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To the Grave and
Beyond: |
Lodagaa Eschatology: The Afterlife
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The Lodagaa believe that at death, the soul can only become an ancestor spirit after being given a proper final ceremony at the burial. Family members do not want the soul to return to his house, so they send all his possessions away so he won’t be tempted. During this transitional period, the spirit dwells in the trees waiting until he is released by the final ceremony so that he can depart to the world of the ancestors. The Land of the Dead lies to the West, which is the direction of the setting sun. On his journey to the other world the spirit must cross a river. The following is a LoDagaa tale from Jack Goody's Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa. The story details the journey of a soul crossing into the Land of the Ancestors, as told by a LoDagaa man.
The Journey: "On the way to the River of Death you meet the One-Breasted Woman. She runs after you and tells you who was responsible for your death. If you get angry and want to return to kill the person, she’ll joke with you to make you laugh. Once you do this, that’s an end to it. For you can never return to earth. But if you don’t laugh, the witch will die. The One-Breasted Woman will help you, she’ll kill the witch, for she is the child of God. Once the witch is dead, he’ll catch you up on the road and you’ll both travel along together. Otherwise you carry on alone until you come to the river. If you’ve led a good life, then when you get there you’ll go straight across. If you’ve done wrong, when you enter the boat you’ll drop through the bottom into the water. So people go across singly, lest they get involved in someone else’s troubles.
If you fall in the water, you won’t drown, but will just have to go on swimming for a long, long time; it’ll take you some three years to cross. You’ll suffer a great deal on the way and you’ll have nothing to eat. If you owe anything to a person who is still living, you’ll have to wait there for him and pay him when he comes. If you’ve stolen anything, you’ll have to wait until your friends are all gathered at the bank. Then when the owner arrives, the ferryman’ll say, “Here’s the man who stole from you.” And you and all your friends will feel great shame. If a man asks you for something and you say you haven’t got it when you have, you, too, will have to wait for him at the river’s bank.
On the left-hand side there’s another river, known as sor man, the Witches’ River, that only witches go to. But here they can’t cross by boat, for there’s no ferryman. A leading witch stands on the bank and shows you what suffering you must endure. He forces you to eat yourself. First he’ll take a bite from the muscle of your left arm; you’ll have to eat the rest., right down to the fingers. The same thing happens with your thigh. Then he pushes you into the river to make you swim across, but the water is full of pepper and so wide that the journey takes three years. You see the other bank very near you and think that you’ll soon reach it. But you go on swimming for a long, long time, two whole years, and still you don’t get there. At the end of the next year, you finally reach the bank. When you get to the Land of the Dead, all the people will see you and know you’re a witch. When you arrive at the Land of the Dead, the old spirits show you difficult tasks which you’ve never seen before. They’ll make you sit in the sun on top of a withered tree. You’ll sit here for three months. But the sun isn’t like the sun here, for they say it is very close at hand. If they hang meat outside, it’ll roast. If you had a good heart, you’ll sit there for three months; if you have an evil disposition, for six months; if you were a thief, for five months; if you told lies, for four months; if you were a witch, for three years; if you were a rich man, for three years.
After this is over, they’ll make you farm as you never did before; the length of time you spend doing this depends on how hard you worked during your lifetime. Then they’ll divide the women and their progeny. They’ll sit all the women separately; the children of one woman and all their progeny will sit together. They’ll count how many bad people there are in each group. If they see that there are a thousand witches among your group, or a thousand thieves, or a thousand liars, then to that woman and her progeny they will give all the bad things in their country, everything that brings pain. Salt water will be their only drink. The people will claim that their wickedness comes from the woman, that her heart was not good. To the woman of good disposition, and to her children, they will give good things, pleasant things-good food and plenty of rest. Once the men have been separated out, they don’t have to harm anymore. They just think what they want to eat, and they get it. But those who have been evil must ask God. They ask him, “Why do you make us suffer?” And God replies, “Because you sinned on earth.” And they ask, “Who created us?” To which God replies, “I did.” And they ask, “If you created us, did we know evil when we came or did you give it to us?” God replies, “I gave it to you.” Then the people ask God, “Why was it you knew it was evil and still gave it to us?” God replies, “Stop. Let me think and find out the answer.”
God thought for a thousand years and came back; they were still suffering. He said, “The things we were talking about, I want you to tell me of them again. They said, “Why did you say you would make us suffer?” He replied, “Because of the evil deeds you’ve done.” They said, “Who made us that way?” And he replied, “I did.” And they said, “Then we can’t have done wrong. If you have a child and give him something bad, then whatever he gets hold of as bad as that, it’s your fault. So you can’t make us suffer.” When they had spoken this way, God put an end to their suffering and set them to farm to get food."
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