The Proto-Indo-European Spirits of the Dead

2022

This began as a Supplementary Table to Harrod (2022), Portable Art Sculptures from the Anzick Clovis Cache, Wilsall, Montana. I did it to provide a Siberian/East Asian and North American comparative mythology context to identify Anzick Clovis cache (13,000 years ago) portable art, and identify possible depictions of Siberian/East Asian and North American Afterlife Beliefs, Mortuary Rituals and Psychopomp Motifs, especially involving Milky Way, Path of Souls of Deceased, Bird, Dog, Coyote or Wolf, and Reincarnation. Especially since this Version 2 is 177 pages long, I decided best to upload this separately from my Anzick article, to stand independently, pertaining to global comparative mythology on these beliefs and their symbolism.

Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis, 1987

The fact that a word or concept has been borrowed from outside does not mean that the original content, the original ideas which the loan word in question expresses, have also been adopted. This is by no means the case when it is a question of abstract words and notions, such as the afterlife. A word, an idea, a custom is taken over but filled with new content; in its new context it acquires a genuinely Saami conceptual load, which has its original domiciliary rights in Saami, north Eurasian culture. The present brief notes on the Nordic and Christian influence on Saami ideas about the realm of the dead proceed from the Saami religion as a whole, examining and explaining it from an external perspective: what connecting-points are there in the "original" mother tradition for the new ideas which have been adopted over the course of time and which have been grafted on to the old? The first and fundamental starting-point for the study of the meeting of the Saami religion with ...

2025

This is the 5th installment of my ongoing bibliographic project collecting the titles of books about the study of death in various cultures that I have been posting since 2022. The previous "Supplementary Bibliography" lists are also available on Academia under my name.

2022

This is the second installment of my ongoing bibliographic project collecting titles of books about the study of death, burial or afterlife concepts, with a focus on the premodern world.

Religions 15 (2), 194, 2024

Many taboos and a high resistance to change are the hallmark of posthumous rituals and customs among all Slavic peoples, which has helped maintain their archaic nature. According to Slavic beliefs, in the otherworld, the souls of the deceased who were kind-hearted during their lifetime join the group of their ancestors who guard the living, providing them with prosperity and fertility. In return, living descendants had an obligation to periodically organize commemorations for the deceased, invoke memories of them, and make (food) offerings meant for the salvation of their souls. On the other hand, Slavs believed that the deceased who died prematurely or violently, or those who were dishonourable throughout their lives, became “the revenant deceased” or “the impure deceased” and could bring harm, sickness, and death to the living. For these reasons, people tended to prepare all of the dead—particularly the ones whose souls could potentially become members of the “impure” group—adequately for the funeral and to see their souls off from this world following traditional rites. This research is based on the presupposition that, among folk beliefs, customs, and rituals regarding the deceased (and their souls), there is a substratum whose archaic nature reaches back to the period when Slavic peoples lived together. These are folk beliefs and customs which appear in all three groups of Slavic peoples but are not related to any of the predominant religions, primarily Christianity, nor did they emerge under the influences of those religions. The sources used in the research include a published ethnographic corpus of data and scientific papers on posthumous rites among the Slavs. Also taken into account were archaeological, historical, and linguistic sources.

2023

This is the third installment of my ongoing bibliographic project collecting titles of books about the study of death, the afterlife, or burials, with a focus on the premodern world.

An anecdote found in the third juan of the Treatise on Discerning Virtue (Fenbie gongde lun 分別功德論) refers to the story of a group of monks who went to a graveyard to practice “dead body contemplation” (guan sishi 觀死屍) and witnessed a particularly curious event: a “hungry ghost” (egui 餓鬼; skr.: preta) brutally beating a dead body. In the lines that follow, the corpse is revealed to be nothing more than the body of the preta itself or, more precisely, the body that belonged to this creature during its previous life. Beating its own mortal remains, the “hungry ghost” unleashed its anger against the human weaknesses that led it to this unfortunate condition. Such preta accounts are common in so-called “popular” Buddhist tales, filled with anecdotes on noctivagous and man-eating creatures that haunt humans. In addition, “canonical” Buddhist sūtra-s and treatises specifically discussing this subject matter are also quite frequent. However, a much smaller number of texts go into greater detail about the various preta categories and their specific nature and “karmic origin”, elements which often prove to be more complex and subtle than expected. It is well known that, despite its integration into the Buddhist cosmological scheme, the concept of preta is in fact inherited from much older speculations linking this condition to notions that are at times far removed from those found in Buddhist texts. Before its assimilation into the five (or six) realms of rebirth by the systematizations of Buddhist scholastics, the preta is first and foremost “the one who proceeds”, in other words the “migrant”, that is to say “the one who travels” between the material world and the world of the ancestors, the pitṛ-s. The most detailed description of this rebirth path transmitted by the Chinese Buddhist tradition appears in a sixth-century translation of the Sūtra of the Foundations of Mindfulness of the True Law (Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra), the Zhengfa nianchu jing 正法念處經 (henceforth ZFNCJ), provided by Gautama Prajñaruci 瞿曇般若流支 (act. 538−543). Up until a few years ago, apart from this translation, completed during the first year of the Xinghe 興和 era (539) of the Eastern Wei, only excerpts and a Tibetan translation (dating from the late 11th−early 12th c.) of this text were known to exist. A Sanskrit manuscript containing this text was recently found in Tibet. The origins of this manuscript, which began to circulate in the Western academic milieu in the form of photographs, are unclear. However, various elements would seem to indicate that it was copied between the eleventh and the thirteenth century. Despite its precious contents, the ZFNCJ was most likely not very popular in India, nor in China, as there is no evidence of the existence of any commentary or any other kind of exegetical work regarding this text. The ZFNCJ lists thirty-six preta-s at the beginning of the chapter (pin) entitled “The Hungry Ghosts” (Egui 餓鬼品). Each entry is accompanied by a phonetic transcription of the “Indian language” ghost name, followed by a summary Chinese translation, that is to say an explanation of its meaning. The precise meaning of these ghost names is clarified in Chinese by short phrases explaining their general features, such as the food they consume, their physical aspect, etc. Lin Li-kouang was doubtless the first scholar to provide a translation and (hypothetical) restoration of the Sanskrit names of these thirty-six preta-s. Later, Wayman suggested a number of rectifications to some of Lin’s assumptions. In this study I will mainly refer to the Chinese version of the ZFNCJ. The preta names found in the Sanskrit manuscript and referred to in the present paper are based on the data provided by Daniel Stuart in his 2012 PhD dissertation. By comparing the terms found in this manuscript with the transliterations found in the Chinese translation, various philological problems can be pointed out. These problems are often quite difficult to explain and, at times, constitute serious inconsistencies. Such elements, which should be studied in greater depth, raise a number of interesting questions concerning the transmission of the ZFNCJ and seem to suggest the existence of different versions or recensions of the text. The work of the three abovementioned scholars proved to be an invaluable source of information for this paper and all Sanskrit transcriptions of these preta names are based on the data they provided. Moreover, by analysing the whole section of the text concerning the preta-s, which consists of two juan-s of the ZFNCJ, it is possible to point out further interesting features of the specific details given by this text, which has not yet been explored in great depth. In fact, apart from the abovementioned list of names, the text contains an in-depth description of the various categories of preta-s, giving full details in a series of paragraphs also containing verses and short digressions on other topics. The ZFNCJ pays particular attention to the karmic causes leading human beings into this kind of evil path of rebirth, as well as to their consequences and long-term effects.

Religions 15(6), 740, 2024

This article examines some features of the mythological beliefs and funeral rites of Siberia’s two related Uralic peoples—the Nenets and the Nganasans. The afterlife fate in the mythology of Nenets and Nganasans is similar—the souls of the dead go to the Lower World, where they continue to live as they lived on Earth. However, the two cultures’ attitudes towards the dead have intriguing differences. A comparison of Nenets and Nganasan beliefs and rituals reveals significant correspondences between the ideas about the benevolence of the dead (the Nenets) or their harmfulness (the Nganasans), on the one hand, and the presence of the practices of substitutional incarnation (images of the dead) (the Nenets) or the absence of such images (the Nganasans) on the other. The differences between the Nenets and the Nganasans, as I suggest, are due to the origin and history of the peoples: the Nenets’ customs reflect the traditions of the Uralic tribes who came to the far north from Southern Siberia in ancient times. At the same time, the Nganasans’ ideas are probably rooted in typical concepts of the Palaeo-Siberian population assimilated by the Uralic tribes.

2022

This is a bibliography, the first in a planned series, of books about death, burial, the afterlife, and related issues. It is supplementary to the bibliography of my book "The Ancient Roman Afterlife" but lists works that are not just about the Romans but about pre-modern death more broadly.