[grizolsemn]

This knowledge doesn't get lost irrevocably, John. The Lakota Sioux, when they thought their knowledge was lost, did a dance to call on the Ancestors to help them re-member (put back together the members of the body of the work) the lost magic. They would call on them to show them the long-forgotten ritual. This became known as the Ghost Dance.

The Salish furniture sounds wonderful ~ and very much like a boat. I have also taken part in a death boat; this one not for soul retrieval but for psychopomp work. We sat in a boat and rowed and chanted and rattled and drummed along a similar journey ... one that had already been mapped by shamans before... down into the Underworld and along a river. It was a sort of mass psychopomp of souls. There were several boats in this ritual, and in my 'boat' alone, we must have psychopomped hundreds of souls, disembodied spirits who hadn't made it through to the Realms of Dead and were just hovering around ...some had been stuck there for hundreds of years.

So this ritual is only different to that of the Salish in that we were taking the souls that we found in the Underworld TO the Realms of the Dead, which is a beautiful and loving place, and not rescuing them FROM it. We were rescuing them from limbo because they didn't know the way to the Realms of the Dead, which is the next stage of the Journey for all of us after we die. Thus I'm wondering if possibly the Salish have not only forgotten the ritual, but also associated it with another idea or confused the terminology?

For instance, I was reminded of my own experience when you used the Salish term 'Llfting the Daylight'. In our ritual, we stood up in our boats and lifted our hands in a similar gesture to push the souls upwards through a membrane which we could 'see' opening above our heads. We also didn't just work with individuals. One of my companions 'lifted' through a whole platoon of World War 1 soldiers. Soldiers are typically found because often, they have been killed so quickly, that the soul didn't have time to prepare itself.

The Underworld is the realm of the Ancestors and is considered to be a wonderful place ~ not the sort you'd need rescuing from. But it is a stage of the death journey through the Underworld and then on to the Realms of the Dead, or the Elysian Fields.

Boats and psychopomping go together quite often. There are other 'death boats', one in Malaysia where the dead body is taken out to sea in a real boat with the Elders and psychopomped from there. Then of course there is the boat found in one of the Egyptian tombs ~ I forget which one ~ obviously there to carry the Pharoah's soul on its death journey.

I would suggest that the Salish start working with a modern day shaman in order to contact their Ancestors and re-member their ritual. It may well turn out to be one of the soul retrieval and not psychopomping. But by practising shamanic techniques, they can reach the other dimensions to get the necessary information and guidance to remember it.