The Worlds of the Supernatural and Living: A Reflection on Themes in Ancient Religions

The world of living humans often formed part of a multilayered cosmos in the ancient world. While the cosmos could take on many layers it generally involved the supernatural otherworlds of the heavens and an underworld sandwiching the human plane.

An envisioned axis then connected these worlds and served as a support for the heavens and linked the various cosmic layers as a whole. Symbolically this often took the form of a tree with its roots in the earth and canopy above reaching toward the heavens. For the Maya, this was the Cieba tree, which dropped its flower peddles from high above. This was the Axis Mundi or World Axis connecting 27 layers of the cosmos. To many in the ancient Old World, the tree of knowledge became a analog to the cosmos and the world axis.

The material and spiritual worlds formed a continuum with no boundaries between them. This enables the living to move between these layers of the cosmos. This ability rested with people we call shamans. Shamans had the ability to pass effortlessly in an altered state of consciousness between the material and spiritual realms. They were able to communicate what came from the supernatural to the living there by shaping world views.  Shamans served to translate the world through their ability to travel between the planes of the cosmos.  They were the shapers of knowledge about how the world worked.  As cultures became increasingly more complex, the role of the shaman was to evolve into the role of the God-King.  The God-King was not only a person who could translate how the world worked but often took on the role of making the world work in a harmonious way.  They were the interveners who kept the relationship between humans and the supernatural world in order.  The could ensure the sun would rise each day, the nile would flood, the rains of El Nino would cease, and earthquakes stop.  The served their people by keeping the relationship with the supernatural world from being in chaos.

One of the major forces shaping religious views in the ancient world was the cycle of seasons. Time in a linear sense as we use it today did not exist. Time was cyclical and repeated itself on a regular basis. Control of these cycles became important to the ancient mind. Human life was governed by the cycles of seasons and by seasons of planting, growth, and harvest. These cycles could be identified by movements of the heavenly bodies such as the Sun, Moon, planets, and constellations of stars. Venus could tell the Maya when to plant and when to go to war. The Pleadies could tell the Andean people when frogs would sing in anticipation of the same cycle. The equinox could foretell the planting season in ancient Khmer culture in southeast Asia. Fertility, life, death lay at the core of this cyclical human experience. As Hopi view the cycle of life as a direct parallel to the cycle of corn, humans created understanding from cycles. Myth and ritual played an important part in defining the world order as part of the relationship between the living world and that of the supernatural.

This was particularly important in defining death in many ancient cultures. Egyptian culture took this to a point where the living viewed death and the passage to the other world as one that moved the individual to a better and eternal life. On the way to the other world, one had to weigh your sins against the weight of a feather. So the living had to be good in life in order to reach the other world which they so desired. For the Chinchorro, Wari, and Inca of South America, the mummies of dead ancestors were alive and could partake of feasts, drink beer, agree to marriages, and form a link to the land. The Wari actually constructed enormous temples that served as collection points for mummies of people the Wari conquered. In a sense, they created penal colonies for the dead holding ancestors hostage to make the living obey. The Inca created a cult around the dead Inca royalty as divine ancestors of the sun. To the people of South America, death was not something different but a continued existence at a higher plane. Like the view of ancient Egyptians, they say death as something that continued life in a better world.

Humans also link between the living and supernatural in the form of ancestor worship. This is particularly true of farming societies who often associated land with ancestry. They see the generations as a part of the cycles of nature. For the Andean cultures, life never ceased in a spiritual sense so from the Chinchorro culture to the Inca they kept the body of an ancestor with the living. To the Hopi, the dead become part of the cycle of death to the corn plant but leave seeds for new generations and bring rain as spirit essences to nourish the living. To the ancient mind reincarnation was a means to bridge the living directly with the cycles time and nature. In China, the importance of family was underscored by the revering of ancestors who created the larger sense of family. The dead in the ancient world lived with those alive and were part of a larger continuum of spiritual life.