Natural History Magazine 3/97
Almost every day among the Sora, a jungle tribe in eastern India, the living conduct dialogues with the dead. A shaman, usually a woman, serves as an intermediary between the two worlds. During a trance, her soul is said to climb down terrifying precipices to the underworld, leaving her body for the dead to use as their vehicle for communication. One by one the spirits speak through her mouth. Mourners crowd around the shaman, arguing vehemently with the dead, laughing at their jokes, or weeping at their accusations.
To prepare her for the important position of intermediary, a future
shaman is visited in childhood dreams by helper spirits, who are
said to turn her soul into a monkey to enable her to clamber down
to the underworld. Later, the Sora believe, she learns to make
this journey at will during a trance. She marries a helper spirit,
bears spirit children, and makes a second home in the underworld,
which she visits every time she dreams or goes into a trance.
According to Sora thinking, death is not the end of existence, but merely another phase. After death one becomes a powerful spirit with contradictory motives. On the one hand, the dead nourish their living descendants by infusing their growing crops with their own "soul force." In aggressive moods, however, they may "eat" their relatives' souls and cause in them the same illness to which the deceased succumbed.
At funerals and in divinations to diagnose the cause of illness, people stage dialogues to interrogate the dead about where they are the landscape, the sky, or the underworld. A spirit that is trying to harm the living is presumed to be in a bad place. The relatives will then try to persuade it to move or offer a sacrificial animal as a substitute for the sick person under attack.
My research has revealed several stages of emotional involvement between living Sora and their dead. Those who died recently are considered the most dangerous because they still retain an intense attachment often expressed as hostility to the living. When speaking with the recently dead, people can become extremely distressed, as pity for the dead is mixed with fear for their own safety. Someone who has been dead for some time a second stage of detachment is no longer so threatening or aggressive. People who have been dead for many years arouse no strong feelings and (speaking through a shaman) bestow their names on their descendants' children.
Finally, the deceased dies a second death in the underworld and becomes a butterfly, bereft of human memories. As the dead drift inexorably away from the living toward butterflyhood, they become increasingly inaccessible and unknowable. In that form, souls are believed to become characterless and beyond the reach of dialogue.
Sora shamans appear to heal physical illness by helping the bereaved to manage painful and guilty memories about the dead. Healing is thought to occur only through dialogue, not merely from the passage of time. While the shaman goes on her soul journey to the underworld, the bereaved or ailing client also makes an inner journey of discovery. The mourners heal themselves by exploring and modifying the deceased's pain and hostility.
Emphasis on a "talking cure" seems similar to many Western therapies, but with a crucial difference. We may speak to our dead in one-sided conversations, but the Sora expect responses. Without the shaman's intervention, there could be no dialogue and thus no healing. Both systems, I believe, are based on the same insight: that intense emotional attachment gives rise to memories that have the power to cause illness. In Western therapies, however, the memories of a grieving patient are considered isolated and subjective, while Sora memories of the dead are made "objective" by social dialogue. The whole Sora community moves toward a consensus as it traces the dead person's shifting states of mind on a shared psychic landscape.
While the traditional Sora religion met certain psychological and social needs very well, it is proving inadequate for a younger generation that is being exposed to rapid social change. Many of today's youngsters the first generation to attend school have joined the Baptist church, believing that the affiliation will help them gain access to mainstream society.
The older Sora know that after they die, their Baptist children will not talk to them or feed them with sacrifices. While some young Baptists extol the benefits of their new religion, others confess to a gnawing uncertainty. "Maybe my father is with Jesus, or maybe he's in the underworld," said one, "but we can't know because we don't speak with him anymore."
(Pictures is from Papua New Guinea and represent dead persons. These are carved to say farewell to a dead person.)