The Mehinaku of Amazonian Brazil recognize three souls in
each person - a shadow soul, a sweat soul and an eye soul - that operate in
different ways in life and have different fortunes after death. The eye soul is
especially active in dreaming. It resides within the iris of the eye. While the
body is sleeping, it goes out and about on excursions, meets other people,
living and dead, and steps across time as well as space. After death, it
goes to a "sky place".
For this indigenous dreaming tradition, a
dream is "the individual's awareness of the nocturnal wanderings of his
eye soul. The dream experience is therefore ego-alien, since the eye soul is
detachable and its nightly expeditions are outside the control of the
individual; at the same time, however, it is ego-involving, since the eye soul
is a perfect replica of the individual and its adventures are psychologically
real.” [1]
The eye soul, in its wanderings,may operate quite
independently from the ordinary self. A villager may recount its adventures in
the third person, like an observer in a movie theater. "My soul walked to
a village beyond the river and met a beautiful white woman he did not
trust."
The Mehinaku share their nocturnal adventures as soon as
they return, swinging towards each other in their hammocks. They are polyphasic
sleepers, rising several times during the night to feed the wood fires that are
their only source of heat - and because they have stories to tell.
1. Thomas Gregor, "'Far, Far Away My Shadow
Wandered' The Dream Symbolism and Dream Theories of the Mehinaku Indians of
Brazil" in American Ethnologist
Vol. 8, No. 4 (November, 1981) 717
No comments:
Post a Comment