto a Creation-wide scale. In other words, the text illustrates views of nature implicit in the Otherworld trope, in ways relevant to current environmental philosophy. Written around the same time as the formation of core literary narratives of Tochmarc Etaine, Tain Bu Cuailnge, and key Irish sources for the Welsh Mabinogi, by an Irish author in Francia with an educational background in the archipelagic milieux of those other texts, the Periphyseon challenges modern assumptions that the distinctive early Irish exegetical concern with miracles as natural “was not tied to a wider theoretical outlook,” but does so with its own iconography.

After rereading the Otherworld trope and Eriugena’s philosophy in terms of connections between environment and text in early Irish Sea cultures, examining the Irish color term glas in two other literary tropes can highlight environment as text in archipelagic ascetic practices. The colors of the winds and colors of martyrdom in early Irish tradition illustrate how color can textually and iconographically express the fluidity of the boundary between body and idea, human and nonhuman, physical and spiritual. In them, color becomes a metonymic expression of landscape, linking the visual and the textual. The primary overlap between the two tropes is found in environmental and cultural associations of the term glas, best translated as “the color of sky in water.” Glas is the color of a southwest wind, from the quadrant of Ireland oriented by tradition toward the Otherworld and by geography toward the ocean. Glas is also the color of a nonviolent ascetic “martyrdom” involving strict self-discipline, glasmartre. The latter encompasses specific bodily and environmental practices, and in them its color evokes biblical aerial waters and clouds associated both with Eriugena’s cosmology and hesychastic-style exercises linking the body and physical world with the uncreated light of divine energies. These motifs of the winds and martyrdom, in the relation of shared colors, evoke the physical context of the Irish Sea archipelago itself.

Many cultures describe their “story-shaped world”1 spatially in terms of a household, hall, or home. Delaware Indian traditions did this in tales of a cosmic longhouse. Early Irish texts sometimes described the three households of heaven, hell, and earth.3 Paul’s cosmic use of the term economia,4 and the modern neologism ecology, both harken back etymologically and semantically to a view of the earth or cosmos as a household. In early vernacular narrative landscapes of Europe’s Atlantic archipelago, the preeminent formative Insular motifs of the “cosmic longhouse” arguably were the otherworldly mound-portals or side of early Irish stories, together with that of the lord’s mead hall of Anglo-Saxon literature.5 These could be extended into larger landscapes, as well. As we saw in chapter three, the Irish mirrored the chthonic Otherworld in the sea. But in Anglo-Saxon hagiography, the eighth-century locale of St. Guthlac’s mound mirrored the mead hall in Beowulf as transformative citadel-tomb opposed to surrounding fenlands, even as the sea figured alienation in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

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.

Rabey, David, 'Ed Thomas: Jazz Pictures in the Gaps of Language', In: 'A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880-2005', Mary Luckhurst (ed), (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.541-550, 2006

U tekstovima vizija prikazuje se drugi svijet unutar kojeg se vrijeme spacijalizira, odnosno, prostorno oblikuje. Prošlost, sadašnjost i budućnost raspoređuju se i dovode u bliski odnos. U srednjovjekovnoj prozi prostor i vrijeme se, ili određuju vrlo precizno, ili su potpuno neodređeni i nevažni. U Tundalovoj viziji nalaze se oba načela. Premda se Tundalova vizija smatra jednim od najdovršenijih djela tog žanra, organizacija prostora onostranog nije vidno napredovala u odnosu na tipičnu zbrku koja je primjetna u ranijim sličnim tekstovima. Ne postoji ideja o cjelovitosti prostora zagrobnog svijeta. Jedino što se čvrsto može odrediti jesu vrijeme i prostor pripovijedanja., There is a noticeable spatialisation of time present in the visionary texts dealing with the concept of the otherworld. Past, present and future are allocated and closely related. In medieval prose, space and time can be either strictly determined or completely ignored and unimportant. Only the happening itself is important, since it contains the eternal and the otherworldly. We can find both aspects in Tundal’s Vision. Despite the fact that Tundal’s Vision is thought to be one of the most developed and elaborated visions, it is noticeable how the organisation of the otherworld regions has not progressed in the way found in earlier visions. The idea of the otherworld’s integrity does not exist. Only the time and the space of the narrative can be firmly established in the text.

In popular culture, al-Andalus is nostalgically represented as a paradise of tolerant coexistence. Many novels, films, and popular histories depict Muslims, Jews, and Christians living together in harmony and prosperity; as a logical consequence, what destroyed alAndalus was intolerance, be it Muslim as in Youssef Chahine’s film Al-Massir (Destiny) or Christian as in Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh. In these depictions, al-Andalus represents the ideal lost homeland, the place where almost everyone could have lived free from violence and discrimination because of ethnicity, religion, or political allegiance. Significantly, many of those who promote this idealized image of al-Andalus have suffered persecution, violence, and/or exile. Imaginatively inhabiting al-Andalus in their writing or filmmaking is a way to make a home for themselves to replace the one that has rejected them. Idealizing depictions of Andalusian coexistence enable their authors to explore possibilities for making the real world a more survivable place and/or for remaking the self in order to be more able to survive exile. Such depictions fuse history and fantasy to produce a credible Otherworld that mirrors this one and other selves who have survived and to some extent overcome the fragmentation of exile.1

Medieval Welsh and Irish texts offer stories of realms that exist in strange contiguity to everyday life, domains often entered through a hill or barrow that seem to be of two worlds at once. The Welsh otherworld of Annwn finds its gateway at Gorsedd Arberth, a mound atop which adventurers like Pwyll sit seeking wonders. In the account of Cu Chulainn’s love for Fand, queen of the mysterious and aboriginal Irish people known as the sidhe, the hero enters a parallel universe through a nondescript tumulus. The Wasting Sickness of Cu Chulainn and the Only Jealousy of Emer [Serglige Con Culainn ocus Oenet Emire] describes the uncanny beings inhabiting this domain as differing from contemporary islanders in their customs, elder history, and potency in magic. Cu Chulainn is cured of self-destructive love for his Fairy Queen only through the intervention of an oblivion spell: he must forget the riches of her world to reinhabit his own. Like many Irish and Welsh stories involving hills as portals, the dominant narrative of The Wasting Sickness of Cu Chulainn seems to enfold within it an untold story about the belatedness of a people to the land they possess, figuring the territory’s earlier inhabitants as an inhuman race whose traces are dwindling, whose presence lingers as if at dimming twilight.

Out of the trees but not free of the animal kingdom, humanity takes to wandering and cave life. Harsh, unpredictable living means equally unpredictable death. Any gradual dying of the person must find a more symbolic space in which to occur, hence giving important impetus to ideas about the otherworld journey.

The ‘birth’ of the good death had continuities with or similarities to its predecessor – dying as otherworld journey – but it also displayed important differences. Awareness and anticipation remained important matters for the dying person as well as his or her kin. To be caught unawares is at best unfortunate and at worst, tragic. Self-awareness of encroaching death became the first feature of a ‘good’ death because it signalled to others an important social characteristic of the person. A person who could tell he or she was dying had clearly learnt the wisdom of dying from their experience of omens, spells, spirit signs or simply from having witnessed many previous deaths of fellow villagers. The illnesses that commonly swept village life had patterns of medical symptoms that could be recognised by any witnesses who had seen them several times before. Smallpox (the virus Variola major ), for example, described by Hopkins (1983) as ‘the greatest killer’ of humanity, enjoyed a three-week course of human destruction. In the first week one hardly noticed any symptoms at all. But by day 9 the symptoms and signs would line up in a most stark and predictable way – headaches, fever, chills, nausea, and backache. This would be followed soon after by a scarlet discoloration spreading from the face to the rest of the body. Then came the rashes.

After a review of the archaeological evidence about the life and death worlds of our Stone Age ancestors, and accepting the uncertainty of the theory and evidence about those times, what can we say about how people died during that period? Obviously people were always aware of death as an inherent part of their biological and social equipment. This is equipment that we share with most animals, perhaps all animals. But beyond that mortal awareness, and as part of our growing human self-consciousness, we gradually became aware of the actual prospect of personal death. In other words, in the face of great biological, interpersonal or interspecies threat we were probably always aware of those series of moments or minutes of our own dying. As we bled to death in giving birth, or encountered great injury during a hunting accident, or during a murderous piece of treachery against ourselves, we knew in those moments that our death was very near. Our death was but minutes, perhaps seconds away. In the Stone Age, personal awareness of dying must have often been short and sudden. The most interesting aspect of Stone Age dying, from a modern point of view, is that it is only in the space of this awareness that the individual seems able to think, feel or do anything before his or her own death because in just about every other aspect of dying it is other people rather than the self that dominate the subsequent social production of dying.