Observations placeholder
Mircea Eliade - Australian aboriginal beliefs on death
Identifier
010967
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Mircea Eliade – Shamanism Archaic techniques of ecstasy
For certain tribes, who are reckoned among the most archaic, the dead go to the sky, but that the majority of ‘primitive’ peoples know at least two post mortem routes – celestial for privileged beings (chiefs, shamans, initiates) and horizontal or infernal for the rest of mankind. Thus a certain number of Australian tribes – Narrinyeri, Dieri, Buandik, Kurnai and Kulin – believe that the dead rise into the sky; among the Kulin they go up by the rays of the setting sun. But in Central Australia the dead haunt the familiar places where they had passed their lives; elsewhere, they go to certain regions in the west