[Dr. Shon Thomson]

All -

Just back.

I knew there was a reason I had to go over to Victoria the last couple days.

As usual, I hit the Royal BC Museum first, only to find this:

http://www.bcarchives.bc.ca/S'abadeb/Default.aspx

The whole exhibit leaves one somewhere between joy and awe and tears of recognition.

The Salish were/are composed of about 70 tribes whose heart/land is where I live.

I spent the better part of two days in there, only stopping when I knew I was on complete overload.

Now, here's a thing, right near the end of the exhibit, which I need to absorb deeply

Before I even try to talk about it.

They had a Soul Recovery Way which involved multiple Shamans and the whole village/group of people.

Who tied all their spirits together to retrieve stolen souls.

There was a fullsized model of the sacred furniture used in this Way -

Specifically not sacred, but constructed by modern Salish people to demonstrate.

A part of their "Gift", as they were heavily involved with creation of the whole exhibit.

If any of you out there have even the slightest chance of seeing this, drop all and do it.

hoka hey

And thank you Grandfather.

john

ps.

If you can't see it, they have a magnificent quite large catalog of the exhibit, with very detailed supportive writing for $50 at the museum shop.
The money left my hand so fast it left blisters.

j.

[Elelaytet]

John, was the sacred furniture boat-shaped?

[zlopikanikanza]

Ishtar -

Yes and no.

I'm going to try, here,

But I already know that I need time and Grandfather to sort all this out.

For all that it was the biggest single piece in the exhibit, the declaratory

Readerboards were mighty reticent.

The catalog is even more reticent, and disagrees substantively with the exhibit readerboards.

What both do agree on is that this is personal, sacred knowledge. Held close.

Here's three things.

As you come around the corner to the Soul Recovery furniture,

You are faced with a 4' high carved wooden Shaman with eyes of haliotis.

It could equally be African as NW American, it could be Asian.

That one stops you in your tracks right there, for maybe an hour.

Now, the layout of the furniture.

Take a 10' x 20' rectangle, filled with gravel/sand.

You are facing it from the narrow end.

Down the center there are a row of staves stood vertical in the sand.

To left and right there are five objects, three equally spaced cedar planks, also stood vertical and

Painted/dyed with dots and eyes and representations of birds/animals/fish,

And centered between the planks two wooden Shaman statues either side.

So, in total you have six planks and four Shaman statues.

(The Shaman statues were carved by the Shaman, and held their power/songs

And were seldom brought out into public.)

The planks, on the other hand, were "read" by the people, like a musical score, and guided their drumming and singing.

Lined up as if they were paddling a canoe, they all are.

The statues each wear a bow and a sheaf of arrows.

Distributed among them are a couple coils of cedar bark rope.

Each wears a cedarbark headband. The headbands "tie" the Shamans' individual spirits together into one. On

The sand are a rolled cedar mat and a bulrush mat, a small boulder,

And a broom made of Snowberry branches (deadly poison) bound with mountain goat wool

To form its handle.

Also two plain cedar boards, lying flat on the sand.

They say it is a very dangerous journey, through mountains and rivers and cliffs and chasms,

To the underground, to retrieve a soul.

The cedar mat is above them, in the air, to conceal.

The boards are used as bridges.

Finally they cross a river similar to the Styx, and retrieve

The soul or souls stolen to the land of the dead.

O yeah, what the stone is for: to break through the portals of the underworld.

And somehow along the way they harvest a basket of sacred, heavenly huckleberries

Which are used to foretell the future (different subject I can't get into here, yet).

The snowberry broom erases their tracks on the way back.

The whole thing takes 3-4 days or more.

Now, the staves.

On the opposite wall there is an enlarged picture, taken

July 12th, 1920.

It shows four Shaman standing between the port and starboard rows

Of picture boards and Shaman statues, with their staves, each

Marvelously different, lifted, tilted up, held in both hands.

They called it "Lifting the Daylight"

The terrible sadness is that that picture was

A re-enactment of a way of knowing that the subjects in

The picture acknowledged was already lost.

But, who knows?

In the corner to my right stands a Catalina Ironwood stave I have kept with me all these years.

I write this today, Sunday, November 29, 2009.

hoka hey

john

[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.