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? In 1715 a hurricane sank eleven Spanish treasure ships off Florida. In 2015 divers pulled up $4.5 million in gold coins from just 15 feet of water. The Queen’s jewels have never been found. Gone forever, or waiting for the right storm?
What do you think about this? Today is the equinox, and at Chichén Itzá a serpent of light will crawl down a pyramid built with 365 steps. Clap at its base and the echo chirps like the sacred quetzal bird. Brilliant engineering, or knowledge from somewhere older?
What do you think about this? Scans of Gunung Padang in Indonesia show hidden chambers deep inside the hill, and one team dated its oldest layers to 25,000 years ago. The study was retracted in 2024. The chambers have never been opened. Natural hill, or the oldest pyramid on Earth?
What do you think about this? Edgar Cayce gave over 14,000 trance readings, all written down and still on file. He said proof of Atlantis would rise near Bimini in 1968. That year divers found a half mile road of giant stone blocks there. True seer, or lucky guess?
What do you think about this? Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky built a 500 foot tunnel just to move its dead out of sight of the living. It closed in 1961. Visitors still report a boy rolling a ball across empty floors. Restless spirits, or a dark building playing tricks on the mind?
What do you think about this? In 1891, a poor French priest named Bérenger Saunière began tearing up his church floor, then spent the next two decades funding lavish buildings on a stipend that should not have covered it. Real treasure, or a secret about how he ran his church?
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