Last weekend I posted my article from the latest Darklore (Amazon US and UK), “Death Before Life After Life“, which looked at accounts of near-death experiences from before the phenomena became well-known through Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life (you can read the article in its original format as a PDF at the Darklore website). I was therefore very interested to read a new blog post this week from Michael Tymn – who’s a fair expert on afterlife-related literature – titled “A Near-Death Experience to Die For“. In his posting, Mike looks at an NDE first published in 1917, in Fanny Ruthven Paget’s book How I Know that the Dead Are Alive, which I didn’t cover in my article.
Paget’s account of what happened to her when she ‘died’ is a very detailed one, and includes many elements that you don’t find in the ‘vanilla’ NDE report. However, it does contain a number of the standards, including the OBE, the guide, meeting loved ones, and the life review. I had some chills though when I read her description of the “city of light”, which she said was constructed of a material that had “the transparency of glass of a variegated whiteness, into which colors, harmonizing in the most delicate way, were coming and going, ever changing”. Not only did I touch on this aspect of “transparent architecture” in my article (when discussing the NDE of Leonora Piper), but I have previously written about this in detail in my 2004 article “Cities of Transparent Gold“.
Curiouser and curiouser….
