Soul travel

Soul Travel is the belief that when one sleeps, their Soul leaves its body and seeks spiritual lessons in the Soul Planes, or heaven. Soul Travel is a key element in the religion of Eckankar. They believe that there are many different Temples that Souls go to in higher Planes, to learn their religion

The phrase (or similar expression) may denote also a motif, treated in the anthropological or ethnographic literature of cultures with shamanistic features. Details may vary: even the mere notion of shamanism is debated sometimes, and in all cases, the cultures described as “shamanistic” are far from being alike.^[1] Diversity can be observed even among linguistically related peoples, like shamanism among Eskimo peoples.

Some Inuit peoples

An example for soul travel motif recorded in some [Inuit]groups (admitting that in other cultures, the motif can vary): there are people who are believed to have special capabilities, these people can "travel" to (mythological) remote places, and report their experiences afterwards. The informations they report are things which are important for their fellows or to the entire community: how to stop calamities, bad luck in hunting, cure a sick person etc,^[2][3] in summary: things that are important, but unavailable to people with normal (non-shamanistic) capabilities.^[4]

Waiwai

Also the yaskomo of the Waiwai is believed to be able to perform a soul flight. The soul flight can serve several functions:

• healing
• flying to the sky to consult cosmological beings (the moon or the brother of the moon) to get a name for a new-born baby
• flying to the cave of peccaries' mountains to ask the father of peccaries for abundance of game
• flying deep down in a river, to achieve the help of other beings.

Thus, a yaskomo is believed to be able to reach sky, earth, water, in short, every element.^[5]

Notes

1. ^ Hoppál 2005: 15
2. ^ Kleivan & Sonne 1985: 7–8, 12, 23–24,26, 27–29, 30, 31
3. ^ Merkur 1985: 4–6
4. ^ Hoppál 1975: 228
5. ^ Fock 1963: 16

References

• Fock, Niels (1963). Waiwai. Religion and society of an Amazonian tribe. Nationalmuseets skrifter, Etnografisk Række (Ethnographical series), VIII. Copenhagen: The National Museum of Denmark. 
• Hoppál, Mihály (1975). "Az uráli népek hiedelemvilága és a samanizmus". in Hajdú, Péter (in Hungarian). Uráli népek. Nyelvrokonaink kultúrája és hagyományai. Budapest: Corvina Kiadó. pp. 211–233. ISBN 963 13 0900 2.  The title means: “Uralic peoples / Culture and traditions of our linguistic relatives”; the chapter means “The belief system of Uralic peoples and the shamanism”.
• Hoppál, Mihály (2005) (in Hungarian). Sámánok Eurázsiában. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. ISBN 963-05-8295-3 2.  The title means “Shamans in Eurasia”, the book is written in Hungarian, but it is published also in German, Estonian and Finnish. Site of publisher with short description on the book (in Hungarian)
• Kleivan, Inge; B. Sonne (1985). Eskimos: Greenland and Canada. Iconography of religions, section VIII, "Arctic Peoples", fascicle 2. Leiden, The Netherlands: Institute of Religious Iconography • State University Groningen. E.J. Brill. ISBN 90-04-07160-1. 
• Merkur, Daniel (1985). Becoming Half Hidden: Shamanism and Initiation among the Inuit. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. ISBN 91-22-00752-0. 
• Klemp, Harold (2003). Past Lives, Dreams, and Soul Travel. Eckankar.. Minneapolis, MN. [Eckankar Web site: http://www.eckankar.org]: Eckankar. 

See also

Bilocation

Astral projection

Eckankar

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