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

(p. viii) Couliano brings to light an observation that hides in plain sight: the living, who seldom reside in these other worlds, pay inordinate attention to the details of these places in which they do not precisely belong.

(p. xii) For Couliano, the multiplicity of worlds seems to be an epistemological necessity, a function of the way the mind works in space. The mind functions, after all, within the space created by the mind. The relationship of mind and space is, therefore, inherently paradoxical and open to many ever-unfolding historical solutions. But no solution can be final. However advanced our knowledge of the surrounding world, the space of the inner mind expands beyond it. That is why, in his view, "there is no end to our imagining more space." We imagine more dimensions than the physical universe furnishes. At stake is the nature of imagination, the character of images, and the function of symbols in shaping reality.

[See p. 9 for Couliano's version of these rules]

(p. xiii) [C]ultural traditions are the outcome of a limited set of rules, such as "There is another world"; "The other world is located in heaven"; "There is body and soul"; and "The body dies, the soul goes to the other world." [...] Across a countably infinite period of time, Couliano seems to argue, such rules produce similar results in the minds of human beings. By thus turning historicism on its head, does he imply the existence of a universal system of mind that governs perception and interferes with the physical world?

(p. 3) The common denominator of the many psychological approaches to the problem of otherworldly journeys and visions is that all of them agree on one fact, and probably one fact only: that the explored universes are mental universes. In other words, their reality is in the mind of the explorer. Unfortunately, no psychological approach seems able to provide sufficient insight into what the mind really is, and especially into what and where the space of the mind is. Cognitive science, which is young, is striving to obtain some answers to these basic questions. The location and properties of our "mind space" are probably the most challenging riddles human beings have been confronted with since ancient times; and, after two dark centuries of positivism have tried to explain them away as fictitious, they have come back more powerfully than ever before with the dawn of cybernetics and computers.

(p. 4) Inside our minds there is no place where dreams and ASC could not take us, yet psychologists say that what we experience is intimately connected either with our individual experience, or with what was already present in our mind at the time of our birth. All explanations - be they in terms of repression of personal sexual desires and impulses or in terms of the collective unconscious - are controversial because they are based on untestible hypotheses, and ultimately they are inadequate, for they completely ignore the question of what the mind is. All the vague talk about "unconscious" and "psyche" that psychoanalysis has given us is the modern equivalent of shamanistic performances or the witch's trip through the air on a broomstick. In all such cases we are dealing with procedures and professional interpretations that are valid only as long s we share the premises of the shaman or the witch. Yet the universal validity of their explanations is highly questionable. We cannot actually understand, for example, what dreams are, if we cannot answer such basic questions as where dreams and visions take place, what dreams are made of, and the like.

Ioan Petru Culianu or Couliano (5 January 1950 - 21 May 1991) was a Romanian historian of religion, culture, and ideas, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer. He long served as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, and also taught the history of Romanian culture at the University of Groningen.

An expert in gnosticism and Renaissance magic, he was encouraged and befriended by Mircea Eliade, though he gradually distanced himself from his mentor. Culianu published seminal work on the interrelation of the occult, Eros, magic, physics, and history.

Culianu was murdered in 1991. His murder has often been suggested to be the result of his critical view of Romanian national politics. Some elements of the Romanian political right openly celebrated his murder. The Romanian Securitate, which he once lambasted as a force "of epochal stupidity", has also been suspected of involvement and of using puppet fronts on the right as cover.

Culianu was born in Iasi. He studied at the University of Bucharest, then traveled to Italy where he was granted political asylum while attending lectures in Perugia in July 1972. He later graduated from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.[1] He lived briefly in France and the Netherlands, before leaving Europe for Chicago, in the United States. There, after a stint as visiting professor, he became a professor at the University of Chicago. He took a Ph.D. at the University of Paris IV in January 1987, with the thesis Recherches sur les dualismes d'Occident. Analyse de leurs principaux mythes ("Research into Western Dualisms. An Analysis of their Major Myths"), coordinated by Michel Meslin.

Having completed three doctorates and being proficient in six languages, Culianu specialized in Renaissance magic and mysticism. He became a friend, and later the literary executor, of Mircea Eliade, the famous historian of religions. He also wrote fiction and political articles.

From wikipedia.

ASC - Altered State of Concsiousness, like dreams, visions, trances etc.

Intertextuality - A reference to the fact that every book, every text, every human expression uses images, words, themes etc. from previous human 'texts'. Texts should be taken widely, especially in this book. Couliano posits that the shape visions take are shaped in part by the way pre-historic shamans and witches interpreted their experiences. These people did not have writing.

OBE - Out of Body Experience

(p. 7) If on the one hand otherworldly journeys should not be too lightly dismissed as being mere products of imagination, one the other they can undeniably be envisioned as a literary genre. This does not necessarily mean that they belong to the realm of pure fiction. Intertextuality is a widespread phenomenon that can be in part explained by our mental tendency to cast every new experience in old expressive molds.

This is where Couliano becomes positively revolutionary:

(p. 8) Yet, with the help of ethnosemiotics, we can establish that human beings had beliefs concerning other worlds long before they could write. Ethnosemiotics analyzes systems of signs without regard to their time setting. It can thus be establish - and as a matter of fact it has - that Paleosiberian cave paintings already show all the traits of a developed shamanistic complex as we still find them displayed by some Siberian shamans.

(p. 9) The Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg (see chapter 2, below), who studied European witchcraft for twenty-five years, came to the conclusion that witchcraft was still practiced in certain zones of eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century as a direct derivative of shamanism. Beliefs recorded in Paleosiberian caves around 1000 B.C.E. were still valid less than a hundred years ago. How can we explain such amazing continuity?

Couliano actually doesn't go quite as far as I do here. He doesn't say shamanism is a universal source, though he does show shamanism as not just continuous in time (from 1000 B.C. to the 19th century), but also in far apart places like Australia, South America, Africa and of course Siberia.

As a scientist - they have to be conservative - his conclusion is simpler: mental rules, culturally transmitted, shape the way people interpret their experience. In this case that way of interpreting shows continuity in time and space that is unparalleled in culture studies. He goes so far as to deny that genetic transmission or a collective unconscious have anything to do with it (p. 9).

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