Abstract
About 20 centuries ago, many hundreds of Hopewellian Native Americans from several communities in southern Ohio gathered in ceremony on multiple occasions to blend or mingle together the souls of their deceased in order to create a spiritual-social alliance among the communities. They also staged ritual dramas that enacted, step-by-step, the souls’ journey to an afterlife, in order to instruct the souls on how to make the trip, to ensure their safe travel in the face of challenges along the way, and probably to allay fears of the souls’ unsuccessful passage and harmful return. The peoples’ motivations for performing the ceremonies and the potency of the design of the rites rested in part on the peoples’ notions of personhood. They recognized that an individual has multiple souls, one of which at death proceeds to an afterlife and some others of which remain with the body and could be combined with the body souls of other individuals to form intimate social relationships. They also experienced their cosmos to be filled with many persons of nonhuman character and extraordinary capacities, including soul-harassing and soul caretaking raptors, a ferocious dog, an underwater bull-like composite creature, and various other beings who challenged or helped human souls in their travels to a land of the dead and who needed ritual attention. The impetuses for the ceremonies, their forms, and their success also depended on the peoples’ internal sense of self, core to the well-being of which was their maintaining appropriate relationships with other persons in their community and world. Appropriate relations emphasized the group over the individual, and the embeddedness of power within social relationships more so than its inherency in an individual’s constitution.
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Carr, C. (2021). Introduction. In: Being Scioto Hopewell: Ritual Drama and Personhood in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44917-9_1
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