another story from believing in the resurrection

the shaman's fear

Terrible dreams had followed the Stone Age hunter and so he woke up freezing and physically dead in the anteroom of the cave in the Lone Valley.

Still agitated from the last day and the resulting bad dreams, he went through his hard-fought victory over the cave lioness again in his thoughts but no less tense: he hardly closed his eyes, still tired from the restless night, when lightning flashed just like in the night short image sequences in a wild, confusing sequence behind the closed songs: the gaping mouth of the lioness with the long row of pointed teeth, the head with the protectively pinched eyes and the firmly laid ears darting towards him, long, powerfully built paws with extended claws, driving wildly, scarcely missing his own face, but hitting him painfully in the shoulder, tearing it open and sliding past along the entire right side, leaving a trail of blood. the other paw,

Yes, the ancients had said that no other animal could fight with cubs with the fury and strength of a lioness. Filled with pain, he had turned away from under the lioness, and his sturdy short spear, sharpened by flint, had lodged itself in one of the animal's flanks, splintering under the cat's weight, but the bladed end was deeply embedded in the cat's Body pushed up towards the heart. A jerk went through the animal, the strong hind legs catapulted the lioness with the spear a little further over him, a twitch went through the body and then she just lay there.

Somewhere further inside the den the young lions would wait in vain for their mother, restless at first, then gradually succumbing to hunger, and then progressively weakening and dying of thirst. That touched him, but it was in fact unavoidable and directly linked to his mother's death. The killing of the lioness had imposed multiple guilt on him. They had not been able to ask the lioness, nor the cubs, nor the spirits of nature for understanding and permission to kill. The cat had pounced on him too quickly. So probably both, human and animal, had broken the law that only allows consenting killing for the sake of survival. So death would be certain for him too. Having just escaped certain death, this fate left him almost cold.

He had straightened up. His tribesmen brought him cooling large leaves for his profusely bleeding wounds. For a long time he sat motionless, unable to move, beside the big cat's unmoving body. Burning pain flooded through his injured limbs in recurring waves and behind his exhausted closed eyelids those single terrible scenes he had just gone through kept coming back. Over and over again. Even though the animal's body was gradually getting colder, the spiritual soul, the intangible, but still active of the animal with all the strength in his head, gave him no rest with these pictures. Deep in his thoughts, the lioness fought with him over and over again, only gave him very short minutes to breathe, only,

The fever from the inflamed wounds had taken hold of his whole body overnight, and he lay moaning as the images of the fight continued to torment him. This went on for days and nights and even the herbal bandages and cooling washes that the women of his tribe prepared for him didn't help much. His body was near the edge of death and his mind was also becoming weaker and weaker, but also less haunted by these images. After the warming skin had been removed from the slain lioness, it was brought to the sickbed as a tribute to the hunter. The carcass of the animal was brought deep into the labyrinth of the cave and the head was honorably deposited in a niche, not without having weighed it down with a stone slab. Later, a small, naturalistic idol in the form of a lioness would be brought to this place, whose side had been mortally wounded with several deep hatches (or were they cords that were supposed to tie the body in the cave?). It was hoped that the spirit of the cat would be just as firmly trapped in the depths of the cave and would no longer bother the wounded in nightly dreams. It was precisely this fear of an avenging return that also ensured that the dead were wedged into the ground under mighty elk shovels or buried under heavy stone slabs. the spirit of the cat would be just as firmly imprisoned in the depths of the cave and would no longer bother the wounded in nightly dreams. It was precisely this fear of an avenging return that also ensured that the dead were wedged into the ground under mighty elk shovels or buried under heavy stone slabs. the spirit of the cat would be just as firmly imprisoned in the depths of the cave and would no longer bother the wounded in nightly dreams. It was precisely this fear of an avenging return that also ensured that the dead were wedged into the ground under mighty elk shovels or buried under heavy stone slabs.

When, contrary to all expectations, his condition began to improve from day to day and the fiber dreams had long since subsided, he kept asking himself how it could be that such a large, strong animal, whose body without doubt was long dead, as long and as long as he could take control of his own mind again and again. Was there some invisible substance, a force that only those near death could see? Again and again, the tribe of hunters was joined by special people who were able to fathom the invisible secrets of nature through everyday things. Shamans were the leaders of the tribe who could often even converse with the spirits of dead animals.

Completely weakened to the breaking point, he rose from the sickbed as a hunter, barely able to hold up his pale, emaciated body, but his mind was wide awake with inner strength, thoughts and questions racing through his head. The lioness, like all other brothers and sisters in nature, was animated by an inner force that was always present in equal proportions throughout nature. It was not so easy to take an animal out of ensouled nature in order to enable one's own tribe to continue living without having to give back one's own strength and life elsewhere.

From the big pot of life you should only ever take as much as is urgently needed for survival. If an animal had to be killed, this sacrificial death should also be honored by using as many different parts of the body as possible. However, since nature also gave life without immediately demanding life again, it was perhaps possible for the remaining remains of the animal to be given back to nature and its great power resource so that new life could arise from it. But simply throwing away these leftovers carelessly was certainly not the right way to get new life.

Life arose in a long process in the wombs of the mother animals and also of the human beings, perhaps by adding red blood and flesh to the immortal white bones. Blood seemed to play a major role in the origin of life. Everywhere it accompanied birth and death equally. The cervix of nature were probably the caves and depressions in the landscape. Shouldn't the bones and remains of the animal beings, for which there was no use, be returned to the prepared place on earth together with the blood of the earth, the red iron ocher? Couldn't one, like animals, also bring deceased people back into a dug birth cave together with a layer of red ocher in order to enable them to be born again?

Shouldn't we keep the place behind the eyes, this cranial vessel, which gave us these non-physically existing soul images, in particular to enable our deceased to make contact with those who are still alive. Would it make sense to give Mother Nature a clue in the large caves, the uterus of nature, perhaps through realistic images of the killed large animals, as to what kind of prey animals should be recreated if one wanted to accept the wishes of the people who but the bones would also have contributed to this? Would he and his clan be able to give the spirits of nature back nearly as much living material as how they had to draw from this pot to sustain life? Or would nature have to make even more sacrifices among humans to preserve the disturbed life energy? An endless stream of questions tormented the spared from death, the future shaman.

We know nothing about the thought life of prehistoric people, because there was no writing that has been preserved for us. In the caves of the Stone Age, however, there are artistically designed animal figures and paintings, as well as intentional deposits of skulls and bones, which we are free to interpret as a belief in reincarnation. Neanderthals deposited the dead in a prenatal crouching position in pits and buried them with red mineral ocher powder and gifts for life after death. The skulls of cave bears and humans seem to be separated from the body and deposited in caves. In the hunter tribes that are still alive today, for example the Mansi in northern Siberia, all the remains of a dead bear are neatly collected during the bear cult and deposited in a depot in nature, so that the bear can be reborn. The same can be found in many other primitive peoples. There are skull cults in New Guinea, among other places, in which dream images are used to enable contact with ancestors or animal spirits via the skull. A belief in a return of life, a rebirth, a resurrection seems to have evolved from the belief in the need to return unneeded life material previously gained through death.

Was it the fear of the hunters and their shamans that they had taken too much life from nature and not fed back enough life material and thus had to vouch for it with their own lives or the lives of family members? Or was it the experience that this "guilty conscience" sparked bad memory dreams and imaginations with hunted animals and fellow human beings resuscitated in the spirit, which put an unbearable burden on those affected, but most of all on the hypersensitive shaman? Was it all that made the people of the early days "give back to earth" their dead and equip them with the objects for another life? Is this based on belief in a resurrection?