[00:00:00] INTRODUCER:
Good evening, and welcome to the Foerster Lecture on the Immortality of the Soul. This is one of these rare and wonderful moments at a university when, in a way, we take time out from normal classroom administrative tasks to welcome a great scholar to our campus and share with him his expertise. If you look in the program, you’ll see that the Foerster lectures have included some of the great names in the history of religion and comparative religion.
As a matter of fact, tonight’s speaker, Professor Hultkrantz, is not the first Swede who has been in Berkeley in this series. In nineteen forty, the great and sometimes controversial Martin P. Nilsson from Lund came to give One of these very same lectures. The history of the lecture series is also contained in your program.
I might add only that it was a bequest of fifteen thousand dollars made to the Regents by Edith Zweybruck in nineteen twenty-eight. That would be worth a lot more today, obviously, if they’ve let it accumulate, which they have. And it was set up so that the income from this bequest would be used to pay for at least one lecture.
during each academic year on the subject of the immortality of the soul or other kindred spiritual subject. Such lecture was not to be f– part of the regular college course and shall be delivered by some person specially qualified therefor and especially appointed for the purpose. I’m not sure what the original intent of the benefactor was honoring her, uh, in-laws.
But, uh, in the late sixties, uh, there was some concern as to whether the speaker had to be definitely of one doctrine or another with respect to the immortality of the soul. And along with some rulings from the assistant counsel for the university, it was decided that the intent of the donors was to provide support for rational academic discussions of an essentially religious subject. And so, uh, m-the speakers are not necessarily constrained, uh, to take a doctrinaire theological position on the immortality of the soul.
They may if they wish, but they can also, uh, be free to treat it in the light of their academic discipline. Now this evening, it is truly a great pleasure to introduce one of the leading scholars in the world in comparative religion, Professor Åke Hultkrantz of the Institute of Comparative Religion at the University of Stockholm. He’s had a long and distinguished career, and I’ll mention some of the highlights.
He was born in Kalmar, Sweden in April of 1920, and after primary school education in Kalmar and Stockholm, he earned his student certificate in 1939 in Stockholm, and then began studies at the University of Stockholm, where he took his, uh, filosofie kandidat examen in 1943. His graduate work earned him a filosofie licentiat examen, it’s like our doctorate, uh, in ethnology in 1946, and then another, uh, filosofie licentiat examen in the history of religions in 1948. He then, uh, wrote his habilitation dissertation in nineteen, uh, fifty three at the University of Stockholm, serving as a docent in the history of religions at the University of Stockholm fifty three and fifty eight.
And in nineteen, uh, fifty eight, he was appointed professor holding the chair of the history of religions at the University of Stockholm, and at the very same time became the director of the Institute of Comparative Religion, and he is still serving in both these capacities. He is a member of many, many Swedish scientific public organizations, scientific organizations in other countries, Finland, Germany, Italy, the United States, honorary fellow of societies, Finland, and Austria. He’s also visited the United States before.
He’s been a visiting professor at Brandeis, nineteen fifty-eight, University of California at Santa Barbara three times, nineteen seventy-three, seventy-seven, and eighty, University of Montana in Missoula in nineteen seventy-seven and nineteen eighty, University of Budapest nineteen seventy, University of Vienna nineteen seventy-three, and the University of Aberdeen in nineteen seventy-six. And at Aberdeen, in fact, some years later, nineteen eighty-one, eighty-two, he was invited to give the prestigious Gifford lectures at that institution. He has done something which very few scholars in comparative religion have done.
He’s done fieldwork. Um, uh, most, uh, people in comparative religion tend to be armchair or library scholars rather than field scholars. Professor Hultkrantz is definitely both.
He’s performed and carried out fieldwork with the Lapps, nineteen forty-four and forty-six, and very importantly, with the Shoshone and Arapaho in Wyoming and Idaho over the years nineteen forty-eight to fifty-eight, altogether some one and a half years of, of fieldwork, and has written many articles on the Shoshone. And he’s worked with the Northern Plains Indians in nineteen seventy-seven. He has published th-three hundred articles and sixteen books, and it would take me all of his time to read– simply to read all the titles.
They– These publications are in the history of religion, ethnology, including ethnohistory, and folklore. His main intellectual interests are methodology, particularly the ecology of religion, religions of the North American Indians, in which I think he’s the world’s authority, particularly Plains and Basin Indians, and Lapps, Circumpolar religions, cultural history of the North American Indians are parts of his research specialties.
He has published in Swedish, of course, English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hungarian. Some of his books, I’ll just mention some of the ones that are most relevant to his, uh, topic this evening. Um, Conceptions of the Soul among North American Indians, 1953.
The North American Indian, uh, Orpheus tradition, um, which is a splendid study of an American Indian tale type, uh, interpreting it in the light of possible shamanistic concepts. General Ethnological Concepts, which is a dictionary, 1960, which i-in my opinion, is still the best available, uh, lexicon of its kind. I have it– I’ve had it as required reading for my folklore students ever since it’s appeared.
Iconography of Religions: Prairie and Plains Indians, nineteen seventy-three. The Religions of the American Indians, University of California Press, our own press, published in nineteen seventy-nine.
Belief and Worship in Native North America, Syracuse University Press, nineteen eighty-one. Nineteen eighty-two, published at the University Press in Oslo, The Hunters: Their Way, Culture and Way of Life, a joint publication. And then nineteen eighty-three, The Study of American Indian Religions, uh, published by Scholars Press.
So this is a man who has devoted much of his scholarly life to the study of American Indian religion. His articles, as I say, are too numerous to mention, but he’s written on shamanism. He wrote a wonderful essay in the Dorson Festschrift, uh, on trends in Swedish folklore studies, which was a very honest, uh, forthright, almost too honest and forthright study of Swedish factionalism and in the folklore field there.
And many are– as I say, many essays in Temenos, History of Religions, all the major, uh, religion, uh, journals, uh, have had articles and featured articles by Professor, uh, Hultkrantz. This evening, we’re privileged to have him give an address on the immortality of the soul among North American Indians. We are very pleased to welcome this evening Professor Doctor Åke Hultkrantz.
(applause)
[00:07:48] ÅKE HULTKRANTZ:
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, And I am extremely thankful for these kind and, uh, heartfelt words of welcome to me, and I can assure you that I am full of pride and joy over the fact that I have been, uh, awarded, as I would say, this, uh, possibility, uh, to give, uh, a lecture in this distinguished series, the Forster Lectures. I am very thankful for this, and I hope that, uh, I have something to say which might appeal to my audience. Well, I want to begin with that immortality is really a strong word, but it is too often used in a corrupted sense.
To Sir James Frazer, the well-known classic scholar and anthropologist, immortality was taunt-tantamount to life after death without further qualifications. This was an interpretation that was natural in a spiritual milieu, ultimately pervaded by Christian notions. In a comparatively modern folkloristic dictionary, we learn that, I quote, “The practice of burial among the prehistoric forerunners of modern man has led to the conjecture that man’s belief in immortality is as old as the species.
Its preservation of the body so that the soul may have a dwelling place.” End of quotation. Immortality in this sense of the word, that man simply survives death in some form, except, uh, uh, for some few wrongdoers, was universal in North America.
The idea of a future state changed with varying cultural, social, or ecological conditions, and was colored by different value patterns. If our goal was to portray Aboriginal thoughts about afterlife in North America, our task would be an easy one, disregarding, of course, the amount of data. The Oxford Dictionary tells us, however, to stick to the linguistically correct interpretation of immortality, defined as undying, divine, unfading.
This was also, as far as I understand, the intention of Miss Edith Zweybruck when she inaugurated the Foerster Lectures. It is beliefs about immortality in the true sense of the term that will constitute the object of the present lecture. This object is indeed exciting, for we are facing not only the problem if there ever was among North American Indians any belief in immortality.
The problem is basically wider and more principled. Do we at all face any ideas of immortality among tribal peoples? There are two aspects of immortality that come to mind.
Immortality as an improvement of existence in man’s life on this earth, and immortality as a quality in life after death. The two aspects are not consistently kept apart in general debate, but ought to be so. Our main target will be the immortality of the soul, that is, man’s life after death.
However, in order to make the picture complete, some words will first be said about immortality as an improvement of life on Earth. May I then also point out that in the following, we are concerned with classic American Indian religion before the appearance of the ghost dance, the peyote religion, and other religious movements partly derived from Christian teaching. As we shall find, it is not always so easy to decide if or to what extent ideas from these quarters have influenced recently recorded traditional Indian beliefs of immortality.
There was a time when North America was supposed to be a land of rejuvenation and immortality. Early Spanish explorers were fired by the information that there existed a wonderful spring that restored youth on an island north of Cuba. Vague reports from captive Indians had been mediated by Spanish writers and supplied nourishment for high expectations among some conquistadors.
Americans are familiar with the account of how Juan Ponce de León, Spanish adventurer in the service of King Ferdinand of Castile, in 1512, set sail to this northern island, that is, Florida, to find the Fountain of Youth. This is a romantic interpretation of a cruel expedition. Ponce de Leon had most certainly other objects in view: land, gold, slaves, or whatever.
Carl Sauer is probably quite right in insisting that, I quote, “Ponce, in vigorous middle age,” was not spending his wealth in search of a fountain of youth, nor did his conduct in Florida support the romantic story that is still told in school books.” End of quotation. Nevertheless, we have reasons to suspect that some of his men had heard the story and believed in it.
However, was the story of the Fountain of Youth an American Indian story? We know that in the Old World, there existed belief in wonderful springs with magical qualities, springs whose waters blessed the fields, healed people from illness, and made the dead revive. Folklore information from wide parts of Europe tells us how these springs were decorated with flowers on days when they were supposed to reveal their supernatural qualities or their water turned into wine.
Whether originally representing the vagina of Mother Earth or not, these springs offered the water of life and thus bestowed immortality. It’s tempting to suppose that such ideas constituted the basis of the Spanish dreams of the Fountain of Youth. However, the idea of the water of life was known among North American Indians, although it was particularly at home along the Northwest Coast.
Here, the dead were revived by being sprinkled with the water of life and The same theme recurs in California. There is the belief among the Western Mono that if a dead person’s bones are deposited in water, he will be resuscitated. Waldemar Bogoras, and after him Gudmund Hatt, have interpreted similar notions as proof of a diffusion of ideas from Asia over the Bering Sea.
If so, they were disseminated with the first emigrants, immigrants to North America, for such revivalistic ideas are part of the animal ceremonial complex that is basic to North American hunting cultures. Like the animal, in particular, of course, the sea animal, man revives when sprinkled with the water of life, at least in the legends. Tales of rejuvenation are common in North America, from California over the plains to the Northwest culture.
And indeed, rejuvenation through water or a fountain of youth may be found among Indians as far apart as the Californian Wintun and the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia. It isn’t unlikely, although far from proven, that such ideas also occurred among some southeastern tribes, say, the Timucua or some other Floridan group visited by Ponce de León. The rejuvenation theme is a reconstruction of the immortality theme.
Whoever attains renewed youth is potentially immortal. The drive for youth and vigor in modern American culture is an expression of a similar line of thought. So the idea of a water of life granting everlasting life may have been present in Florida or other places in America, but only as an idea in a wishful legend.
There was no realistic thought that people could avoid death. A report from a Cahita Indian in northwestern Mexico says that he thought he was immortal already in this life, but it stands quite isolated in our source material. Man was condemned to die.
Paul Radin has given us excellent examples of American Indian resignation in face of death. “I, I always think within myself that there is no place where people do not die,” complains the Tlingit Indian. And the Crow of Montana sing, “Sky and earth are everlasting, men must die.
Old age is a thing of evil, charge and die!” That death is unavoidable was rationalized in the myth of the origin of death. In Western North America, there are, as Boas has shown, two major forms of this myth.
In one diffused over the Plateau and Great Basin and in California, the decision that man shall die is made in a discussion between two mythical personalities, uh, usually are the creator and his tricky assistant, the coyote. In the other, diffused among Northern and Southern Athapascans and in the Plains area, the decision is made usually through the same personages by divination. That is, a certain object is thrown into the water.
If it floats up, man shall revive. If it stays at the bottom, he shall remain dead. Of course, the latter alternative always wins.
It’s interesting to note that in its discussion form, the myth does not necessarily presuppose the inevitability of death, whilst in its divination form, it proceeds from the fact that man is dead. There is also a third version of the origin of death myth according to which the gift of immortality was lost when some Orpheus figure in the myth-mythic past failed to recover his dead spouse. This is clearly an adaptation of the Orpheus myth, uh, motif in the origin of death theme.
In one Montagnais Indian tale from Eastern Canada, there is talk of a gift of immortality enclosed in a Pandora’s package. A curious woman opened it, so immortality flew away, and since then, mankind has been subject to death. We also find stories recounting how man tried to move or persuade the powers to make him immortal.
These stories, which are mostly at home among the central and coastal Algonquins and their closest Sioux neighbors, invariably end with a refusal from the supernatural being who even punishes the human being for his immoderate request. The poor man is turned into a cedar tree or a stone. Indeed, in a Winnebago tale, a young boy is granted the reverse of what he demands.
He dies. This shows that only supernaturals are immortal and that they are jealous of this privilege. The possibility remains then that people become immortal after death.
That is, that they pass over into another type of existence which may be everlasting. And we now come to our main theme, the immortality of the soul. It has been said by reputed scholars of religion that so-called primitive peoples or peoples with a crude technology, like our North American Indians some time ago, do not know any immortality of the soul.
Before studying in detail the ethnographic testimony, let us look more closely into the arguments of these the-theoreticians. They have all made themselves acquainted with North American materials, and a couple of them were well-known Americanists. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the celebrated French social philosopher, argues that since the soul imagined by primitive man is not purely spiritual but quite material as well, there is no belief in its immortality.
He says, “Everywhere one believes in a survival,” nowhere does one imagine this survival without an end.” Life after death, says Lévi-Bruhl, is so alike the life of mortal man that it comes to the same termination. Except in cases of periodical reincarnation, the dead finish by disappearing definitely.
Whereas the French author’s argument that immortality follows spirituality is rationalistic and artificial. His analogies from the conditions of life on earth may seem convincing. Lévy-Bruhl built his reasoning to a certain extent on American Indian materials.
The Americanist Robert Lowie was of course, even more dependent on these materials when surprisingly, he took the same rationalistic stand as his French colleague. Proceeding from the indisputable fact that primitive belief in spirits does not imply immaterial existence, he arrives at the conclusion, I quote, “Hence, continued life after death is not equivalent to immortality.” End of quotation.
It’s difficult to see why this logic should hold. Lowie illustrates his thesis with a reference to the shadow which, among many American Indian tribes, is supposed to be a soul or a mysterious entity of its own. A shadow, says Lowie, is not a rock, but neither is it beyond the realm of physical nature.
Lowie makes two false conclusions here. First of all, the ethnic idea of what is physical nature is not necessarily our own or what science says it is. For another example, the northern lights are atmospheric electrical phenomena to us, but dancing spirits to the Eskimo and Northern Athapascans.
And secondly, American Indians would scarcely draw the same conclusion as the old Greeks and their modern successors, Lowie and Lévy-Bruhl. Namely that what is not material, what is not immaterial is not immortal. They did not share Greek philosophic-philosophical ideas, therefore, non sequitur.
Actually, scholars who are convinced that to tribal peoples there is no post-mortem immortality would do better to drop such logical exercises and express themselves simply in the same manner as Leopold Walk does when he states that to primitive peoples, immortality mostly means unlimited continued life of the soul after death. As we shall see, it’s just the unlimitedness of life after death that characterizes Native American I-I- Uh, Indian ideas on the topic.
Ever so many anthropologists have, since the days of Edward Burnett Tylor, discussed American Indian ideas of the life after death in terms of beliefs in immortality. This often complicates our investigation and makes our conclusions sometimes insecure. On the other hand, there are anthropologists and other field workers who evidently mean immortality stricto sensu when they speak about it.
In his article, “The Idea of the Future Life Among Primitive Tribes,” Franz Boas debates the possibility of a death of a soul. He admits that there are some indications of a belief in a second death, but adds that, I quote, “In the majority of cases, the soul is believed to be immortal.” End of quote.
This is a remarkable general statement by an extremely well-informed scholar and makes us perhaps wonder. Another anthropologist, Boas’s pupil Paul Radin, whose control of the American source material was quite extraordinary as concerns religious beliefs, discusses the subject in the light of his division of informants into men of action and priest-thinkers. He argues that immortality of necessity implies a differentiation between things that have a termination and things that have not.
Who, he asks, introduced this notion? Manifestly the, uh, priest thinker. Well, accepting Radin’s argument, we must say the lack of sophistication in many famous scholars who have speculated on North American Indian ideas of immortality is truly startling.
It really demonstrates only one thing, that not much attention has been paid to the subject, and that no one has bothered to find out how Indians have thought in this matter. Indeed, the authors just quoted have not surpassed Father de Charlevoix’s superficial statement from his voyage on the Mississippi in the beginning of the 18th century when he said, “La croyance la mieux établie parmi nos Américains est celle de l’immortalité de l’âme.” The belief…
The, the most, uh, the best established belief among our American Indians is that of the immortality of the soul. We can never attain a secure opinion of the North American ideas in this matter unless we scrutinize the sources themselves. So that is the task now before us, uh, to make an inventory of the historical and ethnographical literature on death and future life as far as this is possible, for there is, as you know, an enormous wealth of material, and to pick out whatever references there are to a belief in the immortality of the soul.
Now, it isn’t eas– an easy task to handle, for most eschatological accounts are not always conclusive on this point, and this is partly due to the vagueness of Indian pronouncements. There is a lack of interest in these things, perhaps because nobody knows enough if he hasn’t in trance or coma made an expedition there. There is also a shyness of talking about such things.
They are of a private nature that might be dangerous to discuss. However, what particularly hampers us is the lack of preciseness of the writers. They usually drop the question of immortality typical– perhaps because to them it is of lesser interest.
Of course, in many instances, informants have nothing to offer. There are quite a few accounts where immortality is not mentioned, but yet, yet somehow perceptible. Take, for instance, Anne Straus’ recent description of the Northern Cheyenne ideas of death.
Their realm of the dead is situated at the end of the long fork of the Milky Way, which is a beautiful place. The dead live in generation after generation there. Death is defined as transformation, not termination of selfhood for those who have lived in the Cheyenne way.
Is now immortality implied here or not? Well, we should like to think so, but this isn’t definitely stated. Medicine men may take on a lasting spiritual garb by becoming guardian spirits after death, but that is another matter.
The nature of the source material and its dimensions makes it perfectly clear that we can’t expect to find all instances of the immortality belief as documented. A complete review would be a superhuman task. However, we can achieve such a full documentation that, with reasonable confidence, we can establish the range of ideas on immortality held by North American Indians.
The source material consists of statements made by the Indians themselves or summarizing accounts by travelers, missionaries, and ethnographers. There are problems with the letter, for sometimes they’re at– they attribute a notion of immortality to Indian beliefs without proving it. In other words, the immortality concept is taken for granted by the recorder, possibly because in Christian religion, future life and immortality are parts of the same parcel.
Besides these insufficient statements, there are, however, also more certain affirmative pieces of information which deserve our great attention. No rituals ever guaranteed everlasting life if we distract from the partly Christian-inspired ghost dance. The secret rituals of, uh, the Midewiwin Society among the Ojibwe at Lake Superior certainly tried to reduce the dangers of death.
“I overpower death,” sings the initiated Midé member. But immortality as such is not implied, and the same holds good for the widely dispersed death and revival rites which occur in connection with puberty rituals and shamanic callings. Reference is there to the opposition between death and life, but immortal life is not thought of.
This leaves us with the written accounts of possibly possible immortality beliefs, and we begin our survey with northernmost Canada. And I will give here not all the, uh, instances that I have written down and noticed, but just a selection for the time doesn’t allow anything more. Arsène Turquetil, Catholic missionary to the Central Eskimo, tells us that, I quote, “The pagan Eskimo believes firmly in the immortality of the soul and in a moral sanction in the other life.”
End of quote. This is, to my understanding, a rather striking case of interpretatio Christiana. No details are given.
We have just to accept Turquetil on his word. However, this we can scarcely do. We are on a firmer ground if we accept W.L. Hardisty’s description of Kutchin eschatology.
The Kutchin live in, uh, northeastern Alaska. Hardisty’s account of their paradise is most detailed. There are, he says, pleasant hunting grounds where there is an eternal summer, fat animals, no sickness, no death, with exemption from all labor beyond preparing the meat of the animals that they kill for food.
Now, this painting of an Athapascan Schlaraffenland sounds convincing. Another Athapascan group, the Tahltan of northern British Columbia, are said by G.T. Emmons to believe everybody to possess a spirit that is immortal. There is, however, no further statement that confirms such a belief.
Certainly, as Emmons has shown, the Tahltan believed in reincarnation, but reincarnation is not as such a proof of immortality. I think Emmons’ statement is so vaguely made that it has to be dismissed. If now we turn to the Plains area, it seems that the Plains Cree of Saskatchewan have cherished a belief in the immortality of the soul if David Mandelbaum is right.
During the feast following a death, a sacred pipe was pointed to the four cardinal directions where powerful spirits dwelt who could protect the deceased. Thus, the stem was pointed to the south, where old man Kice-yiniw lived, who we read, “kept the souls in his green grass world where they remained eternally. This is a fairly detailed statement by a trained anthropologist, and there is no reason why we shouldn’t endorse his statement.
The land of the dead or green grass world was reached through the Milky Way. In that country, all men, women, and children lived a carefree life. At the end of the last century, Reverend E.F. Wilson lived with the neighbors of the Plains Cree, the Blackfoot Indians, on the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains and the plains below.
He interviewed the Indian Big Plume about what he thought became of the soul after death, and received the answer that all Blackfoot go to the Sand Hills north of Cypress Hills. The dead there may be seen from a distance, and their drums can be heard. Said Big Plume, “I cannot say whether or not they see the Great Spirit.
I believe they will live forever. All the Blackfeet believe this, also the Sarcees, Stonies, Atsinas, and Crees.” End of quote.
Now, Big Plume’s assertion about these latter tribes can be bypassed. But does his statement, ‘all Blackfeet believe this,’ refer to the immortality concept or to the general presentation of the realm of the dead? As it stands, it seems to refer to the said immortality, but we can’t be absolutely sure.
There is also some evidence that the Plains Indians south of Canada should have believed in the immortality of the soul, but in most cases, there is this more undecided attitude. A Crow war party from Montana came across a big camp which proved to be populated by dead people. One of these dead, an Assiniboine, told the Crow not to fear death, for he said, “You are to be people twice.”
That is, they would receive new life after death. The dead person was asked whether he was going to die again, but he said that he didn’t know. This strange tale was, according to Robert Lowie, recounted by the Crow Indian Gray Bull as a personal adventure.
Lowie also tells us of a Crow who had died, that is, uh, lost consciousness, and come back to life again. He said that all who had died were still living, and that they were better people than the Crow, and the Crow believed it, says Lowie. The problem here is, what does the phrase mean?
All who had died were still living? Does the raconteur mean those whom he had known and who had died, or all dead people from the beginning of times? We can speculate, but in vain.
The information from other Siouan peoples of the plains is just as vague. Speaking about all of them, James Owen Dorsey states, “The author finds no traces of a belief in the immortality of human beings. Even the gods of the Dakota were regarded as being mortal, for they could be killed by one another.
They were male and female, they married and died, and were succeeded by their children. But if for immortality we substitute continuous existence as shades or ghosts, there will be no difficulty in showing that the Siouan tribes referred to held such a belief respecting mankind and that they very probably entertained it in a crude form prior to the advent of the white race to this continent, says Dorsey. Even an early writer as Mary Eastman, stationed at Fort Snelling in Minnesota in the 1840s and surrounded by Eastern Dakota, had her doubts about the originality of their belief in immortality, she writes.
“Some of the medicine men, the priests, and the doctors of the Dakotas seem to have an idea of the immortality of the soul, but intercourse with the whites may have originated this.” It’s interesting to find that sixty years later, an Eastern Dakota named Charles Alexander Eastman, Ohíyesa, made it known that, I quote, “The Indian never” doubted the immortal nature of the spirit or soul of man.” End of quote.
However, for an Indian who had become an MD in American white society and who idealized his boyhood on the plains, immortality of the Indian soul was probably a matter of decency. We arrive at the same difficulties of interpretation with another Siouan tribe on the prairies, the Omaha. Alice Fletcher’s presentation of Omaha religion has been challenged by scholars who attribute a pantheistic inclination to her rendering of Omaha thought.
For instance, she points out that Omaha ideas concerning life and death were interwoven with their conception of, I, I quote, “A common and interrelated life, a living force that permeates and is continuous in all forms and appearances. All these forms exist in the realm of the dead as well as in that of the living, and the life which informs them, like that which informs man, is continuous and unbroken, emanating from the great mystery, Wakonda.” End of quotation.
The logic of this pronouncement would be that man is immortal because he is a part of the supreme power, Wakonda. However, Miss Fletcher’s generalizations are not borne out by quotations from her informants and may be interpreted differently. On the other hand, there was definitely in Omaha belief a prolongation of afterlife of a sort, uh, that comes close to immortality.
Fletcher tells us that there were seven spirit worlds, each higher than the next preceding. People who had lived for a time in one world died and passed on to the next one above. And this idea, which reminds us both of the Mithras mysteries and the flight of the Siberian shaman to the, uh, upper world, and there is probably a shamanic basis to all similar conceptions.
This idea contains, as it were, the seed of a concept of immortality. We cannot say more than that. Among the Cheyenne of Nebraska, now Montana, some powerful medicine men are said to go to Bear Butte, north of the Black Hills, after their death.
Here they become guardian spirits for the people they have left, and this may mean that they, like most spirits, live on indefinitely. However, the common people didn’t share this privilege. And we have similar da-data from the Pawnee and from the Wind River Shoshone.
We now turn to a couple of the Algonquian tribes of nor-the Northeast. The case for the Ojibwe inhabitants of the regions north and west of Lake Superior is a bit complex. Father Hugolin stated at the beginning of this century that after death, the children and the aged eternally, he says eternally, kept close to abandoned campfires on this earth.
But this statement probably only concerned the e-earthbound ghosts and exaggerated the duration of their activity. There is much information in other sources on Ojibwe death beliefs, but little on immortality beliefs. Irving Hallowell, speaking of the Saulteaux Ojibwe, assures us that the dead went to a distant region to the south.
He says, “It was in this country that Indians whose souls left their bodies went on living, presumably forever, and it was a land presumably richer in game and bird life than the northern country of the living, a place where no one had any trouble in making a living, although life was in other respects a duplication of this one.” Now, we notice his words, presumably forever, the scholar here makes his own interpolation. There is no certainty.
And, uh, there is similar material from other Algonquin tribes which I have no time to give here. Instead, I go to the Southwestern and Southern Californian Indians, where we find among the Yuma, situated in southernmost Californ- California and neighboring parts of Arizona, that they have the realm of the dead, a happy country, somewhere in the sky south of Yuma territory.
One informant told Daryll Forde the following, “It is the same as Earth, only there is no death. They eat the same sort of food, but it is very good and plentiful. There is no frost, and it is green all the year round.
Now, it’s apparent that immortality is here, not the philosophical idea, but the natural consequence of the life quality in the region beyond. Um, yeah. And then I can go to the Mojave, where we are told that, uh, from the point of view of immortality, there are two categories of human beings except for certain accidents they may meet with while in human shape, the souls are twins, uh, of twins are immortal.
The souls of other persons are mortal. And at the death of an ordinary person, the chief one of his four souls, the so-called real shadow, is brought by a whirlwind to the land of the dead, which is a pleasant replica of the land of the living. However, after a while, the dead person dies there a second time and is cremated in the realm of the dead.
The twins, however, return to heaven from whence they come, and this is something which is peculiar to the, uh, Yuman peoples in the south. Ever so many of them talk about this, that twin-twins come from such a country and go there. And finally, we have the Pueblo Indians, who believe that the dead after death become supernatural spirits, kachinas, and, uh, thereby they come into another category and, uh, have, uh, um, uh, have made a victory over death.
Now, there are many more cases, but I have no time, so now I shall put the evidence together. It, uh, has been said before that slentrian statements of immortality which simply stand for life after death cannot be considered here. Also, unqualified statements made by, for instance, Christian missionaries will be excluded since they reflect anticipations derived from their own faith.
In other cases, as among the Eastern Dakota, the Lenape, Hupa, and Hualapai, aboriginal beliefs may have been influenced by Christian beliefs. The repeated reference to a variety of opinions on immortality, as among Iroquois and Hualapai, may testify to a general uncertainty, a dissolution of traditional ideas, or secrecy in front of an interviewer of foreign extraction. The general lack of information on the issue is probably a reflection of the fact that few Indians had any conscious ideas of immortality.
There was, on the whole, not much that could be said with certainty about life after death, and the information that existed mostly derived from extraordinary experiences that some medicine men and some seriously ill persons had had in states of soul flight. Their message concerned the quality of post-mortem life rather than its duration. However, there were some observations made by these seers which concerned this question, but they referred to the end of life in the other world and not to its prolongation.
Thus, there are, as we have seen, reports from the Crow, Omaha, and Mojave that the spirits of the dead suffer a new death in the other-world realm. This phenomenon, which is known also from other cultures, is in India called Punarmrityu, second death. In North America, the idea is widely spread among tribes of the Northwest Coast, the Middle West, and the Southwest.
If we disregard the many cases, particularly among Northern and Central Algonquins, where feeble, diseased persons like small children and aged persons succumb on the journey to the land of the dead, and the cases where a wrong ritual behavior at the burial jeopardizes continued life on the other side for a deceased, as, for example, among the Fox, then we can nevertheless state that second death has been supposed to occur quite frequently. Often we hear that the dead die several times after successive existences in the land of the dead. The Tlingit, Haida, and Kwakiutl die four times, and so do the Dakota, Kamia, and Kokopa, whilst the Mojave and Omaha die five times.
Sometimes reincarnation into new human beings or transmigration into animals saves the dying ghost from complete annihilation. However, in general, reincarnation and transmigration take place on another conceptual level without affinities. It is with man’s fate, with man’s fate as a being in the land of the dead.
The rationale behind the second death has been reconstructed in different ways. Boas associates to Tylor’s train of thought in postulating that the dead person represents the memory image of a deceased individual. And from this, it may be inferred that there should be a death of the soul at the time when all those who knew the deceased are dead and gone.
However, Boas insists that in the majority of cases, the soul is believed to be immortal, to which we may interpret as a very doubtful statement indeed. He admits, however, that there are a considerable number of cases of a second death, but points out at the same time that they are not of such a character that they may be explained by the fact that the dead person has become forgotten. He says they seem rather to be due to the imaginative elaboration of the continued life of the soul, which is necessarily thought to be analogous to our own life, and in which therefore, death is a natural incident.
End of quotation. This seems to be a correct interpretation. The first hypothesis mentioned by Boas, that the spirit of a dead person dies when his memory fades away among the living, is wrongly thought and is not substantiated by our sources.
Now, if then the rule holds that the spirit of a dead man dies analogous to the death of a man on this earth, we may well ask how the idea of immortality could enter the picture. We should, of course, be careful not to see immortality in the light of Greek or Christian thinking. Immortality is not a self-evident category of thought, but derives from an idealism which negates mortality, just as, as Raffaele Pettazzoni has said, monotheism negates polytheism.
Only when Christian impact had changed native religions and contributed to the birth of the Ghost Dance and the idea of the return of the culture hero, did immortality come into focus as a result of the resurrection, re-resurrection theme. Unless encapsulated in the doctrine of a unilinear development, development from earthly life to death, to final judgment, to everlasting life, as in the Southwestern Asian religions, or distinguished as an elevated quality set apart from the c-common life conditions after death. Immortality is no normal perspective of the future life in Amerindian thought.
There are two main roads leading to the belief in the immortality of the soul. First, the deceased person takes part of the qualities of the supernatural world and is therefore unmolested by death. Ideally, each surviving entity of man, sometimes identified with his so-called free soul in life, is part of the supernatural reality.
In practice, however, this doesn’t lead automatically to immortality. As the quotation from Dorsey has shown, also gods, at least among the Dakota, may be subjected to death. It’s only by virtue of specific associations with the supernatural world that man’s soul stays immortal.
First of all, the dead person has come to the supernatural realm where spirits and gods dwell. We have seen how the Yuchi dead join the supernaturals after death and become immortal together with them. There are occasional reports of dead living together with the supernatural beings in their world, but there is no definite proof that this this makes them immortal.
The Hare in northernmost Canada, the Haida, Bella Coola, and Bella Bella on the northwest coast, the Fox, the Mandan, and the Omaha of the Middle West, the Cheyenne of the Plains, the Creek and Choctaw of the Southeast, and the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest all furnish us with information of the cohabitation of ghosts and spirits in the other world. In most afterlife conceptions, there is, however, a clear barrier between them, the spirits living in the almost ubi-ubiquitous world of mystery, uh, the dead recluses in a particular realm of the dead, supervised by some supe-superior spirit. When dead people go to the world of the gods, There is usually something supernatural about them.
We have seen how the queen old ghost may turn into a guardian spirit. The Fox make a difference between common people who go to a land of the dead and people who are partly Manitou, that is, spirits or supernaturals. Up there in the region of White River, as they call the Milky Way, these happy dead are assembled in a lodge where the Supreme Being or the Great Spirit is the chief, and where the Thunderers are most welcome guests.
Indeed, most of the stars one sees in the night sky are people who have died and come there. However, it seems that particular ritual observances could grant even common people a place in this supernatural realm. In the southeast of North America, where sacred kings ruled up to the early eighteenth century, the king and members of his family went to live with the sun after death.
The court ritual surrounding such monarchs as the Natchez Great Sun clearly shows that he was of divine nature and therefore part of the supernatural realm after death. However, we are not really told if he was immortal. The Pueblo Indian beliefs constitute a particular case since they more or less divinize all their dead.
Particularly in Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblos, most dead become cloud and rain spirits, Kachina. Sometimes it’s said that their priests turn into these spirits. Sometimes all villagers become Kachina after death.
There is no direct indication that this change made them immortal. In any case, it would be wrong to classify them as simply dead. They have become spirits of nature.
We now come to our second point. Dead who are twins are transmitted to supernatural status after death. This is the case with Mojave and Cocopa twins, as we have seen, and renders them immortal.
However, it’s a rather common conception in North America that twins originate from, and after death return to, the supernatural world. Some examples, the Kwakiutl believe that twins are salmons who, when they die, become salmons again. They are supernatural and have supernatural power.
This idea that twins are salmon is common on the southern northwest coast, whereas on the plateau, twins are bears. The Dakota twins come from a specific twin country, and when they die, they go there again. And the twins among human tribes, after death, return to their original home, which is the sky, and they are supposed to be, uh, supernatural.
So it’s only from the human peoples that we have information of twins’ immortality, or at least their incessant living on. Among the Akwa’ala of Baja California, twins arrive from a mountainous, uh, twin country to which they return at death. They allow themselves to be born and die as they please in a series of reincarnations.
It’s a moot question whether we should call this immortality or not. Now to the last argument. The deceased person arrives in a paradise, and since everything there is thought to be happy, he cannot be supposed to die.
In other words, immortality is a function of the state of paradisaic happiness. We have found this correlation between paradise and immortality among the Plains Cree, Sauk, Pawnee, Quinault, Yuma, and San Felipe Indians. And this doesn’t mean to say, however, that wherever we find happy hunting grounds, there is also immortality.
Far from it. All we can say is that in many places where a happy afterlife is believed in for the good and decent tribesmen, there is a tendency to include never-failing life among its qualities. There is the possibility that Christian impulses have changed original native ideas in the direction of immortality, but this is, uh, difficult to prove, and in my view, not very probable in most cases.
Yeah, this is all there is to American Indian concepts of immortality. People who are of divine or supernatural origin may live on forever, and good tribesmen who go to a paradise after death have a good chance to do the same. Maybe immortality is too strong a word to use since it is so sharply defined.
The concept of immortality was primarily determined in classical Greece. As Benson Saler writes, “A distinction between agelessness and immortality on the one hand, and aging and mortality on the other, was important in Greek thought, and agelessness and immortality were attributes primarily associated with the gods.”” “End of quotation.” Such a dichotomy was certainly not conscious to American Indians.
Their gods and spirits were intrinsically immortal, but not unconditionally so. The Algonquian supernatural caribou owner could be killed, and so could some Dakota gods and the Mexican Nagual. Man was at most vaguely immortal.
As we have seen, Yuchi and Yuma Indians prefer to speak about spirits of the dead living an indefinite time. It’s probable that this notion was more widespread than our sources show. We all mis- almost divine it, for example, behind the Cheyenne conceptions of the next life.
This more flexible rendering of what we call immortality is in line with American Indian concepts of time. Time is seen not as a course between two definite poles, beginning and end, as in Western thought patterns. It is an endless chain of cyclic courses of events, symbolized in rite de passage, hunting and vegetational rit-rites, and annual rites.
Everything is going on all the time. There is no final showdown. A concept like immortality becomes seen in this perspective, relative, not absolute.
Perhaps it would be better to replace the philosophically chiseled concept of immortality with such a word as lasting. Lasting life after death, that is what, in optimal situations a North American Indian could hope for. Thank you.
(applause and cheering)
[01:06:53] INTRODUCER:
I want to thank Professor Hultkrantz for a most enlightening and erudite talk. I don’t know many people that control all the American Indian source materials, anthropologists, missionaries, and the like. You certainly were treated to a truly exercising comparative religion, as well as the Scandinavian forte of source criticism, in which they examine the nature of the materials rather than simply accepting them.
I, we– I know it’s a long, uh, uh, hot night, but I thought perhaps we would offer a chance for a few questions if any of you would, would like to do that before we adjourn. Is there anyone that has a, a burning question that they would like to ask on the subject of American im-immortality? Yes.
[01:07:32] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, I was wondering if you’d be able to, um, uh, add some information about, uh, at what point the Great Spirit in North America became thought of as, um, patriarchal or as equated with either a father or as equated with Father Sky. At what point did male characteristics become attributed to the Great Spirit?
[01:07:57] ÅKE HULTKRANTZ:
Well, are you referring to his, uh, uh, equation with the father concept or with the sky?
[01:08:04] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Well, that’s a point of confusion for me because I’m even wondering if, if at what point, uh, do you have Mother Earth and Father Sky?
[01:08:11] ÅKE HULTKRANTZ:
Yes.
[01:08:12] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I’m wondering at what point Father Sky or Grandfather Sky became connected with the Great Spirit, who might be thought of as being neither Mother Earth nor Father Sky.
[01:08:19] ÅKE HULTKRANTZ:
Yeah. Well, uh, this is a very difficult question, and, uh, it is not solved as yet. If you mean the connection between Mother Earth and Father Sky, this is, uh, truly not, uh, uh, quite clear unless you go to, uh, well, first and foremost, the Luiseño Indians in Southern California and then also among Puebloan Indians.
There you will find the marriage between sky, Father Sky and Mother Earth. Uh, Professor Kroeber, who, uh, instructed in, uh, this campus, uh, several decades ago, he said in his Handbook of Californian Indians that he thought that this, however, was a kind of a Polynesian concept that had been imported to California from Polynesia. I’m not so sure about that.
I think there has been a general feeling of the sky as the fertilizing air and the mirth and then the Earth as the fertilized person in a ca– in a relationship. But our sources are not so good that we can prove it definitely, but I have the feeling that this is the case. A-as to the father concept, I know that there is now, uh, they are now raising certain doubts about, uh, the, uh, God, the heavenly God, uh, the, um, uh, the Supreme Being, the Great Spirit as a father, and thinking that that is, uh, some new concept introduced by Christianity.
I’m not so sure, because if you go to all the, uh, Basin peoples, the Basin Indians, uh, the, uh, so-called Numic peoples or Shoshonean peoples, you will find that they have everywhere a word for father, and it— if, uh, well— they call the Supreme Being Father, and it’s quite unbelievable to me that this could have been introduced from Christianity. I think it is a rather old concept.
[01:10:26] INTRODUCER:
Any other questions? In the back.
[01:10:27] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Well, you said in your closing statement that the Indians have a different concept of time being a cycle, cycle, whereas our time is indefinite, and if we accept your concept of time as in a cycle, that they do have immortality?
[01:10:42] ÅKE HULTKRANTZ:
Well, I, I don’t know if I have understood the, the question here. But I mean, they– You see, when I talked about the religions which have a, a kind of a stretch from a beginning to an end, I was talking about the prophetic religions of Southwest Asia. That is, uh, the Iranian religion, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and all the religions that stem from these religions.
There you have this, uh, concept. And that is, uh, really, uh, something that is, uh, most exceptional in the history of religions, so that, uh, uh, the– mostly we have a kind of an undulating pattern of events, everything going from ne- one year to the next i-in-in rounds. You know, the American Indians have the circle as a sign, and this circle is a sign not only for, uh, locality, but, or-on places, but also for time.
Time in, for instance, in, in the, uh, the, uh, Sioux and Dakota time concept, room and time join. in one circle. And this is, uh, very definitely proved, uh, there is no doubt about it.
And I mean that such an idea fosters, uh, fosters a, a kind of feeling that, uh, there is nothing essential to the question of immortality because, uh, people are not thinking in those categories. I may, of course, be wrong. This is my interpretation.
I think it is valid, but you may have another opinion.
[01:12:21] INTRODUCER:
Yeah. The point is well taken that, uh, that, uh, that may be ethnocentric with our linear notion as opposed to cyclical. And, and one, one of the things that Professor Hultkrantz was concerned with in his whole lecture, seems to me, was wrestling with the question of the nature of this series.
Because this series came from a very ethnocentric notion of soul, religion, immortality, and in a sense, he had to spend a lot of time undoing that. And maybe that was a very important point that we made. A couple more questions in the back again.
[01:12:45] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Is there any information on North-Northern California Indians?
[01:12:50] ÅKE HULTKRANTZ:
In this matter, there is very little to be said. I don’t think I have noticed here anything of that. I’ll, I’ll look at it. As far as I know, there’s nothing. But, um, I have from the the Tillamook of the Oregon coast, I have material. I have from the Hoopa, and that is about all. Yes.
[01:13:20] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I was wondering about evidence of burial customs, or evidence for preparing for the life after death.
[01:13:28] ÅKE HULTKRANTZ:
I don’t think any evidence at all. Uh, you know, uh, in California, for instance, you have, you have, uh, cremation and, uh, earth burials, uh, in, in bands. If you take, uh, the state from north to south, you have an area of cremation, an area of, uh, of, uh, uh, earth burial, an area of cremation, et cetera.
It goes down like stars and stripes that way
(laughter)
. And, uh, uh, at the same time, the, uh, ideas, the eschatological ideas have nothing whatsoever to do with this. It seems as if, uh, the, uh, rituals, that is the cremation and the burials, is, uh, something that can go on for a long time while the, uh, beliefs change and vice versa.
So I, I, I don’t trust them at all. Yes. Uh, perhaps a proper ending to this might be a story from a Southern Cheyenne friend of mine, uh, Youngblood Henderson, who has told me about, uh, when the Custer massacre occurred.
Uh, it was the largest gathering of force that American Indians had ever made, and practically speaking, they could have stood off, uh, anything that the military at that point could have carted into the area to fight them with.
(breathing)
But it’s told in, uh, certain circles that that night, the five major war chiefs of the different groups all had the same dream, but each in their own symbology. And that in each case, the message was the same, that these white men that they were fighting against, uh, had this belief that they would go either to heaven or to hell, uh, on being killed, and that the Indians, Of course, uh, believed in, according to this story, that they would stay right there and live right there in the same place. And they all got the notion from this dream that if they kept killing these white men, that the white men were going to stay right there as well.
And they said, “No, enough of that,” and they just took off and all directions.
[01:15:36] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yes. Thank you. That is a nice, a nice story.
[01:15:39] INTRODUCER:
Well, if there are no further questions, let us thank again Professor Hultkrantz for his re-remarkable lecture.
(applause)