Otherworld Journey In Medieval Literature

كتاب: "نَشوة الشَّمول في السّفر إلى إسلامبول، ونشوة المُدام في العود إلى مدينة السّلام" قد تُوّج في فرع تحقيق المخطوطات الفائزة بجائزة ابن بطوطة لأدب الرحلة لسنة 2019. 
والكتاب رحلةٌ مهمةٌ لعلاّمة العراق في القرن التاسع عشر أبي الثناء الألوسي صاحب "روح المعاني". ولهذا الرحلة أهمية استثنائية؛ إذ وقعت في منتصف القرن التاسع عشر بعد عشرين سنة على رحلة رفاعة الطهطاوي إلى باريس. 
وإذا كانت باريس، في رحلة رفاعة الطهطاوي، عنوانًا للاستنارة والتنوير والحداثة، فإنّ إستانبول كانت، عند الألوسي، حاضرة الخلافة والدولة العلية والسّلطنة العّظمى، وكان السلطان عبد المجيد خان خادم الحرمين آنذاك.

حصول هذا الكتاب على الجائزة مكمن سعادة غامرة لأسباب تتصل باقترانها بأدب الرحلة، ولارتباطها بابن بطوطة الطّنجيّ وأبي الثناء الألوسيّ البغداديّ.
المسألة الأخرى التي أودّ أنْ أعرضها، في هذا المقام، هي أنّ نص رحلة الألوسي يُمثّل عنوانًا بارزًا على رفعة النصّ السردي في القرن التاسع عشر عصر النهضة، وهو دليل على أنّ قيمة الانحطاط التي وصم بها الأدب العربي الذي أنجز بعد سقوط بغداد على أيدي المغول سنة 656 هـ وحتى الأدب الحديث تتضمّن موقفًا انحيازيًّا سلبيًّا حال، ولا يزال يحول، دون فحص مدونات الأدب والفكر في تلك القرون المهمة.
ختامًا، هذه فقرة مُستلّةٌ من مقدمة الكتاب الذي حقّقته: "إنّ رحلةَ الألوسيّ رحلةٌ ارتقائيّةٌ من النَّصَب والتّعبِ والكدّ إلى الراحة والدّعة والرّخاء، ورحلة انتقاليّةٌ اعتلائيّة من مدينة السلام بغداد إلى دار السّلطنة العُظمى إسلامبول، وفي ذلك إحالة جليّة على رحلة الإسراء والمعراج النبويّة القرآنيّة. وبعبارةٍ أُخرى فإنّ أبا الثناء الألوسي لا ينشدُ ارتقاءً في المنزلة والرُّتب السّنية وانتقالاً إلى حاضرة الدولة العليّة فحسب بل إنه يرومُ تحويل رحلته إلى مُتخيّلٍ سرديّ يعتمدُ مبدأ محاكاة أثر الأنبياء والأولياء والزُّهّاد والعُبّاد والمُتصوّفة في رحلاتهم التي كانت جزءًا أصيلاً في مُعجزاتهم وكراماتهم ومُجاهداتهم، ومُكوّنًا مركزيًّا في رسالاتهم وخطاباتهم، وفي هذا المستوى تتجلّى ملامح رحلة الألوسيّ الإسرائيّة وتنكشفُ دلالاتها المعراجيّة".

The article is the first Polish attempt to provide a theoretical framework for a relatively unknown term ‘allotopia’, coined by Umberto Eco in essay Il mondi della fantascienza. However, instead of following rather poststructuralist Eco’s reasoning, the text proceeds with the deconstruction of the underlain dichotomy between real (natural, ordinary, known, empirical, realistic) and unreal (unnatural, extraordinary, unknown, counterempirical, fantastic) world — which is subsequently exposed as fundamental for heretofore fantasy and SF studies. Consequently, the paper encourages postmodern reading of those ‘allotopian’ texts that resign from supporting a colonial, two-world model in favour of philosophy conscious worldbuilding.

A commentary volume to my bilingual edition of the Hervarar saga. It contains five separate studies into various aspects of the saga with the aim to bring to the reader as much as possible from the scholarly literature and discussions that has been published until then. The chapters are:
1) "Riddles, Runes and the Secret Language of the Skalds" where the the genre of riddles is explored in the context of medieval Europe, followed by the exploration of the role of metaphor in riddling, but also in skaldic kennings. Then the riddling contest from the saga is explored and connected to its parallels in Old Norse literature;
2) "Narrative Structure of Hervarar saga", here the structure of the saga is thoroughly explored and analyzed building on the impressive work of Torfi Tulinius and adding to it,
3) "The Maiden and the Sword of Destiny", in this chapter the motif of the warrior maidens and shieldmaidens as well as the meykóngr phenomenon is analyzed and connected to the patriarchal idea of virginity as "noncastrated" state equalling to masculinity; also the role of the ancestral sword is explored in the context of the saga genre
4) "Gudmund, Mound-Flame and the Otherworld", here the whole concept of the journeys to the Otherworld is systematically introduced and various forms of Otherness and borders of the Otherworld is explored
5) "The Fratricidal Battle, Odin and Eschatology", here the historical roots of the final battle (The Battle of the Goths and Huns) is presented as well as the mythological motifs appearing in connection with the battle (i.e. Ódin's role as the originator of the strife)

[For those who don't read Czech. but would like to use the text, I recommend using DeepL for translating the whole text to English]

PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR COPIES OF THIS PAPER. This paper has been withdrawn from academia.edu in anticipation of the publication of a revised, updated and much expanded version, forthcoming from University of Exeter Press in August 2024:
See https://www.exeterpress.co.uk/products/the-green-children-of-woolpit

This drafts gives an overview over major steps in the shift of use of society-building pagan concepts as displayed in Insular Celtic literature to their oppressive abuse by Norman-Christian conquerors. The re-interpretation of pagan  concepts as expressed in literary motifs formed part of the ideological discourse to ensure the establishment of a much more hierarchical feudal society..

Two myths that describe Óðinn’s quest for the Sacred Mead are presented side by side in Hávamál – the myth of the self-sacrifice on the Tree and the journey to Suttungr’s hall. While their protagonist, the quest and the boon are their connecting points, their content is otherwise completely different and the myths are usually interpreted as two unconnected stories. Their difference could be expressed as a series of oppositions: simple-complex, static-dynamic, passive-active etc. Their contrast is so pronounced that it paradoxically seems to point to their deeper connection. This text presents an interpretation that connects both myths and explains their systematic contrast. It uses Snorri’s description of a trance state ascribed to Óðinn and shows how one of the myths corresponds to the situation of the symbolically dead body while the other myth corresponds to the active aspect of the person travelling to the Otherworld. The pattern applied on the two Odinic myths is then analysed and other applications are suggested.

A monograph on the theory of myth. The first section analyzes the relationship of myth to the world, presenting various theories of the meaning and function of myth; the second section is called "Myth and Language" and focuses on the use of metaphor, metonymy and other tropes in myth and connects it to the framework of conceptual metaphors; the third chapter is called "Myth and Otherness" and focuses on the relationship of myth to the things beyond the bounds of symbolic system; the fourth chapter is called "The Monomyth of the Twice-Born" and concerns itself with the communication between This World and Otherworld in the form of initiation, sacrifice and hero's journey; the last chapter "Myth and Paradox" uncovers the paradoxical core of myth and its creative and re-creative power. [the present pdf contains only a sample of the whole text with parts left out]

The motif in the centre of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor (ca. 2000-1900 BCE) concerns a star that fell to earth and caused the extinction of a population of giant serpents on an enchanted island, whose location is traditionally ascribed to the Red Sea. These creatures could apparently breathe fire, but they themselves were "burned utterly" in the fireball that followed the celestial body's impact with the earth. If the recently postulated Late Holocene meteorite impact (<5000 years ago) at Umm al Binni/al Amarah in southern Iraq is indeed the cause of a regional impact fallout layer dated to ca. 2350 BCE, then a folk memory of this event could be preserved in the Egyptian story; the proposed impact site and the story's likely setting both lie due east of Egypt, and oral reports of the loss of life wrought by the impact in Mesopotamia would soon have reached Egypt. A less likely candidate is the putative comet strike of ca. 2807 BCE that has been proposed to account for the undersea "Burckle crater" southeast of Madagascar. Both of these sites are as yet unproven as impact craters. A confirmed meteorite impact in southwestern Egypt <5000 years ago, which caused the Kamil crater, is another possible contributor to the fireball motif in the Tale. In light of modern theories that a meteorite, comet or asteroid impact caused the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event in which the non-avian dinosaurs were eliminated 66.5 million years ago, it is uncanny to find the destruction of a unique population of flightless, dragon-like giant reptiles attributed to just such a collision in this ancient narrative.

A short history of how human cultures have understood and attempted to achieve immortality, with global coverage from the ancient Near East to the present. Covers resurrection, the immortal soul, reincarnation, animistic transfornation, longevity, as well as symbolic immortality through fame and legacy, and how these different approaches are assessed by modern science and philosophy.

Taking the medieval period as the highpoint of hell, this talks explores where this idea came from, including Greece and Rome, the mystery religions, Gnosticism, the Bible and the Christian Creeds. It explores ideas from Christian scholastics and theologians, and particularly from medieval literature. It looks at what was going on simultaneously in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Finally it discussed what happened to ideas about hell with the dissolution of the monasteries, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment.

In the second half of the ninth century, an unusual, beautifully illustrated manuscript was produced in the West Frankish kingdom of Charles the Bald (d. 877). The manuscript, which is now kept in the National Library of St. Petersburg, Russia, contains two early medieval texts of visionary journeys to the Otherworld. The first is the only surviving illustrated copy of the famous Merovingian narrative called “Visio Baronti monachi Longoretensis”, dated to 678 or 679. While this text was considerably popular throughout the Middle Ages, is extant in 27 manuscripts and has been studied by several modern historians, the other visionary journey which was copied in the St. Petersburg manuscript, the so-called “Visio fratris Rotcharii”, has escaped scholarly attention. Its only extant copy came down to us in the St. Petersburg manuscript, was never critically edited before nor thoroughly investigated against its immediate historical context. The aim of this paper is to examine the visionary journey to the Otherworld depicted in the “Visio fratris Rotcharii” both in its own right - against the political, social and religious context in which it appeared – and in relation to the earlier text with which it was copied and preserved, in order to reach a better understanding of this imaginary journey’s structure and aims. Looking at the St. Petersburg manuscript as a whole will reveal strong indications that it was made by a specific ecclesiastical faction in Reims who sought to purify the name and the deeds of the controversial bishop Ebbo of Reims (d. 851) through clever literary uses of Otherworldly journeys.

Medieval otherworld visions are adventure stories — journeys into unknown realms — with ethical, theological and soteriological instruction embedded into them. The richness of these tales makes them an excellent foundation for such instruction. Part of their richness derives from a narrative strategy that includes descriptions that rely on the visionary's sensory experiences.

«L’Inferno sognato, la telepatia di Virgilio e gli antefatti danteschi della Commedia come visione in sogno», in Dante e la dimensione visionaria tra medioevo e prima età moderna. Atti del Seminario di studio, Freie Universität Berlin, 23 novembre 2017, a cura di Bernhard Huss e Mirko Tavoni, Ravenna: Longo (Memoria del tempo, 64), 2019, pp. 97-119.

The mysteries of Mount Sibyl and the Lakes of Pilate, in the Sibillini Mountain Range in Italy, are both ancient enigmas which are still unsolved. In two previous papers, “Birth of a Sibyl: the medieval connection” and “A legend for a Roman prefect: the Lakes of Pontius Pilate”, we identified the presence of two additional, extraneous legendary layers, which are connected to the figure of Morgan le Fay and to the ancient lore concerning the burial places of Pontius Pilate. With a third paper, “Sibillini Mountain Range: the legend before the legends”, we pinpointed a number of common traits that mark both legends, the Cave's and Lake's, with at least three shared features: a legendary demonic presence; the performance of necromantic rituals; winds, tempests, and devastation which mythically arise from both sites.

With the present paper we address a fourth, most significant feature which seems to mark the two sites, the Sibyl's Cave and the Lake of Pilate: they both appear to have been considered as some sort of passageways to the Otherworld, owing to the presence of specific narrative elements, such as the test bridge, that are usually found in literary works that depict visionary travels to otherwordly regions.

The Otherworld and its accessibility to living men has always been an illustrious, emotional literary topic in the literary production of the Western tradition, since classical antiquity, through the advent of Christianity and across the centuries of the Middle Ages. From Homer's “Odyssey” to Vergil's “Aeneid”, from Pope St. Gregory the Great to the visionary dreams originated in medieval Ireland, and up to the legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick, men have always been dreaming about the afterlife, its shadows, its demons and its punishments. In the present work we retrace the main literary instances of the visionary narratives on the Otherworld in the Western culture.

In addition to that, we highlight the strong literary links which can be retrieved between the legendary tales of the Sibyl's Cave and the Lake of Pilate, in the Sibillini Mountain Range, and two most famous and successful narratives which depict two specific journeys to otherwordly regions: the legend of the Cumaean Sibyl, with the Lake of Avernus and the gloomy cave providing an access to the realm of the dead, and the legend of St. Patrick's Purgatory, featuring another lake, Lough Derg, and another sinister cave.

In the present paper we show the recurrent contaminations of narrative themes that link the three different, and substantially unrelated, legends, in the form of a visible transfer of narrative topics and situations from the illustrious and widely-known Cumaean and Irish tales, to an Italian tale which appear to features some narrative and geographical traits in common, though set in a different setting and despite its total independence from the legendary narratives of Lough Derg and Cumae. A contamination that has travelled across the centuries of the Middle Ages, through the invisible streams of oral tales and storytelling, finally materialised within the fifteenth-century works written by Antoine de la Sale and Andrea da Barberino.

The resulting, far-reaching assumption which arises from the present research work is that a legendary passageway to some sort of Otherworld might have been possibly situated, by an antique tradition that left some faint traces in the known literature, among the peaks of the central Apennines. And the landmarks for this mythical entryway would be associated, just like in Cumae and Lough Derg, to the same kind of landforms, a lake and a cave: they both would mark a sort of legendary 'hot spot' on the surface of Earth, where the mythical passageway would be located.

In this framework, a number of questions are left open in the present paper: why should this Apennine site have been considered as a further entryway to the Otherworld? If our assumption is true, what sort of Otherworld was this? What sort of dreadful dream did men conceive by the Lake and Cave set in the mountains of the Apennines, in central Italy?

What legend did live in this area before the medieval legendary tales about a Sibyl and Pontius Pilate settled themselves here?

The highlighting of the otherwordly character marking the Sibillini Mountain Range, in Italy, may lead to an improved comprehension of the mythical nucleus of the legendary setting that inhabits those imposing mountains of Italy, opening a new path that will be fully addressed in a future, and conclusive, research paper, now under preparation.

This article is Part 1 of the full paper on the above topic, and also part of an extended series of papers on the true origin of the Apennine Sibyl's and Pilatus Lakes' legends, a series that will include further papers that are about to provide additional, previously-unpublished information on the whole fascinating topic.

From my original proposal to the conference organiser: 'I have done quite a bit of work on the Green Children story and, as you probably know, I’ve published two or three articles. It would be fun to say something more about their long journey through an underground cavern (which is only in Ralph of Coggeshall’s version) as a reflex of Gervase of Tilbury’s tale of William Peveril’s swineherd in the Peak Cavern. (After all, Ralph and Gervase were well acquainted!) But as Charles Oman put it in an article in Folklore in 1944: ‘Tales of mysterious lands reached through caverns seem to have been particularly rife in England [in the late twelfth century].’

Conference paper offering a series of complementary theoretical perspectives on the motif of breaking into a burial mound known from the Old Norse literature. This motif is surprisingly common and it usually follows a specific structure. Both the popularity and the relative constancy of the form invite an explanation or interpretation.

The paper applies series of concepts from the Religious Studies classics like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Arnold van Gennep, Mircea Eliade, Victor Turner,  Sigmund Freud, Rudolf Otto, Émile Durkheim and C.G. Jung to show how they are all useful to certain extent as interpretive paradigms. The paper is thus a kind of exercise in theoretical flexibility and interdisciplinarity (combining psychology, anthropology, phenomenology of religion, sociology and structuralism). The burial mound pattern is linked repeatedly to initiatory structure and to the monomyth structure of hero's "there and back again" quest.

The contemporary "Dungeons and Dragons"-type games (hero exploring a dangerous Otherworld, typically underground, killing monster guardians and discovering magic treasures) are suggested as a modern counterpart to the discussed pattern, fitting the same form and function.

My paper concerns two radically distinct portrayals of genital injury. The first examples, drawn from legal and doctrinal narrative, describe the cultural norm of meaningful castration. The other, which provides my paper with its title, is from Peter of Cornwall’s Book of Revelations. This set of one is an analogous injury that may mean nothing: neither penitential nor quite juridical, it may be just a strange injury, something that just happens. Rather than resolve this quandary, I’ll instead conclude by exploring the ethics of interpreting literary accounts of torment.

Abstract: The analysis of chess motifs and motifs of space exploration in Bend Sinister, Speak, Memory, and Lance, under¬ taken in this essay, allows us to expand our understanding of Nabokov’s “metaphysical storyline” as well as re¬interpret the concept of “knight’s move” the writer borrowed from one of the founders of Russian Formalism Victor Shklovsky. In all three works, the hero or the narrator consider the possibility of escaping a tor¬turous fate either by moving away from harm through the inter¬ planetary space or by undertaking an interstellar journey for the sake of achieving a “transcendental” goal of overcoming death and reaching life everlasting. The possibility of their escape into the otherworld by means of a metaphysical shift, a dramatic plot twist, and a chivalric exploit is encoded in Nabokov’s play on the homonymic overlap of the words “knight” (as in chess) and “knight” (as a hero of medieval romances). In the first part of the essay, the death of Krug in Bend Sinister is explored as a break¬ through in a chess game as well as a flight from the circles of hell, encapsulated in the name of the hero, into the author’s reality encoded in the trope of a spiral galaxy. Further, the novel’s auto¬ biographical subtext and ontological structure are compared to Nabokov’s image of the interstellar¬-scale love for his wife and son in Speak, Memory. This comparative study ends with the re¬eval-uation of Lance’s journey to another planet in the context of Na¬bokov’s “spiral” dialectics and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about the chronotope of a chivalric narrative. Аннотация: Исследование космических и шахматных моти¬вов в романе «Под знаком незаконнорожденных», автобиографии «Другие берега» и рассказе «Ланс», предпринятое в данной ра¬боте, позволяет расширить наше представление о «метафизиче¬ском сюжете» В.В. Набокова, а также придать новое толкование заимствованному им у В.Б. Шкловского понятию «ход коня». В каждом из трех произведений герой или повествователь либо размышляют о возможности избежать мучительной участи по¬ средством перемещения в межпланетном пространстве, либо совершают космическое путешествие ради достижения «транс-цедентальной» цели преодоления смерти бессмертием. Возмож¬ность перехода ими в иную реальность с помощью сюжетно¬ метафизического сдвига и подвига, подобного рыцарскому, скрыта в обыгрывании писателем омонимического совпадения английских слов «knight» (шахматный конь) и «knight» (рыцарь). В первой части работы рассматривается смерть Круга в «Под зна¬ком незаконнорожденных» как прорыв в шахматной игре и, одновременно, бегство из воплощенных в имени героя кругов ада в инобытие автора, символом которого является спиральная галактика. Далее, автобиографический контекст романа и его онтологическая структура сопоставляются с развиваемой в «Дру¬гих берегах» мыслью о космическом масштабе любви автора к близким. Сравнительный анализ завершается переосмыслени¬ем путешествия Ланса на другую планету в свете набоковской «спиральной» диалектики и идей М.М. Бахтина о хронотопе рыцарского романа.

The mysteries of Mount Sibyl and the Lakes of Pilate, in the Sibillini Mountain Range in Italy, are both ancient enigmas which are still unsolved. In two previous papers, “Birth of a Sibyl: the medieval connection” and “A legend for a Roman prefect: the Lakes of Pontius Pilate”, we identified the presence of two additional, extraneous legendary layers, which are connected to the figure of Morgan le Fay and to the ancient lore concerning the burial places of Pontius Pilate. With a third paper, “Sibillini Mountain Range: the legend before the legends”, we pinpointed a number of common traits that mark both legends, the Cave's and Lake's, with at least three shared features: a legendary demonic presence; the performance of necromantic rituals; winds, tempests, and devastation which mythically arise from both sites.

With the present paper we address a fourth, most significant feature which seems to mark the two sites, the Sibyl's Cave and the Lake of Pilate: they both appear to have been considered as some sort of passageways to the Otherworld, owing to the presence of specific narrative elements, such as the test bridge, that are usually found in literary works that depict visionary travels to otherwordly regions.

The Otherworld and its accessibility to living men has always been an illustrious, emotional literary topic in the literary production of the Western tradition, since classical antiquity, through the advent of Christianity and across the centuries of the Middle Ages. From Homer's “Odyssey” to Vergil's “Aeneid”, from Pope St. Gregory the Great to the visionary dreams originated in medieval Ireland, and up to the legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick, men have always been dreaming about the afterlife, its shadows, its demons and its punishments. In the present work we retrace the main literary instances of the visionary narratives on the Otherworld in the Western culture.

In addition to that, we highlight the strong literary links which can be retrieved between the legendary tales of the Sibyl's Cave and the Lake of Pilate, in the Sibillini Mountain Range, and two most famous and successful narratives which depict two specific journeys to otherwordly regions: the legend of the Cumaean Sibyl, with the Lake of Avernus and the gloomy cave providing an access to the realm of the dead, and the legend of St. Patrick's Purgatory, featuring another lake, Lough Derg, and another sinister cave.

In the present paper we show the recurrent contaminations of narrative themes that link the three different, and substantially unrelated, legends, in the form of a visible transfer of narrative topics and situations from the illustrious and widely-known Cumaean and Irish tales, to an Italian tale which appear to features some narrative and geographical traits in common, though set in a different setting and despite its total independence from the legendary narratives of Lough Derg and Cumae. A contamination that has travelled across the centuries of the Middle Ages, through the invisible streams of oral tales and storytelling, finally materialised within the fifteenth-century works written by Antoine de la Sale and Andrea da Barberino.

The resulting, far-reaching assumption which arises from the present research work is that a legendary passageway to some sort of Otherworld might have been possibly situated, by an antique tradition that left some faint traces in the known literature, among the peaks of the central Apennines. And the landmarks for this mythical entryway would be associated, just like in Cumae and Lough Derg, to the same kind of landforms, a lake and a cave: they both would mark a sort of legendary 'hot spot' on the surface of Earth, where the mythical passageway would be located.

In this framework, a number of questions are left open in the present paper: why should this Apennine site have been considered as a further entryway to the Otherworld? If our assumption is true, what sort of Otherworld was this? What sort of dreadful dream did men conceive by the Lake and Cave set in the mountains of the Apennines, in central Italy?

What legend did live in this area before the medieval legendary tales about a Sibyl and Pontius Pilate settled themselves here?

The highlighting of the otherwordly character marking the Sibillini Mountain Range, in Italy, may lead to an improved comprehension of the mythical nucleus of the legendary setting that inhabits those imposing mountains of Italy, opening a new path that will be fully addressed in a future, and conclusive, research paper, now under preparation.

This article is Part 2 of the full paper on the above topic, and also part of an extended series of papers on the true origin of the Apennine Sibyl's and Pilatus Lakes' legends, a series that will include further papers that are about to provide additional, previously-unpublished information on the whole fascinating topic.

Undergraduate dissertation. An ecocritical study of the conceptualisation of women as aligned with the wilderness, and how this is reflected in natural symbols, namely trees, in three Middle English Lays: Sir Orfeo, Sir Gowther, and Lay le Freine.

First two pages of my article. For more, please refer to the printed issue of the journal.
--
Medieval heroic narratives are studded with heterogeneous references to motifs and elements suggesting a familiarity of the knight with the Otherworld. In the present paper, the author intends to explore the articulations of this connection in Old French chansons de geste and romance, by comparing them with similar occurrences in Celtic and Germanic heroic literature and in Middle Latin visionary texts. This analysis aims to highlight how the magic and spiritual attributes of the knight in 12th and 13th century texts compose the model of an otherworldly hero, capable to move across the symbolic and physical boundaries of the human.

1 The Beginning of the Early Chinese Otherworld Bureaucracy
2 Early Funerary Documents
3 The Development of the Chinese Otherworld Empire
4 Early Buddhist Appropriation
5 The Amalgamation of Parallel Bureaucratic Otherworlds via similar Concepts of Abstinence Days
6 The Transmigration of Deceased Kings and Officials into Otherworld Divinities
7 The Posthumous Transmigration of an Indian King into King Yama, the Lord of Hell, in Chinese Buddhist Scripture
8 The Posthumous Transmigration of a Chinese General into King Yama in the Official Chinese Historical Record
9 How the Government of the Transmigration Cycle by the Otherworld Bureaucracy Replicates Living-World Imperial Administration
10 Conclusion



The perception of the afterlife as a mirror image of the living world is a widespread religious phenomenon among civilisations. As this mirror-image relation is condi- tioned by the natural and social surroundings of each cultural milieu, particular ques- tions arise when a religion is translated from one cultural domain to another, as Bud- dhism was into China.  One of the most  striking aspects  of popular Chinese Buddhism  is the ubiquity of purgatorial and penitential liturgies that are performed as part of funerals, ancestral worship and religious festivals and involve communication with a bureaucratic pantheon for the sake of the well-being of the deceased and the living.  This otherworld authority takes the form of a pre-modern Chinese bureaucratic empire ruled by the Indian Buddhist and local Chinese deities. This article attempts to unravel the evolution of the Buddhist use of this Chinese imperial metaphor in the period be- fore the emergence of the more fully fledged imperial image presented in the Scripture of the Ten Kings during the medieval period. By examining early archaeological and mortuary texts, I will first show how the development of the “imperial metaphor” of otherworld authority began once Chinese feudal states were first unified as an empire during the Qin-Han period. The second section illustrates how the bureaucratic other- worlds that existed parallel in Indian and Chinese contexts were linked and amalga- mated within Chinese Buddhism through the accommodation of certain religious con- cepts, such as abstinence days, transmigration and the afterlife fate of deceased kings and officials, which were formulated in Chinese Buddhist apocryphal scriptures and popular religious texts. Through this process of evolution, the profile of the Chinese Buddhist otherworld empire we are familiar with today was formed.