Hardly any name appears as often in our articles as his: Raymond Moody (born 1944 in Porterdale, Georgia) coined the term "near-death experience" in his 1975 book Life After Life – making nameable a phenomenon people have reported for millennia. The book sold more than 13 million copies, and out of the avalanche it triggered an entire research field emerged. Time for a portrait of the man who stood at the beginning.
A philosopher hears a story
Moody's path to the near-death experience began not in a clinic but in philosophy. In 1965, as a student at the University of Virginia, he heard the psychiatrist George Ritchie tell of his own experience: in December 1943, aged twenty, Ritchie had "died" of pneumonia in an army hospital in Texas – around nine minutes without detectable signs of life – and returned with a detailed account of a journey into the afterlife, which he later described in his book Return from Tomorrow (1978). The story never let go of Moody. When, years later, as a young philosophy lecturer, he kept hearing strikingly similar accounts from students – people who did not know each other – he began to collect systematically.
Remarkable is the double qualification he brought to it: Moody had earned a PhD in philosophy at the University of Virginia in 1969 and initially taught the subject, before starting over and studying medicine (M.D. 1976); he later worked as a psychiatrist. From the very start, then, the near-death experience was studied by someone who combined the philosopher's conceptual care with the physician's clinical eye.
Life After Life (1975): 150 cases, one pattern, one name
For his book Moody analysed around 150 accounts – from people who had been clinically dead and resuscitated, and from people who had come very close to death. What electrified him was not any single report but the recurrence of the same elements in people who knew nothing of one another: leaving the body and watching the resuscitation from above, moving through a dark tunnel, meeting a being of light of overwhelming warmth, the life review, encounters with deceased relatives, deep peace – and the often reluctant return. From these building blocks he formed an ideal-typical composite and gave the whole thing a name: near-death experience.
Two things are often forgotten. First, the worldwide bestseller initially appeared with Mockingbird Books, a small publisher – nobody had seen this success coming. Second, Moody himself was the first to stress that his collection is no scientific proof of life after death – he understood it as an impulse to investigate the phenomenon seriously. The book's dedication, incidentally, went to the man at the beginning: "To George Ritchie, M.D., and, through him, to the One whom he suggested."
The foreword: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Understanding the book's success requires a second person – and a backstory. The foreword to the first edition was written by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and at that point she was already world-famous: her book On Death and Dying (1969), with its five-stage model, had shaped the modern understanding of dying and grief, had appeared in millions of copies in some twenty languages, and had made the psychiatrist arguably the best-known researcher of dying in the world. More important still: Kübler-Ross had already opened the field to a large audience before Moody named it. From the late 1960s she herself collected accounts of resuscitated patients and dying children and spoke to packed halls about what people experience at the threshold of death. The audience that devoured Life After Life was, to a degree, one she had created.
Her foreword turned the debut of an unknown author at a small publisher into a book carrying the authority of a world-famous name. In it she wrote that Moody's findings coincided very much with her own research on patients who had "died and made a comeback" – and further:
"It is research such as Dr. Moody presents in his book that will enlighten many and will confirm what we have been taught for two thousand years – that there is life after death."
(Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the foreword to "Life After Life", 1975)
The division of labour between the two can be summed up like this: Kübler-Ross had brought dying out of the taboo zone and prepared the audience – Moody gave the phenomenon its name and the structure with which it could henceforth be studied.
What the book set in motion
After publication Moody was flooded with letters from experiencers – more than a single author could handle. In November 1977 came the Charlottesville meeting from which, in 1978, the later IANDS emerged – Moody sat at the table, next to Kenneth Ring, Bruce Greyson and Michael Sabom. What followed was the scientific consolidation of his impulses: Ring quantified the patterns, Greyson developed his NDE Scale, the Journal of Near-Death Studies turned individual findings into a research tradition, and prospective studies such as van Lommel's Lancet study (2001) carried the topic into the major journals. That Moody is often called the "father of near-death research" is precise in this sense: he did not raise the child – but without him it would not have been born.
The criticism – and what is fair about it
The methodological criticism of Life After Life came early and was substantively fair: the cases are anecdotal and retrospective, there is no control group, no statistics, no independent verification of the medical records; philosophers like Paul Kurtz and psychologists like James Alcock therefore considered the book scientifically worthless. Except: this criticism targets a book that had never claimed to be proof. The real answer to the fair objections was the following five decades – prospective studies with defined patient groups, standardised measurement instruments, documented cases of veridical perception. Measuring Moody against the standards the field later developed means measuring him against his own impact.
The later Moody: more idiosyncratic paths
In fairness, the picture includes the fact that after his book of the century Moody took paths that are contested even within near-death research. In Reunions (1993) he described his psychomanteum – a darkened mirror chamber modelled on the ancient Greek oracles of the dead, in which grieving people are said to experience visions of the deceased; he operates such a chamber in Alabama. In Glimpses of Eternity (2010) he collected reports of shared death experiences: relatives at the deathbed – themselves perfectly healthy – co-experiencing elements of a near-death experience. The first project is hardly controllable experimentally; the second is at least a phenomenon area the Journal of Near-Death Studies today expressly counts within its scope. These later works need not be judged like the early one – but they should not be concealed either.
Context
Raymond Moody built no edifice of proof, and he never claimed to. His achievement lies one level deeper: he gave a scattered, embarrassed, mostly concealed kind of experience a name, a structure and a public – and thereby posed the question on which cardiologists, psychiatrists and philosophers have been working ever since. Books that launch a research field are rarer than books that close one. Life After Life is one of the former.
Sources: Raymond Moody, Life After Life (Mockingbird Books, 1975; dedication, case count, catalogue of elements) including the foreword by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross; Moody's website lifeafterlife.com; George Ritchie, Return from Tomorrow (1978); on reception and methodological criticism, among others the objections of Paul Kurtz and James Alcock; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (1969); supplemented by our portraits of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, IANDS and the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory.