Out of this World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein

Like his one-time mentor Mircea Eliade, Ioan Culianu wrote at the intersection of religion, magic, science, and history. He was Professor of Religion at the University of Chicago before he was reportedly murdered by Romanian agents in a campus restroom in 1991.

Out of This World is an exploration of imaginative literatures from around the world, demonstrating Couliano’s point that there are common ecstatic visionary experiences across a wide range of cultures and traditions from the ancient world to the present. Despite early mentions of shamanism and ‘ethnosemiotics,’ Couliano has little truck with either New Age baloney or PoMo obscurantism. What he provides is testimony to the boundless creativity of the human imagination. show more

Otherworldly journeys take place in a mental universe, writes Couliano, inside our mind space—which is infinite, since there is no limit to our imagining more space. Examples such as Einstein’s Special and General Relativity and Jorge Luis Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” show that visions of fourth-dimensional space and other levels of reality do not belong only to the deluded fantasies of prescientific peoples. Indeed, instead of quashing wonder and mystery, the new avenues of enquiry opened by cognitive science, mathematics and modern physics have succeeded in remystifying the world.

The real treat here are the obscure literary sources examined by Couliano, from the Chaldaean Oracles to the 6th c. Persian Book of Ardâ Virâz, the Coptic Apocryphon of John to the Muslim legend of mi‘râj and The Purgatory of Saint Patrick. There are Taoist alchemists, Pythagorean rainmakers, Singapore crane riders, Taiwanese ghost brides, drunken Sufis and the pigs of Hell. What more could you want? show less

MÁS ALLÁ DE ESTE MUNDO PARAÍSOS, PURGATORIOS EINFIERNOS,
UN VIAJE A TRAVÉS DE LAS CULTURAS RELIGIOSAS

Este libro conduce al lector hacia un viaje fantástico a
través de una amplia gama de culturas y de tradiciones,
con el fin de examinar el fenómeno de las experiencias del
éxtasis visionario, desde los sumerios y los taoístas hasta
las imaginativas ficciones de Jorge Luis Borges. El autor
ofrece asi un amplio recorrido por los viajes
ultramundanos-moneda corriente desde tiempo
inmemorial- que acaba ilustrando con todo lujo de
detalles la relación existente entre chamanes, magos o
brujas, y fenómenos modernos tales como los estados
alterados de conciencia, las experiencias fuera-del-cuerpo
y las experiencias de cuasimuerte. Un libro-como show more dice
John J. Collins, profesor de Cristianismo y Judaismo
Antiguos en la Universidad de Notre-Dame-
indispensable para cualquiera que esté interesado en la
experiencia mistica y religiosa.

I. P Couliano fue jefe de redacción de la revista
Incognita y profesor de Historia de la Cristiandad en la
Universidad de Chicago. De entre su amplia obra, Paidós
ha publicado también el Diccionario de las religiones,
elaborado en colaboración con Mircea Eliade show less