TRIBAL BELIEFS IN GHOSTS

[THE FUGITIVE]

Native American Afterlife Mythology

Native American beliefs about the afterlife vary greatly from tribe to tribe. In the traditions of many Native American tribes, the souls of the dead pass into a spirit world, where they can occasionally still communicate with the living through dreams or the intercession of medicine people. In other tribes there is a more structured land of the dead, often presided over by a god of death or other supernatural caretaker. In some tribes there is no Native American afterlife per se-- dead people are believed to become stars or part of the earth unless they are disturbed and turned into ghosts by grave robbing or other unnatural acts. And in some tribes there is no afterworld at all because the spirits of the dead are reincarnated as new infants within their family or clan.


afterlife (Chinese Religion)

The Chinese conception of the afterlife is based on a combination of Chinese folk religions, Taoism and Mahayana Buddhism.

At the moment of death, it is believed that one's spirit is taken by messengers to the god of walls and moats, Ch'eng Huang, who conducts a kind of preliminary hearing. Those found virtuous may go directly to one of the Buddhist paradises, to the dwelling place of the Taoist immortals, or the tenth court of hell for immediate rebirth.

After 49 days, sinners descend to hell, located at the base of Mount Meru. There they undergo a fixed period of punishment in one or more levels of hell. The duration of this punishment may be reduced by the intercession of the merciful Ti-ts'ang. When the punishment is complete, the souls in hell drink an elixir of oblivion in preparation for their next reincarnation. They then climb on the wheel of transmigration, which takes them to their next reincarnation, or, in an alternative account, they are thrown off the bridge of pain into a river that sweeps them off to their next life.

East Asian Attitudes toward Death�" A Search for the Ways to Help East Asian Elderly Dying in Contemporary America
Sok K Lee, MD, MA
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Abstract
The art of dying well has been a quintessential subject of ethicoreligious matters among the people in the West and the East. Most of us wish to die at home; however, about 50% of Americans die in acute care hospitals. Furthermore, immigrants from East Asian cultures feel more uncomfortable near death, because their physicians are not familiar with their traditions.

This article is written to help American physicians understand the unique aspects of East Asian Confucian Ethics for the better care of the dying elderly. Western attitudes toward death are briefly reviewed and the six East Asian concepts related to death are elaborated from Confucian Chinese philosophy. To widen the horizon of bioethics and to embrace the Confucian wisdom of dying well, three pearls of wisdom from classical Confucianism are proposed: the relational autonomy of family, Confucian creative self-transformation, and the unity of transcendence and the human being.

We will have to give up the notion that death is catastrophe, or avoidable, or even strange.

�" Death in the Open, Lewis Thomas

NORDIC
DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE

Runestones and a burial mound from the Viking Age in Jelling, Denmark (photo by Casiopeia)
The Vikings’ religion never contained any formal doctrines concerning what happens to someone when he or she dies. In the words of historian H.R. Ellis Davidson, “There is no consistent picture in Norse literary tradition of the fate of the dead,”[1] and “to oversimplify the position would be to falsify it.”[2] The rational order that people today often naively insist on finding in Viking portrayals of the dead simply isn’t there in the sources.

Nevertheless, the picture presented to us by archaeology and the Old Norse literary sources isn’t complete chaos. There are discernible patterns in the way the Norse conceived of death and the afterlife, even though those patterns don’t hold absolutely, and the details of what one source tells us are almost invariably contradicted by another source.

The Land(s) of the Dead

Spiritual parts of the dead were usually thought to end up in a spiritual otherworld of some sort or another (with some exceptions that we’ll explore below).

The most famous of these dwelling-places of the dead is undoubtedly Valhalla (Old Norse Valhöll, “the hall of the fallen”), the resplendent hall of the god Odin. Those chosen by Odin and his valkyries live there as celebrated heroes until they’re called upon to fight by Odin’s side in the doomed battle at Ragnarok, the downfall of the gods and the rest of the universe.

The goddess Freya is said to welcome some of the dead into her hall, Folkvang (Old Norse Fólkvangr, “the field of the people” or “the field of warriors”). Unfortunately, Folkvang is mentioned so sparsely in the sources that we today don’t have any idea what it was thought to be like.

Those who died at sea �" not an uncommon way to go in a seafaring culture like that of the Vikings �" are sometimes, but not always, said to be taken to the underwater abode of the giantess Ran.

But the afterlife world to which the dead are most commonly portrayed as going is Hel, a world beneath the ground presided over by a goddess who is also named Hel. In addition to this conception of a general underworld, people from particular families and localities are sometimes depicted as remaining together in a particular place close to where they lived while they were alive �" underneath a specific mountain, for example.[3]

And what do the dead do in Hel or the local variations thereof? They typically eat, drink, carouse, fight, sleep, practice magic, and generally do all of the things that living Viking Age men and women did.

The lines between these various abodes of the dead are quite blurry, and there’s no consistent picture of who decides where a particular person goes after death, or how the decision is made.

An oft-repeated line is that those who die in battle are thought to go to Valhalla, whereas those who die of other, more peaceful causes go to Hel. Leaving aside the fact that this excludes all of the other places to which the dead are thought to potentially go, this artificially tidy distinction was first made by Snorri Sturluson, a Christian historian writing in the thirteenth century �" many generations after the pre-Christian Norse religion had ceased to be a living tradition.

Snorri is known for attempting to impose a systematization on his source material that isn’t present in his sources (many of which we, too, possess), and this seems to be another instance of that tendency. Snorri himself blatantly contradicts his distinction between Valhalla and Hel in the one substantial account of Hel he provides: the tale of the death of Baldur, Odin’s son, who is killed violently and is nevertheless borne to Hel. No other source makes this distinction �" and several contradict it �" which means that this snug way of differentiating between who ended up in Hel versus Valhalla is surely an invention of Snorri’s.[4]

Not only is it ultimately impossible to establish a neat set of criteria for how the dead end up where they do �" it’s also impossible to cleanly differentiate these places themselves from one another. For example, Valhalla is often depicted as a realm where distinguished warriors engage in a continuous battle, and just such a place is described, in important early sources, as being located beneath the ground �" and, intriguingly, without the name “Valhalla” anywhere in the account.[5] Furthermore, the very name Valhöll, “the hall of the fallen,” clearly seems related to the name Valhallr, “the rock of the fallen,” a title given to certain rocks and hills where the dead were thought to dwell in southern Sweden, one of the greatest historical centers of the worship of Odin.[6][7]

So are we to conclude that Valhalla is simply one particular part of Hel, rather than an independent realm? Not so fast. It’s elsewhere described as being a part of Asgard, the celestial realm of the gods.[8]

Rebirth

Some sources also speak of the dead being reborn in one of their descendants, although never in someone outside of their family line. Here as well, the sources are unclear as to how exactly this would happen, but oftentimes the dead person is reincarnated in someone who is named after him or her.[7]

It’s sometimes impossible to distinguish between deceased human ancestors and elves in Old Norse literature, to the point that it wouldn’t be amiss to speak of a part of the dead human becoming an elf in some cases. One example of this comes from The Saga of Olaf the Holy, one of the first Christian kings of Norway. Olaf and a servant ride past the burial mound of the king’s ancestor and namesake, who is now called by the name of �"láfr Geirstaðaálfr �" literally “Olaf, the Elf of Geirstad,” a title that clearly implies the currently elfin state of the king’s forefather. The same passage also insinuates that King Olaf is the reincarnation of the deceased Olaf,[10] showing that the dead could be thought to have multiple fates simultaneously. There’s not necessarily a contradiction on this particular point, since such a scenario would be logically possible in the Norse view of the self having multiple spiritual parts.