Near-Death Experiences throughout the History of Art and Science: Challenges for the XXI century
In: Death, Dying, Culture: An Interdisciplinary InterrogationSearch for other papers by Ana León in
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If a new field of near death studies were to be formally established, the name of one of its branches should start with the prefix ‘paleo.’ Depictions of death and dying are as old as the oldest human civilisations, so too are the representations of near death experiences (NDEs, hereafter). The Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead, and The Republic of Plato are the earliest and well known sources. Reports of NDEs can also be traced back to medieval times, e.g. in The Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great, and The Ecclesiastical History of the English People of Saint Bede the Venerable. Classical and contemporary literature have also tackled this issue. For instance, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri offers an allegorical picture of the soul’s journey towards God, which closely resembles some negative NDEs. A Descent into the Maelstrom, by Edgar Allan Poe, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are both stories of shipwreck and survival, which contain some typical elements of NDEs accounts. Similarly, some of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Gustave Doré and Henry Fuseli are outstanding visual representations of an otherworldly reality. A great deal of scientific work has studied this phenomenon as well, posing a very important question: Should death be considered as a process whose first stages can be reverted? This chapter shows how major current advances in the medicine of resuscitation suggest that death is not a point in time during which brain activity ceases, and thus cannot be defined as the moment at which life and consciousness ends. Therefore, the above representations of NDEs may well be prints of a real fact that science is now beginning to consider.