ABSTRACT
In the summer of the year 2000, at the beginning of a new millennium, a quarter of a century after the initial publication of Raymond Moody’s Life After Life, a spate of articles appeared in the Journal of Near-Death Studies ( JN-DS) surrounding the outbreak of so-called ‘religious wars’ within the ‘NDE movement’. These lengthy articles filled two complete numbers of the Journal and revealed that a number of the world’s pioneering near-death researchers had arrived at major disagreements concerning, of all things, religion. The first shots in the conflict had in fact been fired two years previously by Michael Sabom in his book Light and Death. In it, readers who had been impressed by his religiously neutral and theologically non-partisan earlier work, Recollections of Death, may have been surprised to find that the same author was now espousing a particularly conservative Christian interpretation of NDEs. In fact, a major inspiration behind Light and Death was Sabom’s concern about the directions that near-death studies had been taking in the years between this and his previous work. What surprised many about Sabom’s latest book, however, were the adverse comments aimed in it at some of his coresearchers. Fellow NDE pioneer Raymond Moody, for example, was criticized for his experiments with mirror-gazing at his selfconstructed psychomanteum at his home in Alabama, experiments which constituted the subject matter of his 1993 study, Reunions,
and which provoked Sabom’s comment that ‘The Raymond Moody I knew was a medical doctor, not a witch doctor’ (Sabom 1998: 145). Sabom was also to describe as a ‘dog-and-pony-show’ a spiritualistic-style meeting in which Moody had appeared on an Atlanta stage with one George Anderson who claimed to be able to bring messages for the audience from the ‘other side’ (Sabom 1998: 144).
