Universitätsverlag Kiel | Kiel University Publishing eBooks
September 1, 2022
Jens Schlieter
2 citations
Der Begriff ›Near-Death Experience‹ bzw. ›Nahtoderfahrung‹, wurde als generischer Begriff von Raymond A. Moody 1975 geprägt. er sollte jene Erfahrungen zusammenfassen, die Menschen aus Zuständen der Todesnähe berichten. Ein genauerer Blick auf die Ideen- und Ereignisgeschichte der frühen 1970er Jahre zeigt allerdings, wie verschiedene Ströme der Konzeptualisierung von religiösen Erfahrungen –...
May 11, 2021
Jens Schlieter
2 citations
The contribution will discuss the impact of American Theosophist Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) on the emerging "science of religion." Evans-Wentz first pursued Celtic studies, concluding in his The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Here, in line with Theosophical doctrines and Psychical Research, he claimed a "Fairyland" as "a supernormal state of consciousness into which men and women...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
3 citations
The similarities between the experiences near death and drug experiences have often been stressed. This chapter goes a step further in providing evidence that the consumption of morphine, hashish, and especially more potent hallucinogens such as LSD in the 1960s and 1970s are to be identified as a major component, or “push factor,” of the emerging discourse on near-death. Not only were several...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
1 citation
This chapter focuses on a long-term development in Western societies addressed as “privatized death,” namely, the assignment of the dying into hospitals and other institutions. This trend, mirrored in the works of French historian Philippe Ariès and psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, so the chapter argues, served as a “push factor” for articulating near-death experiences. Near-death...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
1 citation
A second “push factor” for the increase of near-death experiences (and their reporting), emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, is the introduction of new reanimation techniques that increased the relative and absolute numbers of individuals surviving critical situations (such as heart attacks). In addition, the chapter discusses the impact of the broadly accepted new definition of death, namely,...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
This book offers a modern genealogy of “near-death experiences,” outlining the important functions of these experiences in the religious field of Western modernity. Emerging as autobiographical narratives in the legacy of Christian deathbed visions, narratives of near-death experiences were used in Western religious metacultures (Christian, Esoteric, and Spiritualist–Occult) as substantial...
Oxford Scholarship Online
September 20, 2018
Jens Schlieter
The final chapter of the discursive history outlines how Robert Crookall’s and Robert A. Monroe’s books on “astral projection,” but also C. G. Jung and other researchers discussing paranormal and parapsychological phenomena in the 1960s and early 1970s, already assembled almost all phenomena that Moody could bundle in 1975 under the new term “near-death experiences.” However, the chapter points...