What do you think about this?
Long before hospice nurses and heart monitors, the peoples native to this continent had their own understanding of what happens when a life ends. These were not one belief but many, spread across hundreds of distinct nations, yet some threads appear again and again, and they are strikingly beautiful.
Many traditions speak of the spirit not ending, but traveling. Among various peoples, the band of the Milky Way overhead was seen as a road, a path of souls that the dead walk on their way to the next world. Some held that a relative or a guide comes to meet the newly departed and lead them along it, so that no one makes the journey alone.
There are the messengers, too. In many Native cultures the appearance of a certain bird, an owl, a crow, a hawk, at the moment of a passing was understood as a sign, a soul carried or a message delivered between worlds. Smoke rising, a sudden wind, an animal that lingers and meets your eyes. The veil between here and there was not a wall but a thin and crossable thing.
Makes you wonder whether people who lived so close to the land understood something about death that our modern world has talked itself out of believing.
Is it all just old comfort dressed up as cosmology, or a kind of knowledge we have lost? What do you think these traditions were really describing?
What do you think about this? On January 20, 1996, three young women in Varginha, Brazil, saw a four foot creature with oily skin and red eyes crouched by a wall. The army was in town that morning. A policeman said to have handled it died a month later. Cover story, or Brazil’s Roswell?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
What do you think about this? The Whaley House in San Diego was built in 1857 where a man was slowly hanged five years earlier. A baby and a daughter later died inside. Visitors report footsteps in empty rooms and a pressure on the throat where the gallows stood. Old house, or long memory?
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