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 as Christians would call it. 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. [Hoppál 2005: 15] Diversity can be observed even among linguistically related peoples, like shamanism among Eskimo peoples.

Some Eskimo peoples

An example for soul travel motif recorded in some Eskimo 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, [Kleivan & Sonne 1985: 7–8, 12, 23–24,26, 27–29, 30, 31] [Merkur 1985: 4–6] in summary: things that are important, but unavailable to people with normal (non-shamansic) capabilities. [Hoppál 1975: 228]

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, erth, water, in short, every element.Fock 1963: 16]

Notes

References

*
* The title means: “Uralic peoples / Culture and traditions of our linguistic relatives”; the chapter means “The belief system of Uralic peoples and the shamanism”.
* The title means “Shamans in Eurasia”, the book is written in Hungarian, but it is published also in German, Estonian and Finnish. [http://www.akkrt.hu/main.php?folderID=906&pn=2&cnt=31&catID=&prodID=17202&pdetails=1 Site of publisher with short description on the book (in Hungarian)]
*cite book |last=Kleivan |first=Inge |coauthors=B. Sonne |title=Eskimos: Greenland and Canada |year=1985 |publisher=Institute of Religious Iconography • State University Groningen. E.J. Brill |location=Leiden, The Netherlands |series=Iconography of religions, section VIII, "Arctic Peoples", fascicle 2 |isbn=90-04-07160-1
*cite book |last=Merkur |first=Daniel |title=Becoming Half Hidden: Shamanism and Initiation among the Inuit |year=1985 |publisher=Almqvist & Wiksell |location=Stockholm |series: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis • Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion |isbn=91-22-00752-0

ee also

Bilocation

Astral projection