So not only was the constellation of Orion part of the Moundville story, not only was a journey to the realm of the dead part of it, too, but now I knew also that a series of trials would have to be faced on that journey, that the Milky Way was involved and, last but by no means least, that Moundville itself had been thought of as an image, or copy, of the realm of the dead on earth. Every one of these were important symbols, concepts, and narratives in the ancient Egyptian funerary texts that I’d been fascinated by for more than 20 years. It would be striking to find even two of them together in a remote and unconnected culture, but for them all to be present in ancient North America in the same way that they were present in ancient Egypt, and serving the same ends, was a significant anomaly.
In the museum there were other superb examples of the art and iconography of Moundville. It is all indisputably Native American art, the work of the same Mississippian culture responsible for Cahokia. Every piece on show in the display cases had been produced between about AD 1150 and 1500 when Moundville was abandoned, and the archaeologists had done their work so well that there could be no doubt whatsoever about the dates. This ruled out any possibility of direct influence since ancient Egypt breathed its last under Roman occupation in the fifth century AD, at least 500 years before the Mississippian culture came into existence.
How, then, to explain the fact that some of the fundamental symbols and ideas of the religions practiced at Moundville and in ancient Egypt—ideas and symbols specifically concerning the afterlife journey of the soul—appear to be the same?
THE PORTAL AND THE PATH
THE BOARD AT THE TOP of Mound B said there was “one account” linking the constellation that we know as Orion to traditions of “a great warrior’s hand in the sky.” This turned out not to be the case. There are in fact dozens of such accounts specifically referencing an ancient Native American constellation in which the stars of Orion’s belt form the wrist of this hand—sometimes said to belong to a great warrior chieftain and sometimes to a malevolent celestial being called “Long Arm,” who used it in an attempt to block a portal between earth and sky but lost the hand when it was chopped off by a human hero.1
Other than their underestimation of the sheer numbers of such accounts, it took me no more than an hour on Google to confirm that the information about the Mississippian afterlife beliefs displayed at Moundville, though scant, was based on solid research and accurately reflected the views of leading scholars in the field.
The Milky Way, the connection with Orion, the perilous afterlife journey of the soul, and the notion of creating an image or copy of the realm of the dead on the ground were all genuinely present in the Mississippian religion, just as they were in the ancient Egyptian religion. No one familiar with the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead could fail to notice these obvious resemblances. I’m not the first to do so. Andrew Collins and Gregory Little made passing mention of them in 2014 and there was earlier brief recognition of the same issue by others in 2012.2 To my knowledge at the time of this writing, however, no in-depth comparative study has ever been undertaken to determine whether there’s a real connection between these two otherwise very different cultures, separated not only by geography but also by time.
Is it all just coincidence?
Or can coincidence be ruled out?
The issue, it seemed to me, was important enough to justify a thorough investigation, and I already had a head start since the ancient Egyptian funerary texts, though never “easy,” were home turf for me. I’d been through them so often while researching previous books that I had no difficulty in reengaging with them. As a bonus I still had hundreds of pages of detailed notes I’d made on all the key recensions over the years and most of those notes, with page references to the heavily underlined and tagged print editions in my shelves, were in searchable electronic form.
The ancient Egyptians left us immense numbers of documents in their beautiful hieroglyphic script and we’ve been able to read them since Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone in the nineteenth century. We also have historical accounts of the ancient Egyptians and their religious beliefs written in antiquity by eyewitnesses to their civilization such as Herodotus. So we have a lot to go on.
In the case of North America, on the other hand, there are no eyewitness reports to provide a pre-Columbian historical record, and since Native North Americans possessed no written languages, they left no documents. Even had they done so, if the example of the organized burning of the Mayan codices during the Spanish conquest of Mexico is anything to go by,3 precious few of them would remain for us to study today. Such wholesale destruction was visited upon the indigenous cultures of North America that it is a miracle any of their painted and engraved images on pottery, stone, copper, shell, and bone have survived at all.
We can only guess at what has been lost and work with what remains. In this respect, as anthropologist Mark Seeman explains, while sites like Watson Brake, Serpent Mound, and even the Hopewell earthworks are so old that “historical connections are extremely difficult to make,” it’s quite a different matter with the Mississippian culture, which is “close enough in time to connect it to the religious practises and oral traditions of historical groups such as the Chickasaw, Creek, Caddo and Osage.”4
Similar connections with the Lakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Crow, Arapaho, Oglala, and other Siouan speakers, as well as with the Ojibwa and other speakers of Algonquian languages, have added further vital information to the inquiry.5
With these resources at hand, and through a sustained exercise of interdisciplinary detective work involving archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists, the code of Mississippian ideas and iconography has been comprehensively broken. The crucial realization, as anthropologists Kent Reilly and James Garber inform us, is that much of the imagery “has a linkage to ethnographic material that describes the location of the realm of the dead and the journey of dead souls to the underworld.”6
There is “variation in ethnographic details from one tribal group to another, as might be expected,” adds Professor George Lankford, an internationally recognized authority on Native American folklore, anthropology, religious studies, and ethnohistory.7 Nonetheless:
There is a unifying metaphor which argues for a common core of belief across the Eastern Woodlands and Plains, and probably far beyond that area. That unifying notion is an understanding of the Milky Way as the path on which the souls of the deceased must walk.8
Elsewhere Lankford reiterates that this belief system was by no means confined to the Plains, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Mississippi Valley. It is better understood, he argues, as part of “a widespread religious pattern” found right across North America and “more powerful than the tendency towards cultural diversity.”9 Indeed, what the evidence suggests is the former existence of “an ancient North American international religion10 … a common ethnoastronomy … and a common mythology. Such a multicultural reality hints provocatively at more common knowledge which lay behind the façade of cultural diversity united by international trade networks. One likely possibility of a conceptual realm in which that common knowledge became focused is mortuary belief [and] … the symbolism surrounding death.”11
SOULS OF ANCIENT EGYPT
IN BOTH ANCIENT NATIVE NORTH America and ancient Egypt the universe was believed to be “layered”—with This World, the everyday material realm, inhabited by humans, sandwiched between an Underworld below (often with powerful Underwater aspects) and an Upper World, or Sky World, above. In both ancient Native North America and ancient Egypt the afterlife journey was envisaged as unfolding in the Sky World, among the stars. But in both this apparently celestial setting had contradictory Below World characteristics, including bodies of water and other obstacles to cross, architectural spaces to navigate, and monstrous adversaries to face.
Ancient Egyptian notions of the soul can seem extremely complex at first glance. Indeed, according to the great authority on the subject, Sir E. A. W
allis Budge, formerly Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, it’s not just a matter of one soul but of multiple souls—all of them separate from but in some way connected to the khat, or physical body—“that which is liable to decay.”12
In Budge’s summary, these separate, nonphysical “souls”—perhaps “aspects of the soul” would be a better description—include notably:
The Ka, or “double,” that stays earthbound after death in the immediate vicinity of the corpse and the tomb.
The Ba, depicted as a bird or human-headed bird that can fly freely “between tomb and underworld.”
The Khaibit, or shadow.
The Khu, or “spiritual soul.”
The Sekhem, or “power.”
The Ren, or “name.”
The Sahu, or “spiritual body,” which formed the habitation of the soul.
The Ab, or heart, “regarded as the center of the spiritual and thinking life. … It typifies everything which the word ‘conscience’ signifies to us.” The heart, and what its owner has imprinted upon it by his or her choices during life, is the specific object of judgment in the Netherworld.13
The Ba soul flying free of the physical remains of the deceased.
It would be possible to write an entire book, perhaps several, on the complexities of ancient Egyptian soul beliefs. In my opinion, however, once the baroque flourishes, dramatic elements, and multiple iterations are dispensed with, the eight “souls” or “soul aspects” listed above can be boiled down to two, reflecting the ancient Egyptian view of the fundamentally dualistic nature of the human creature as both a spiritual and as a material being.
On the one hand, there is that nonphysical, spiritual aspect of ourselves that is potentially eternal and immortal, aspiring to the “life of millions of years,” as the funerary texts put it. Having worn the body like a suit of clothes, it is this “soul” that is liberated from it at death and can ascend to the stars, specifically to the constellation of Orion, to begin the next stage of its journey.
On the other hand, there is the physical body and the animating force believed to have attended to the vital functions of that body during life. Also seen as a kind of “soul,” a supernatural entity in its own right, it is the lot of this ghostly, nonphysical presence—combining most notably the characteristics of the Ka (“double”) and of the Khaibit (“shadow”)—to remain on earth with the corpse.
Inevitably in such a system of ideas, earth and sky become opposed dualities symbolizing the material realm that is to be left behind and the spiritual realm to which the potentially immortal, nonphysical aspect of the deceased ascends. Thus we read in the Pyramid Texts:
Earth is this King’s detestation. … This King is bound for the sky.14
The spirit is bound for the sky, the corpse is bound for the earth.15
The King is one of those … beings … who will never fall to the earth from the sky.16
In a similar vein, with some complexity regarding the activities of the “shadow,” the Book of What Is in the Duat has this to say:
Let thy soul be in heaven … let thy shadow penetrate the hidden place, and let thy body be to the earth.17
Many other examples could be cited but the summary is that the ancient Egyptians believed in two souls, or two fundamental aspects of the soul. One of these (let us not quibble about its several different avatars) remained bound to the physical remains and the tomb. The other, again in its several forms, was free to ascend to the sky and begin the journey to the realm of the dead.
SOULS OF ANCIENT AMERICA
WHAT NOW OF NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN conceptions of the soul?
Here, too, we find at first a bewildering multiplicity.
The Quileute people of the US northwest coast believe that within every living human body there reside several souls that “look exactly like the living being and may be taken off or put on in exactly the manner as a snake sheds its skin.”18
These souls are an inner soul, called the “main, strong soul,” an outer soul, called the “outside shadow,” a life-soul, referred to as “the being whereby one lives,” and the “ghost” of the living person, “the thing whereby one grows.”19
Let’s note in passing that the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead declares in chapter 164:
I have made for thee a skin, namely a divine soul.20
Returning to North America, it was believed among the Yuchi of Oklahoma that the individual “possesses four spirits … one of which, at death, remains on the spot where the disembodiment took place, while two others hover in the vicinity of tribesfolk and relatives. … The fourth starts upon a four-days” journey … to the haven of souls.21
In other accounts gathered from among the widely spread Ojibwa people of northeastern North America, the ethnographer Vernon Kinietz was told that humans have seven souls—only one of which, “the real soul,” goes to the realm of the dead.22 Another Ojibwa group reported that, according to their traditions, the human being consists of three parts:
The body (wiyo), which decays after death, the soul (udjitchog), which at death departs for the realm of the dead in the West, and the shadow (udjibbom), which after death becomes a grave-ghost.23
Expressing the same idea in a slightly different way, the Menominee of Wisconsin say there are two souls in every human being:
One, which is called “a shade across,” resides in the head and is the intellect; after death it becomes a grave ghost. The other is the real soul, tcebai, which has its seat in the heart and at death betakes itself to the realm of the dead.24
For the Choctaw, also, humans have two souls—the shilombish, “the outside shadow,” and the shilup, “the inside shadow,” or ghost, which at death goes to the land of ghosts. The shilombish remains on earth.25
And indeed, when the unnecessary details and confusingly ambiguous terminology are stripped away, it becomes clear that the fundamental Native North American belief across a vast geographical area, like the fundamental belief of the ancient Egyptians, was in the existence of two souls, one bound to the body and the earth, the other free to ascend to the sky. “Soul dualism,” concludes renowned Swedish anthropologist Ake Hultkrantz in his immense and still widely cited 1953 study, Conceptions of the Soul Among North American Indians, “constituted the predominant type of soul belief in North America.”26
At the heart of this widespread belief system stand twin concepts defined by Hultkrantz as the “free-soul” and the “body-soul.” The latter, also sometimes referred to as the “life soul,” represents “the forces that keep the body vital and active.” The “free-soul,” on the other hand, represents “the person himself in his extracorporeal form” but with the added power of limitless movement.27
To what end was this freedom of movement used?
Among ancient Native North Americans, as George Lankford explains, it was believed that
at a crucial point in the dying process the “free-soul,” the one that is self-aware and has an identifiable personality in relation to the deceased, separates from the body, leaving behind the life-soul, a mindless force which can be dangerous to the living, trapped in or near the physical remains. The free-soul remains present in the vicinity for a brief time, then … sets off towards the west on its final journey. … If at any time along the route the free-soul gains the power or will to return to earthly life, then it may retrace its steps and re-enter its body. … Mortuary rituals must therefore include at least two different tasks, taking care of two different souls.”28
Exactly the same care and attention paid to two different “souls,” and for the same reasons, also characterized ancient Egyptian mortuary rituals.29 It seems clear that these separate ancient Egyptian “souls” are essentially identical to, and interchangeable with, Native American notions of the “body-soul” and the “free-soul.”
THE ROAD TO THE WEST
IN THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PYRAMID Texts, line 1109, a soul reaches the realm of the dead only to hear a voice telling him:
Turn about, O you who have not yet come to the number of your days.30
A legend of the Ottawa, a Native American people who lived in Michigan and Ohio before migrating to Oklahoma where most members of the tribe are now found, tells of a person who enters the realm of the dead although he himself still lives. A voice, “as if it were a soft breeze,” whispers in his ear:
Go back to the land from whence you came. Your time has not yet come.31
The free-soul can become detached from the body not only in death, but also in dreams, visions, and comatose states. From the Native American perspective, “death” has therefore not definitively occurred until there is certainty that the absent free-soul will not return. It is for this reason, explains Lankford, that “the ‘dead’ are almost never buried immediately, and most people have a ritually specified time of waiting.”32 The Ojibwa were particularly known for their “habit of keeping the dead four days, in the hope that the soul in the spirit world would return and the person come back to life.”33
But when the soul does not return, where has it gone and how did it get there?
America Before Page 31