The doctrine of the survival of the soul or spirit after the death of the body, forms an integral part of Lenape belief. The spirit is supposed to leave the body at the moment of dissolution, but remains in the vicinity eleven days, during which time it subsists on food found in the houses of the living, if none has been placed at the grave. Some say that the actual food is not consumed but that the ghost extracts some essence or nourishment from it.
On the twelfth day the spirit leaves the earth and makes its way to the twelfth or highest heaven, the home of the Creator, where it lives indefinitely in a veritable “Happy Hunting Ground,” a beautiful country where life goes on much as it does on earth, except that pain, sickness, and sorrow are unknown, and distasteful work and worry have no place; where children shall meet their parents who have gone before, and parents their children; where everything always looks new and bright. There is no sun in the Land of Spirits, but a brighter light which the Creator has provided. All people who die here, be they young or old, will look the same age there, and the blind, cripples,—anyone who has been maimed or injured,—will be perfect and as good as any there. This is because the flesh only was injured, not the spirit.
This paradise, however, is only for the good, for those who have been kind to their fellows and have done their duty by their people. Little is said of those who have done evil in this world, except that they are excluded from the happy Land of Spirits. Some Unami say that the blood in a dead body draws up into globular form and floats about in the air as a luminous ball, but this is not the true spirit.
The Minsi seem to have retained a more archaic belief, for they say that the Land of Spirits lies to the southwest, in a country of good hunting. Here they say, the wigwams of the spirits are always neat and clean, and happiness prevails. But between our world and the spirit country flows a river which the spirit must cross on a slender foot-log or in a canoe.
Ghosts do not seem always to have left the earth at the expiration of the twelve days, or else they have the power of returning, for the Lenape claim that boys, dreaming for power, have sometimes been pitied and given some blessing by the ghosts, who remained their guardian spirits through life. Such people were considered to have the power of talking with the departed and sometimes made a practice of it, but mediumship was by no means confined to them. Among the Minsi formerly they were accustomed to hold meetings in the burial grounds at certain times, when some medium, it is said, would communicate with the spirits.
The late James Wolf, one of the principal Minsi informants, was said to have this power. One time a man was drowned in the Thames river near Munceytown in Ontario, and the body could not be located. Wolf, it is said, walked up and down the river-banks, with a companion, talking to the water. At last a strange sound was heard, and Wolf stopped. “That was the dead man’s spirit,” he said; “the body lies right over in that hole.” Surely enough, when they procured a boat, they found the body in the hole, wedged beneath a sunken log.
Certain regular ceremonies were held by both the Unami and the Minsi in honor of the dead, and will be discussed in a later paper.
Penn.—In William Penn’s letter,[34] dated August 16, 1683, is the first mention of any details of Lenape beliefs regarding the soul that has been found. He says:
“They say there is a King that made them, who dwells in a glorious Country to the Southward of them, and that the Souls of the Good shall go thither, where they shall live again.”
Brainerd.—The same Indian whom Brainerd saw in 1745 dressed in a bearskin costume and with a wooden mask, told him[35] that—
“departed souls all went southward, and that the difference between good and bad was this: that the former were admitted into a beautiful town with spiritual walls, and that the latter would forever hover around these walls, in vain attempts to get in.”
Later,[36] Brainerd speaks of the Spirit Land of the Lenape to the southward as being “an unknown and curious place” in which the shadows of the dead “will enjoy some kind of happiness, such as hunting, feasting, dancing, and the like.” One of his Indian informants defined the kind of “bad folks” who would be unhappy in the hereafter as “those who lie, steal, quarrel with their neighbors, are unkind to their friends, and especially to aged parents, and, in a word, such as are a plague to mankind.” These would be excluded from the “Happy Hunting Ground,” not so much as a punishment to themselves, as to keep them from rendering unhappy the spirits of the good inhabiting the “beautiful town.”
Zeisberger.—About 1748, according to Zeisberger,[37] a number of preachers appeared among the Indians, who claimed to have traveled in Heaven and conversed with God. Some exhibited charts of deerskin upon which were drawn maps of the Land of Spirits and figures representing other subjects used in their preaching. Some of their ideas concerning the Son of God, the Devil, and Hell, are evidently derived from the whites; others seem more aboriginal in character, such as purification by emetics, twelve different kinds being used. He wrote:
“Other teachers pretended that stripes were the most effectual means to purge away sin. They advised their hearers to suffer themselves to be beaten with twelve different sticks from the soles of their feet to their necks, that their sins might pass from them through their throats. They preached a system of morals, very severe for the savages, insisting that the Indians abstain from fornication, adultery, murder, theft, and practise virtuous living as the condition to their attaining after death the place of good spirits, which they call Tschipeghacki, the ‘land of spirits,’ where the life is happy, and deer, bear and all manner of game are abundant and the water is like crystal. There nought was to be heard save singing, dancing and merry making.... The passage thither is the Milky Way.... Whoever reaches that place will find a city of beautiful houses and clean streets. Entering a house he will see no one, but have good things to eat placed before him, a fire made and a bed prepared—all of which is done by spirits invisible to him. Others assert that such an one will see the women coming with baskets on their backs full of strawberries and bilberries, large as apples, and will observe the inhabitants daily appear in fine raiment and live a life of rejoicing.—The bad Indians ... will not reach the place, Tschipeghacki, but must remain some distance away, able to see those within dwelling happily, but not able to enter. They would receive nothing but poisonous wood and poisonous roots to eat, holding them ever near the brink of a bitter death, but not suffering them to die.”
Zeisberger usually specifies when his information is derived from tribes other than the Lenape, from whom most of his data were procured; so it is probable that the following quotation applies to them, although in part somewhat at variance with our other knowledge. He says:[38]
“They believe in the immortality of the soul. Some liken themselves to corn which, when thrown out and buried in the soil, comes up and grows. Some believe their souls to be in the sun, and only their bodies here. Others say that when they die their souls will go to God, and suppose that when they have been some time with God they will be at liberty to return to the world and be born again. Hence many believe ... that they may have been in the world before.
“They believe also in the transmigration of the soul. Wandering spirits and ghosts, they claim, sometimes throw something into a public path and whoever goes over it is bewitched and becomes lame or ill.”
Such was the Lenape belief with regard to the powers that control the world, and such were his notions concerning the souls of men. The main channel of communication between this great supernatural realm and mankind was, to the Lenape as to so many other tribes of Indians, the dream or vision, experienced either while fasting or in natural sleep. This subject will be considered in the next chapter.