On spirits and ghosts:
While I was in the Kalahari with a group of hunter-gatherers called the Kua, a woman died. I did not witness this, I arrived at the camp after she was buried under the sandy floor of her hut. The people (four families, plus the new widower and his two children) were in the process of abandoning the camp. They told me to follow them to the site of their new campground, which I did.
I asked about why she was buried that way, since this seemed to automatically men the whole camp and all the huts recently constructed there, were abandoned. I was told it was so that her spirit would not feel lost. However, since this spirit would linger until her body was consumed by the earth, it would be dangerously disturbed by the presence of other people, who could not see it, could not respond to it, and would walk right through it.
I was confused by this, since I had previously been told that the spirit of every living thing is re-united with the “Creator” after death. I asked, but apparently people saw no contradiction. I was told that Creator had provided many helpers to consume dead flesh and carry away the spirit that animates the living…predators, scavengers, and even the flies who lay their eggs so that their young can hatch and eat the dead and carry the fragmented spirit back into the living world. The spiritual was said to be the manifestation of the “Creator” — it is what literally animates the material world — it causes rivers to run, rain to fall, lightening and winds, and life.
I was even told that fire is a direct intrusion of this animating force into the material world. Therefore fire was the sacred intersection of the spiritual and the material: given into our human keeping — a sacred trust and tool to help us take care of the world. Making fire directly accesses the spirit world and brings it into the “real” world, where it can only exist as long as it “consumes” matter.
This casts an different light on the idea of “burning energy” — even fossil fuels, rather differently, at least to me.
One evening I had a visitor by my tent: Be/e — a older healer (what some might call a “shaman”). I asked him all these questions about spirits and the Creator. He looked down, and shook his head. “Stories for children; these are stories for children” he said.
Then he added, and looked me right in the eye: “most people are always children. Death is too frightening, so we think life can go on outside of the world we can see and feel..” — and he reached out and gently pinched my forearm. Then he shook his head.
I was shocked; I blurted out: “So there is no Creator?”
He huffed a laugh. Put up a hand to stop my question, and asked if I had a cigarette. So we had a quiet smoke together before he left. I think he did not want to go any further with this subject: he left the mystery in case I needed it. But I am pretty sure I had met a lonely, fellow agnostic…
