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.

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?