SpiritWorld

The Spirit World
The voices of spirit, of our global ancestors (ancestor_worship), of the kami or deities (divinity) as understood by the indigenous (indigenous_peoples) or aboriginal peoples of all times, paleolithic to present. The sources, voices and messages the Spirit_mediums (clairvoyance), Seers (prophets), Diviners (Maya_calendrical_divination), Shamans, Priestesses, Medicine People (Medicine_Man) 'hear' and 'see' in their transient or permanent connection to or immersion in the 'medicine' of Mother Nature (animism), sometimes distinguished by supernatural naming.
Ancient & Indigenous Peoples
Great Spirit in the many diverse names spoken in the GrandMother wisdom-keeper stories of the pre-columbian native Americans. Spoken by the Itako and Miko of ancient and contemporary Japan. The Mudang of Korea, the Noro and Yuta of the Matrilineal Ryukyu Islands. The Curandera, Machi and Sacerdonsa of Latin America. The Hawaiian Kahuna, Maori Tahunga, Filipine Babaylan. Dukun of Indonesia and Bomoh or Pawang in Malaysia. (expand to a globally-representative portrayal of the Priestess and Shaman cultures which are best known.)
Weaving The Storyline
Singing the songline, dreaming the dreamtime. A 'Dreaming trek' journey around the globe of tribal and cultural examples of medicine women and men, and identifying elements of the songs, dances, rituals associated with their practices, in this 'world' today.
Dhyani Ywahoo, Tsalgi People
"When Native American people sing for the rain, the rain comes -- because those singers have made a decision that they and the water and the air and the Earth are one. The song is sung that all beings may benefit from the gentle rains."
"Each of us has a song in our heart. Through thought, through action, each one is creating vibrations in the atmosphere. When we think about the dancing atoms that build and sustain the forms of life, we can see ourselves forever in the dance. Everything is vibration. Our action rings out in many dimensions, and in that way our thoughts and actions return to us. We may call it karma or destiny; we are living the result of our thoughts and their various overtones interacting with other thoughts. Just as a pebble of intention dropped into a still pond ripples out in every direction, so the appearance and phenomena of our lives and our world are ripples on the serene surface of universal mind."
"We are one with our mother, the Earth, the umbilicus of our thought interweaving the dream that we are sharing. We are turning this dream to peace. We are remembering the sacred medicine and we are keeping the sacred prophecies to clarify and purify, to see ourselves in harmony."
Diane Bell, on Women's Business
"Through their yawulyu (land-based ceremonies)" the aboriginal women "nurture land; through their health and curing rituals they resolve conflict and restore social harmony, and through yilpinji (love rituals) they manage emotions. Thus in women's rituals their major responsibilities in the areas of love, land and health fuse in the nurturance motif with its twin themes of the 'growing up' of people and land, and the maintenance of harmonious relations between people and country"
"To understand this concept of nurturance, which is so different from that of Western culture," we must look to the sacred Aboriginal teachings and practices. "When women hold aloft the sacred boards for their country, when they dance hands cupped upward, they state their intention and responsibility to 'grow up' country and kin. This wide-ranging and broadly based concept of nurturance is modelled on the Dreamtime experience, itself one all-creative force. For Aboriginal women, as the living descendants of this time, the physical acts of giving birth and of lactation are important, but are considered to be one individual moment in the much larger and total design of the jukurrpa (Dreamtime)."
Rishika and Rishi, "through whom the Vedic hymns flowed ..."
(the "seers" or "shaman" of Vedic tradition, to whom the Veda hymns were "originally revealed".)
Susan Sered, on Becoming Kami
"Eight kami-sama continue their trek into the increasingly dark jungle, finally reaching the sacred grove. There are two stone benches where they sit and weave crowns of leaves and vines to put on their heads. One of the kami-sama goes further into the sacred grove, stopping at a small stone altar on which rest six conch shells. She squats in front of the shells, prays briefly, and "feeds" rice and sake into the opening of each shell. She then joins her sister kami-sama at the benches, taking her place on the center seat."
Sake is poured for each kami-sama and "they pray briefly and quietly. The eight kami-sama rise and begin their journey back to the bus. The bus driver takes them to the edge of the village, and the kami-sama walk to the village square where they are met by clan members and by the village headman, who bows and pours sake for each kami-sama. Clanswomen provide food and drink for the kami-sama. After a small meal the kami-sama (compare amaterasu) rise, take of their white robes and hang the crowns of leaves on special nails in the village square. Eight middle-aged and elderly women then walk home to prepare food for their families, to weed the vegetable gardens, and do to their housework."
Hearan Chung, Shaman Dancing Spirit
"In her Shin Kal Deh Shin Mu performance, Korean Master Artist Hearan Chung uses a special kind of wand called a Shin Kal, made from layers of white paper cut into thin pieces and attached to a long bamboo stick, in Shin Kal Deh Shin Mu. The Shin Kal is used in mediating the ceremony of death as a key to open the door to the spirit world. The dance is performed to protect the emigrating soul from interference by any evil beings and to safely lead it onto the next realm of existence."
"Each element of this dance has ancient symbolism. The Shin Kal wand, held in both hands, portrays the mourning for the passing of the personality, the long white cloth used in
the beginning of the dance represents the path of that soul, while the cut paper on the wand is considered money used by the soul during its journey to the other world. The
powerful shaking movement the shaman creates with the Shin Kal in hand threatens any devils that might prey upon the soul, thus freeing the soul to move to the next life."
Chi Gong, Traditional_Chinese_Medicine
"Spirit Possession: Perhaps many of you have heard something about being possessed by animals, such as foxes, yellow weasels, ghosts and snakes, etc?"
"Some people say that one can develop supernormal capabilities through the practice of qigong. As a matter of fact one is not developing 'supernormal' capabilities, they are none other than instinct. However, with the development of human society, we are more and more attached to tangible things in our physical space and are more and more dependent on modernized means. Therefore our human instincts are deteriorating, and in the end they are made to disappear completely."
To return to natural instincts "one has to cultivate them" through returning to our origins and going back to the truth. "The wild animal does not have such a complex mind, so it can always communicate with the fundamental qualities of the universe and is possessed of the primordial instinct."
La Sacerdonsa "Iyami Horonga"
The High Priestess 'La Emperatriz' Ochun, or Yemaya amongst the Yoruba. The ancient name Yemaya is a contraction of 3 separate Yoruba words: yeye or iya, omo and, finally, aje. "Yeye" or "iya" translates to mean ocean, creation or mother. "Omo" means child or children and "aje", can be translated to mean planet, fish, seashells; or, priestess, shaman, witch. The name can be interpreted as "mother-whose-children-are-as-numerous-as-fish", "mother-whose-child-is-the-world," or [shades of Harry Potter) "mother-whose-children-are-witches." (Compare Nüwa and ).
The 401 Orishas or divinities that comprise the Yoruba pantheon include 200 aspects who sit to the Divine left of the Great_Mother, and 200 to the Divine right. Each one of these 401 divinities is the deification of a specific 'personality' of nature.
Many contemporary Orisha worshippers say that the lesser Orishas are not great spirits in the strictest sense but rather they are the fragments of the One Creation Song known as "Oloddumare." (Oloddumare translates to mean "Song of All Beings.")
In West Africa and in Brazil, Yemaya/Yamanja is the supreme ruler of the Iyami community. The Iyami ("our mothers") community is comprised of ancestral priestesses and she is the patron/matron kachina of the ajes. (Compare Mãe-de-santo).
A Yoruba priestess is known as Iyanifa, Iyalaja, Iya Agba and Iyalase.
Maya ah'men, Raising the Sky
Raised-Up Sky, First-Tree Precious, Sky Tree, Elevated Wood, Platform of the Sky -- "these resonances could be coincidental, but we think they are all names for the same fundamental thing. The names may very in time and place, but Don Pablo's altar is the present expression of the Maya Cosmic Center: the axis mundi, transfered through practice and apprenticeship from shaman to shaman for early a hundred generations."
ah'men or h'men -- "performer or doer" or "one who understands." (Maya priesthood). The h'men traveled between the worlds, or existed simultaneously in both, preserving the ancestral wisdom, and healing and guiding the community. Maya_health_and_medicine.
In Yukatek, the wordsounds for sky (ka'an) and the number four (kan) are nearly the same. In Cholan they are the same, "and moreover, the glyphs for the number four, and for sky and snake (all chan in Cholan or kan in Yukatekan) freely substitute for each other in the ancient writing system."
The ka'an che' (altar), was a table of six legs, and four saplings or vines (xtab ka'anil, "cords of the sky") creating the arch of the cosmos (or alternately of four legs and six vines). "In the ancient Classic period, wak and kan (six and four) formed the name of the World Tree -- the Wakah-kan (or Wakah-Chan in Chol)." (See Wacah_Chan, world_tree and Tree_of_life).
Thirteen gourds hung from the vines of the ceremonial altar -- for the thirteen constellations of the Maya zodiac -- creating a portal between the material plane and the world of spirit, through which the h'men could summon chaac/chakob ... (see Chac:_Dios_de_la_lluvia).

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