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Iroquoian women: The gantowisas
Thanks to @polyfrazzlemented for sharing this handy bit of info with me! Check out this snippet from Iroquoian conceptions of personhood and self!
Source: Mann, B. A. (2004). Iroquoian women: The gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang. This passage is found on pages 326-329.
Iroquoian spirituality is unmediated, direct contact between human and non-human spiritual agents. Connecting with outside entities who operate on their own, non-human agenda is a frighteningly real experience that shakes you to the bone, leaving a sense of shivering awe. Such spiritual experiences occur in a non-ordinary reality that is entered by walking through the Open Door of medicine into the connecting realm of Spirit. To pass through, assuming you are Iroquoian, you must use that element of your own spirit that came from the stars and that will, eventually, walk the Milky Way Trail back home to Te jennoniakoua, the Seven Dancers of the Pleiades, where Spirits dance with Sky Woman.
Source: Mann, B. A. (2004). Iroquoian women: The gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang. This passage is found on pages 326-329.
Iroquoian spirituality is unmediated, direct contact between human and non-human spiritual agents. Connecting with outside entities who operate on their own, non-human agenda is a frighteningly real experience that shakes you to the bone, leaving a sense of shivering awe. Such spiritual experiences occur in a non-ordinary reality that is entered by walking through the Open Door of medicine into the connecting realm of Spirit. To pass through, assuming you are Iroquoian, you must use that element of your own spirit that came from the stars and that will, eventually, walk the Milky Way Trail back home to Te jennoniakoua, the Seven Dancers of the Pleiades, where Spirits dance with Sky Woman.
Fourth, notice that it is Spirits, not Souls, returning home to Te jennoniakoua. Since first contact, Europeans have casually presented the star-quality of Iroquoian Spirit as "soul," a Christian term that is wildly out-of-context when applied to the Iroquois. To begin with, soul is inextricably linked with Christian morality, as Iroquoian Spirituality is not. Furthermore, whereas Christian theology parcels out souls with a stingy hand, one per customer, traditional (i.e. pre-Longhouse) Spirituality invested the body with two Spirits, operating at different levels of awareness - and sometimes, at cross purposes. One Spirit is not necessarily aware of the other.
Although modern Longhouse religionists, largely unaware of the older traditions of Spirit, tend to accept the Christianized concept of spirit as soul, the non-Longhouse Iroquois of Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia remember the older ways, in which there is no ephemeral soul striving to reunite with God. Instead, every human being has two Spirits, a gannigonr-ha and an erienta. The first, gannigonr-ha, is transitory, an earth spirit hooked up with the personality of this particular life. The second, erienta, is a Sky spirit and, in Lafitau's excellent word, "habitual." An Elder Spirit that transcends any particular life, erienta is bound up with the permanent trajectory of spiritual purpose that temporarily manifests as a human life. Thus, every living thing has not one, but two animating Spirits, each enjoying a different level of spiritual access, one connected with the smaller concerns of daily life, and the other an umbrella Spirit, aware of cosmic purpose.
Although this philosophy was recorded by the more astute sources such as Lafitau, the fact of a community of spirits working on different levels for purposes not necessarily known to the host personality has since been completely obviated by western scholars, to whom one immortal soul per person seems a foregone conclusion. As an unexamined area, this aspect of Iroquoian Spirituality goes well past western bias, into sheer western oblivion. It is something that most western scholars yet have to notice, let alone come to religious grips with.
To date, I have found only the nineteenth-century scholar Daniel Brinton to have taken the Iroquois (and Algonkins) seriously concerning the twinned spirits of human existence. Others who encountered the concept simply rejected it as unaccountable, or, as William Fenton did in his 1974 translation of Lafitau, dismissed it out-of-hand. Fenton claimed that the terms gannigonr-ha and erienta were "entirely original with Lafitau." In footnotes, Fenton further obscured the issue by underscoring Lafitau's mistaken suggestion that gannigonr-ha and erienta were a primitive form of Cartesian mind-body dualism. Fenton was Euro-forming with a vengeance. First, Lafitau did not invent gannigonr-ha and erienta, the spiritual forces animating human life. (Brébeuf mentioned the "two souls" as well.) Second, they exist, and they have nothing to do with Cartesian logic.
The gannigonr-ha and erienta do not necessarily work in tandem during life while, at death, they go their separate ways. Traditionally, gannigonr-ha was metaphorically characterized as "body," whereas the erienta was metaphoric "Breath" - and the term Europeans typically translated as "soul." Breath reflected the cosmic connections of the erienta, as body did the earthly connections of the gannigonr-ha. It was said that children inherited their erienta "breath" from their fathers, and their gannigonr-ha "body" from their mothers.
The transient spirit, gannigonr-ha, acts like a shadow, staying close to the deceased's body for some time after death. In the older traditions, the usual time frame for its final departure was given as a year, although under the Longhouse Religion, that time was foreshortened to ten days. The other spirit, erienta, is generally unconcerned with its deceased host. Instead, the erienta follows the Atiskein andahatey, the Milky Way Trail (or, as misrepresented by the missionaries, The Path of Souls), home to the stars, upon having completed its sojourn among the Spirits of Earth. Once an erienta has finished its work on earth, it is not to return, explaining the resolute refusal of the erienta of the deceased sister to return to her earthly body in the tradition that opened this chapter. When missionaries like Sagard recorded that the Iroquois believed "in the immortality of the soul," which followed star paths to the gendered Lands of "Ataensiq" (Sky Woman) and "Yoscaha" (Sapling), it was the erienta to which they were referring. As Chief Elias Johnson recalled, his ancestors "did not suppose the spirit [erienta] was instantaneously transferred from earth to heaven, but that it wandered in aerial region for many moons." The gannigonr-ha was likewise apt to wander about the earth before fixing on its next life. As long as the spirits wandered, the mourning continued.
Although modern Longhouse religionists, largely unaware of the older traditions of Spirit, tend to accept the Christianized concept of spirit as soul, the non-Longhouse Iroquois of Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia remember the older ways, in which there is no ephemeral soul striving to reunite with God. Instead, every human being has two Spirits, a gannigonr-ha and an erienta. The first, gannigonr-ha, is transitory, an earth spirit hooked up with the personality of this particular life. The second, erienta, is a Sky spirit and, in Lafitau's excellent word, "habitual." An Elder Spirit that transcends any particular life, erienta is bound up with the permanent trajectory of spiritual purpose that temporarily manifests as a human life. Thus, every living thing has not one, but two animating Spirits, each enjoying a different level of spiritual access, one connected with the smaller concerns of daily life, and the other an umbrella Spirit, aware of cosmic purpose.
Although this philosophy was recorded by the more astute sources such as Lafitau, the fact of a community of spirits working on different levels for purposes not necessarily known to the host personality has since been completely obviated by western scholars, to whom one immortal soul per person seems a foregone conclusion. As an unexamined area, this aspect of Iroquoian Spirituality goes well past western bias, into sheer western oblivion. It is something that most western scholars yet have to notice, let alone come to religious grips with.
To date, I have found only the nineteenth-century scholar Daniel Brinton to have taken the Iroquois (and Algonkins) seriously concerning the twinned spirits of human existence. Others who encountered the concept simply rejected it as unaccountable, or, as William Fenton did in his 1974 translation of Lafitau, dismissed it out-of-hand. Fenton claimed that the terms gannigonr-ha and erienta were "entirely original with Lafitau." In footnotes, Fenton further obscured the issue by underscoring Lafitau's mistaken suggestion that gannigonr-ha and erienta were a primitive form of Cartesian mind-body dualism. Fenton was Euro-forming with a vengeance. First, Lafitau did not invent gannigonr-ha and erienta, the spiritual forces animating human life. (Brébeuf mentioned the "two souls" as well.) Second, they exist, and they have nothing to do with Cartesian logic.
The gannigonr-ha and erienta do not necessarily work in tandem during life while, at death, they go their separate ways. Traditionally, gannigonr-ha was metaphorically characterized as "body," whereas the erienta was metaphoric "Breath" - and the term Europeans typically translated as "soul." Breath reflected the cosmic connections of the erienta, as body did the earthly connections of the gannigonr-ha. It was said that children inherited their erienta "breath" from their fathers, and their gannigonr-ha "body" from their mothers.
The transient spirit, gannigonr-ha, acts like a shadow, staying close to the deceased's body for some time after death. In the older traditions, the usual time frame for its final departure was given as a year, although under the Longhouse Religion, that time was foreshortened to ten days. The other spirit, erienta, is generally unconcerned with its deceased host. Instead, the erienta follows the Atiskein andahatey, the Milky Way Trail (or, as misrepresented by the missionaries, The Path of Souls), home to the stars, upon having completed its sojourn among the Spirits of Earth. Once an erienta has finished its work on earth, it is not to return, explaining the resolute refusal of the erienta of the deceased sister to return to her earthly body in the tradition that opened this chapter. When missionaries like Sagard recorded that the Iroquois believed "in the immortality of the soul," which followed star paths to the gendered Lands of "Ataensiq" (Sky Woman) and "Yoscaha" (Sapling), it was the erienta to which they were referring. As Chief Elias Johnson recalled, his ancestors "did not suppose the spirit [erienta] was instantaneously transferred from earth to heaven, but that it wandered in aerial region for many moons." The gannigonr-ha was likewise apt to wander about the earth before fixing on its next life. As long as the spirits wandered, the mourning continued.
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