FIRST PERSON AND THE OTHER WORLD

Abstract

The paper examines 30 texts (from interwar period to recent examples) unrecognized so far in Serbian folkloristics as belonging to the same corpus and representing a distinct genre. It is first-person narrative about the experience of temporary death and vision of the other world. This genre became first introduced in Russian folkloristics under the emic term obmiranie and since the pioneer work of N. and S. Tolstoi it became the topic of intensive research, especially in last 30 years. South Slavic examples, however, were only sporadically mentioned and most of them remained virtually unknown in this sense.
The scheme of the genre, as discerned by Tolstois (introduction-circumstances of death; seeing the other world, travelling; returning to life) applies to Serbian narratives too, which confirms that we deal with a specific genre. While there is a couple of emic terms, etic termwe propose is eschatological memorate. Motifs in these examples show the persistence of the traditional concepts of post-mortal existence, but at the same time they overlap with concepts stemming from Orthodox chap-books. The relation between written and oral tradition is therefore taken into account too as important for the transmission and for
forming the wordview of the narratives. Finally, these narratives to some extent resemble NDE narratives, as popularized by R. Moody, but there is a strong difference since folk memorates retain traditional folk Christian worldview. However, we don’t have examples of modern NDE, except for those from a couple of new age healers.