--Katha Upanishad 

     --Odin Brotherhood 

This section contains information--“skeleton keys”--to enter other worlds. 

When different traditions give different instructions, do not despair. According to Eastern sages, the same truth looks different from several viewpoints.665 

As Professor Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) pointed out, a characteristic belief of hunting cultures is that living things can be reborn from their skeletons.261,266 

The Eskimo, for example, leave the skull of a bear they have killed face down at the place the bear was slain. This, they believe, allows it to be reborn.147 For the same reason, American Indians from the Pacific Northwest put salmon bones back in water.441 

For people in planting cultures, the dead body, including the bones, disintegrate and germinate into something else. For the hunter, in contrast, one part of the body, the bone, becomes the “undestroyed base” from which the individual is “magically reconstructed.”139 

In many traditions, having a son is essential to the well-being of a man and his deceased ancestors.218 

According to the Konde people in Africa, a man will return as a frog if his family line ends with him.9 

The Artareya Brahmana, a Hindu text, says “By means of a son have fathers always crossed over the deep darkness, since he was born as their self from their self.”120 

The Houailou people, a Melanesian group, see life as a process of “becoming spirit.” As we grow older, we shed “humanness” and take on the character of spirits.837 

Makkhali Gosala (born 484 BC), an ascetic teacher of ancient India, taught that all souls must run through a fixed number of inevitable births during the normal course of their evolution. These births occur over 8,400,000 aeons.63,261 

This natural biological activity, said Professor Heinrich Robert Zimmer, “cannot be hurried by means of virtue and asceticism, or delayed because of vice; the process takes place in its own good time.”963 

According to Gosala, we begin as a living atom, with only the sense of touch. As we progress, we gain more senses and higher mental faculties and we pass through various types of vegetable life, lower and higher animals, and then human level, and even seven lives as gods.63,200 

After all of these existences, release simply happens. The process is automatic and requires no effort from us.261,63,200 

And then, in endless time, the process repeats, from the beginning.279 

The Jains speak of Jnanavarniya--knowledge-obstructing karma--generated by the refusal to learn, by closing the mind, spreading false or one-sided information, ridiculing those who pursue knowledge, and advocating fanatical and prejudiced opinions.715 

Study all knowledge--reflect on all ideas--and you will rise to higher levels in the process of rebirth. 

On the other hand, if you denounce books you have never read, condemn people you have never known, and reject ideas you could never understand, you will regress in the process of rebirth. 

In Skanda Purana, a wicked thief is killed by the king’s men. When a dog came to eat the thief, the dog’s nails accidentally made the mark of Shiva’s trident on his forehead. As a result, Shiva’s messengers took the thief to Shiva’s paradise.238 

Shiva’s abode and paradise is Kailasa, or Swastika Mountain.481 It is open to all who worship Shiva, regardless of caste or gender.487 Although the Hindus have many afterworlds, Swastika Mountain is especially interesting because it is on Earth. The only mountain on the planet not climbed by man, no one has ever been allowed on the summit because the Hindus believe that Shiva and his paradise are there.605,296,548,481,592 

In peaceful urban cultures, a bloody death is undesirable--we want a quiet death, in bed from old age.592 

But a violent death is the treasured death of warriors. Heraclitus (circa 535-475 BC) said, “Souls slain in war are purer than those that perish with disease. They arise into wakefulness.”206 

Warlike cultures also maintain that the war dead reach the next world in a more vigorous form. The people of Mangaia (Cook Islands) think “the spirits of those who die a natural death are extremely feeble and weak; whereas the spirits of those slain in battle are strong and vigorous, their bodies not having been reduced by disease.”335,308 

And, since many traditions teach that the soul has the age and appearance of the dead person at the time of death, young men who die here are young men there. This belief inspired Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), a Japanese warrior, to commit suicide by seppuku. According to Mishima, a “powerful, tragic frame and sculptured muscles” are “indispensable in a romantically noble death.”823, 619 

In many cultures, death during childbirth is viewed as the female equivalent of war. Childbirth currently kills 1,400 women each day.424 On average, that exceeds the number of men killed daily in war.592 

Interestingly, in the Norse Grimnismal, the lovely goddess Freyja takes half of the heroic dead, and this is probably a reference to women who die giving birth.697,272,593,529 

Ovid (43 BC-AD 17/18), the great Roman writer, closed his Metamorphoses with this line: “I shall live for all eternity, immortalized by fame.”658 

Fame is difficult to achieve--of the billions who have died since the last Ice Age, only a small number are remembered today 209--but can fame conquer death? 

In some traditions, fame does indeed have that power. 

According to archaic Greek paganism, the dead live only as long as the living remember and honor them.738 

According to Egyptian paganism, if a person’s name no longer exists, the person no longer exists.114 

“To say the name of the deceased is to make him live again.”115

A Traveler’s Guide to the Afterlife by Mark Mirabello, Ph.D. © 2016 Inner Traditions. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International. www.InnerTraditions.com

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