Infinitum

Dybbuk – Spiritual Possession

A human being that is possessed by a spirit or some otherworldly creature is a phenomenon found in a myriad of cultures and religions. Jewish folklore calls the spirit that causes this rare but remarkable occurrence a “dybbuk.”

A dybbuk (pronounced “dih-buk”) is the term for a wandering soul that attaches itself to a living person and controls that person’s behavior to accomplish a task. The word “dybbuk” is the Hebrew word for “cleaving” or “clinging,” and surprisingly, having a dybbuk is not always a bad thing for the human host. However, sometimes having a dybbuk is a very bad thing.

Rabbi Gershon Winkler has been studying Jewish folklore, spirituality, and its shamanic roots for more than 25 years. He has written books covering the Jewish perspective on ghosts, apparitions, magic, and reincarnation, including a book titled Dybbuk. I spoke to Rabbi Winkler about dybbuk from his office at the Walking Stick Foundation in the wilderness of New Mexico.

My own understanding of possession is from a very Roman Catholic perspective: a person can succumb to a demon or devil that will take over their body, and the only cure is an exorcism to drive the demon out. Rabbi Winkler said, “[Jews] don’t believe in demonic possession. We believe that, on very rare occasions, there can be a possession of a living person by the soul of one who has left the body, but not the world, and they’re seeking a body to possess to finish whatever they need to finish.”

Winkler explained how stories of dybbuk go back to ancient scriptures. In the Old Testament of the Bible, in the Book of Samuel (18:10), a bad spirit is briefly described as attaching itself to King Saul, the first king elected chieftain of the ancient tribes of Israel: “And it came to pass on the morrow, that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul…” Later in the Bible, in the Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah is possessed by the spirit of a dead man who is trying to get the prophet to trick the King into going to war when he wasn’t supposed to. Winkler said, “You have stories like that, that just nonchalantly mention spirits of people who have left us coming down to effect some change, some phenomenon in this world.”

Rabbi Winkler has a unique perspective on dybbuk and other Jewish folklore. Though the kinds of things he’s writing and teaching about may not be discussed in your local synagogue, Winkler explains how ghosts and spirits are definitely part of Judaism. Winkler said, “Our scriptures and our mystical tradition are full of ghosts — ghosts meaning the disembodied soul still wandering around. We also have teachings about what in English they call “demons,” but they’re not all evil — they’re called ’sheydim’ in Hebrew. There are good demons and bad demons. According to our ancient tradition, demons are beings just like we are, just like animals are. They were created in the twilight of creation after the human being was created, right before the climax of creation, so that they’re neither of this world, nor of the other world, but little bit of both. There are teachings about how our ancestors like King Solomon dabbled in demonology, and he learned a lot of sorcery mysteries from the famous head of all the demons, Ashmedai.”

So how does a dybbuk take hold of a person? Winkler said, “The dybbuk is drawn to someone who is in the state where their soul and their body are not fully connected with each other because of severe melancholy, psychosis, stuff like that — where you’re not integrated. It seeks a particular person who in their current lifetime is going through what the possessing spirit went through, and so the possessing spirit is drawn to compatibility — to someone who is struggling with the same thing it did. Let’s say in my heart I have a desire to rob all convenience stores, but I don’t follow through because I don’t have the guts. The spirit of someone who has actually done it will be drawn to my desire to do it and will possess me because we’re compatible.”

Giving in to your bad inclinations doesn’t necessarily mean you are victim of a dybbuk. A true possession does have specific signs. Winkler explained, “You can tell it is real if the person is capable of speaking things that they would not otherwise be capable of knowing. Because the soul that’s in them is not integrated with them enough to be subject to time, space, and matter, they would be able to tell you things they would ordinarily not know — like what you dreamed last night, what’s happening across the street, maybe they can even speak a separate language that they’ve never known before.” If this kind of bad possession takes hold, the solution is exorcism.

The Jewish exorcism ritual is performed by a rabbi who has mastered practical Kabbalah. The ceremony involves a quorum of 10 people who gather in a circle around the possessed person. The group recites Psalm 91 three times, and the rabbi blows the shofar — a ram’s horn. Rabbi Winkler has performed four exorcisms in his life so far. He said, “We blow the ram’s horn in a certain way, with certain notes, in effect to shatter the body, so to speak. So that the soul who is possessing will be shaken loose. After it has been shaken loose, we can begin to communicate with it and ask it what it is here for. We can pray for it and do a ceremony for it to enable it to feel safe and finished so that it can leave the person’s body.”

The point of the exorcism is to heal the person being possessed and the spirit doing the possessing. This is a stark contrast to the Catholic exorcism that is intended to drive away the offending spirit or demon. Winkler said, “We don’t drive anything out of anybody. What we want to do is to heal the soul that’s possessing and heal the person. It’s all about healing — we do the ceremony on behalf of both people.”

In some cases, a person may exhibit signs of dybbuk but the problem is purely psychological. Rabbi Winkler recounted a story from Jewish folklore that took place in the eighteenth century — around the time the first wind-up alarm clock was invented. A woman brought her daughter to her rabbi because she suspected a dybbuk. The rabbi diagnosed the young girl and didn’t find any real signs of possession, so he sent her home with an alarm clock and told her to carry it throughout the day. The rabbi told the woman and her daughter that at 4:30 that afternoon, the dybbuk would leave the girl. At 4:30, the family believed the dybbuk was gone by the mere shock of hearing the bell go off at exactly 4:30.

There is also a positive aspect to a dybbuk. Sometimes a spirit will come to a person in a time of need to help. Winkler said, “The second kind of possession is called ’sod ha’ibbur,’ which is Hebrew for ‘mystery impregnation.’ This kind of possession is a good possession — it’s a spirit guide. The spirit of someone who has struggled and overcome what you have struggled with and can’t overcome will be lent to you from the spirit world to possess you, encourage you, and help you overcome what you have not been able to overcome and what it has been able to in its lifetime. Then when it’s done and you’ve managed to achieve what you need to achieve in your life, it leaves you. Sometimes people reach high pinnacles of achievement and they fall into deep depression, and that’s explained as the loss of that spirit. So there’s a sense of loss, and it’s misinterpreted as depression. If the person realizes that, they can be thankful that they had a spirit guide to help them, and they need to continue to lift up their own spirit.”

Most belief systems have some notion of a spirit guide or guardian angel, and they also recognize a malevolent spiritual force that can influence us. The Jewish concept of dybbuk recognizes that our physical world and the spiritual world can intertwine for both positive and negative reasons. If those intersecting reasons are negative, Judaism has a healing process to mend the collision so both the possessor and the possessed can move on.

By Jeff Belanger

Tags: folklore, jewish

Chachapoya

The Chachapoyas, also called the Warriors of the Clouds, were an Andean people living in the cloud forests of the Amazonas region of present-day Peru. The Incas conquered their civilization shortly before the arrival of the Spanish in Peru. When the Spanish arrived in Peru in the 16th century, the Chachapoyas were one of the many nations ruled by the Inca Empire. Their incorporation into the Inca Empire had not been easy, due to their constant resistance to the Inca troops.

Since the Incas and the Spanish conquistadors were the principal sources of information on the Chachapoyas, unbiased first-hand knowledge of the Chachapoyas remains scarce. Writings by the major chroniclers of the time, such as El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, were based on fragmentary second-hand accounts. Much of what we do know about the Chachapoyas culture is based on archaeological evidence from ruins, pottery, tombs and other artifacts.

The chronicler Pedro Cieza de León offers some picturesque notes about the Chachapoyas:

“They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen in Indies, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas’ wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple (…) The women and their husbands always dressed in woolen clothes and in their heads they wear their llautos, which are a sign they wear to be known everywhere.”

Cieza adds that, after their annexation to the Inca Empire, they adopted customs imposed by the Cuzco-based Inca.

The name Chachapoya is in fact the name that was given to this culture by the Inca; the name that these people may have actually used to refer to themselves is not known. The meaning of the word Chachapoyas may have been derived from sacha-p-collas, the equivalent of “colla people who live in the woods” (sacha = wild p = of the colla = nation in which Aymara is spoken). Some believe the word is a variant of the Quechua construction sacha puya, or people of the clouds.

 

Geography

The Chachapoyas’ territory was located in the northern regions of the Andes in present-day Peru. It encompassed the triangular region formed by the confluence of the rivers Marañón and Utcubamba in the zone of Bagua, up to the basin of the Abiseo river, where the ruins of Pajáten are located. This territory also included land to the south up to the Chontayacu river, exceeding the limits of the current department of Amazonas towards the south. But the center of the Chachapoyas culture was the basin of the Utcubamba river. Due to the great size of the Marañón river and the surrounding mountainous terrain, the region was relatively isolated from the coast and other areas of Peru, although there is archaeological evidence of some interaction between the Chachapoyas and other cultures.

The contemporary Peruvian city of Chachapoyas derives its name from the word for this ancient culture as does the defined architectural style. Garcilaso de la Vega noted that the Chachapoyas territory was so extensive that,

“We could easily call it a kingdom because it has more than fifty leagues long per twenty leagues wide, without counting the way up to Muyupampa, thirty leagues long more (…)”

The league was a measurement of about 5 kilometers.

The area of the Chachapoyas is sometimes referred to as the Amazonian Andes, due to it being part of a mountain range covered by dense tropical woods. The Amazonian Andes constitute the eastern flank of the Andes, which were once covered by dense Amazon vegetation. The region extended from the cordillera spurs up to altitudes where primary forests still stand, usually above 3500 m. The cultural realm of the Amazonian Andes occupied land situated between 2000 and 3000 m altitude.

 

Origin of the Chachapoyas

Accounts such as that of Cieza de León indicate that the Chachapoyas had ‘lighter’ skin than other Native Americans of the region, and as with other anomalous populations (such as the Guanche people of the Canary Islands or the Tarim mummies), their origins and appearance are subject to speculation and exaggeration.

According to the analysis of the Chachapoyas objects made by the Antisuyo expeditions of the Amazon Archaeology Institute, the Chachapoyas do not exhibit Amazon cultural tradition but one more closely resembling an Andean one. Given that the terrain facilitates peripatric speciation – as evidenced by the high biodiversity of the Andean region – the physical attributes of the Chachapoyas are most likely reflecting founder effects, assortative mating, or related phenomena in an initially small population sharing a relatively recent common ancestor with other Amerind groups.

The anthropomorphous sarcophagi resemble imitations of funeral bundles provided with wooden masks typical of the Horizonte Medio, a dominant culture on the coast and highlands, also known as the Tiahuanaco-Huari or Wari culture. The “mausoleums” may be modified forms of the chullpa or pucullo, elements of funeral architecture observed throughout the Andes, especially in the Tiahuanaco and Huari cultures.

Population expansion into the Amazonian Andes seems to have been driven by the desire to expand agrarian land, as evidenced by extensive terracing throughout the region. The agricultural environments of both the Andes and the coastal region, characterized by its extensive desert areas and limited soil suitable for farming, became insufficient for sustaining a population like the ancestral Peruvians, which had grown for 3000 years.

This theory has been described as “mountainization of the rain forest” for both geographical and cultural reasons: first, after the fall of the tropical forests, the scenery of the Amazonian Andes changed to resemble the barren mountains of the Andes; second, the people who settled there brought their Andean culture with them. This phenomenon, which still occurs today, was repeated in the southern Amazonian Andes during the Inca Empire, which projected into the mountainous zone of Vilcabamba, raising examples of Inca architecture such as Machu Picchu.

 

Incorporation into the Inca Empire

The conquest of the Chachapoyas by the Incas took place, according to Garcilaso, during the government of Tupac Inca Yupanqui in the second half of the 15th century.

He recounts that the warlike actions began in the slope of Pias. If this is true, it was to the south-west of the Gran Pajáten, whence it is deduced that the area of Pias was already considered as a Chachapoyas territory.

About the resistance that the Chachapoyas put up against the Inca’s penetration in the times of Tupac Inca Yupanqui, there is abundant historical information, especially in the chronicle of Cieza.

During the sovereign Huayna Capac’s government, the Chachapoyas rebelled:

“They had killed the Inca’s governors and captains (…) and (…) soldiers (…) and many others were imprisoned, they had the intention to make them their slaves.”

As an answer, Huayna Capac, who was in the Ecuadorian cañaris land and while he was gathering his troops, sent messengers to negotiate peace. But again, the Chachapoyas “punished the messengers (…) and threatened them with death”.

Then Huayna Capac ordered to attack them. He crossed the Marañon river over a bridge of wooden rafts that he ordered to be built probably in the surroundings of Balsas, next to Celendín.

From here, the Inca’s troops went to Cajamarquilla (Bolivar), with the intention of destroying this town that was “one of the principal towns” of the ‘Chachapoyas. From Cajamarquilla, an embassy consisting of women came out to meet them. In front of them there was a matron, who was a former concubine of Tupac Inca Yupanqui. They were asking for mercy and forgiveness, which the Inca granted them. In memory of this event of peace consecration, the place where the negotiation had taken place was declared sacred and closed so from now on “(…) neither men nor animals, nor even birds, if it were possible, would put their feet in it.”

To assure the pacification of the Chachapoyas, the Incas installed garrisons in the region. They also arranged the transfer of groups of villagers under the system of mitmac, or change of territories of human groups:

“(…) it gave them grounds to work and places for houses not much far from a hill that is next to the city (Cuzco) called Carmenga.”

Of the Inca presence in the territory of Chachapoyas remain the architectural rests of Cochabamba, placed in the outskirts of Utcubamba in the current district of Leimebamba.

 

Characteristics

The architectural model of the Chachapoyas is characterized by circular stone constructions as well as raised platforms constructed on slopes. Their walls were sometimes decorated with symbolic figures. Some structures such as the monumental fortress of Kuelap and the ruins of Cerro Olán are prime examples of this architectural style.

Chachapoyan constructions may date to the 9th or 10th century; this architectural tradition still thrived at the time of the arrival of the Spanish until the latter part of the 16th century. To be sure, the Incas introduced their own style after conquering the Chachapoyas, such as in the case of the ruins of Cochabamba in the district of Leimebamba.

The presence of two funeral patterns is also typical of the Chachapoyas culture. One is represented by sarcophagi, placed vertically and located in caves that were excavated at the highest point of precipices. The other funeral pattern was groups of mausoleums constructed like tiny houses located in caves worked into cliffs.

Chachapoyan handmade ceramics did not reach the technological level of the Mochica or Nazca cultures. Their small pitchers are frequently decorated by cordoned motifs. As for textile art, clothes were generally colored in red. A monumental textile from the precincts of Pajáten had been painted with figures of birds. The Chachapoyas also used to paint their walls, as an extant sample in San Antonio, province of Luya, reveals. These walls represent stages of a ritual dance of couples holding hands.

History

Although there is archaeological evidence that people began settling this geographical area as early as 200 A.D. or before, the Chachapoyas culture is thought to have developed around 800 A.D. The major urban centers, such as Kuélap and Gran Pajáten, may have developed as a defensive measure against the Huari, a Middle Horizon culture that covered much of the coast and highlands.

In the fifteenth century, the Inca empire expanded to incorporate the Chachapoyas region. Although fortifications such as the citadel at Kuélap may have been an adequate defense against the invading Inca, it is possible that by this time the Chachapoyas settlements had become decentralized and fragmented after the threat of Huari invasion had dissipated. The Chachapoyas were conquered by Inca ruler Tupac Inca Yupanqui around 1475 A.D. The defeat of the Chachapoyas was fairly swift; however, smaller rebellions continued for many years. Using the mitmaq system of ethnic dispersion, the Inca attempted to quell these rebellions by forcing large numbers of Chachapoya people to resettle in remote locations of the empire.

When civil war broke out within the Inca empire, the Chachapoyas were located on middle ground between the northern capital at Quito, ruled by the Inca Atahualpa, and the southern capital at Cuzco, ruled by Atahualpa’s brother Huascar. Many of the Chachapoyas were conscripted into Huascar’s army, and heavy casualties ensued. After Atahualpa’s eventual victory, many more of the Chachapoyas were executed or deported due to their former allegiance with Huascar.

It was due to the harsh treatment of the Chachapoyas during the years of subjugation that many of the Chachapoyas initially chose to side with the Spanish colonialists when they arrived in Peru. Guaman, a local ruler from Cochabamba, pledged his allegiance to the conquistador Francisco Pizarro after the capture of Atahualpa in Cajamarca. The Spanish moved in and occupied Cochabamba, extorting what riches they could find from the local inhabitants.

During Inca Manco Capac’s rebellion against the Spanish, his emissaries enlisted the help of a group of Chachapoyas. However, Guaman’s supporters remained loyal to the Spanish. By 1547, a large faction of Spanish soldiers arrived in the city of Chachapoyas, effectively ending the Chachapoyas independence. Residents were relocated to Spanish-style towns, often with members of several different ayllu occupying the same settlement. Disease, poverty, and attrition led to severe decreases in population; by some accounts the population of the Chachapoyas region decreased by 90% over the course of 200 years after the arrival of the Spanish.

Archaeological Sites

The Chachapoyas people built the great fortress of Kuélap, with more than four hundred interior buildings and massive exterior stone walls, possibly to defend against the Huari around 800 AD. Referred to as the ‘Machu Picchu of the north,’ Kuélap receives few visitors due to its remote location.

Archaeological sites in the region include the settlement of Gran Pajáten, Gran Saposoa, and the burial sites at Revash and Laguna de los Condores (Lake of the Condors), among many others.

“Chachapoyas culture.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 19 Mar 2009, 05:56 UTC. 28 Mar 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chachapoyas_culture&oldid=278280426>.

Tags: Inca

Human Sacrifice

Pre-Columbian Americas

Some of the most famous forms of ancient human sacrifice were performed by various Pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas.^[41] that included the sacrifice of prisoners as well as voluntary sacrifice. Friar Marcus de Nica (1539) writing of the “Chichimecas“: that from time to time “they of this valley cast lots whose luck (honor) it shall be to be sacrificed, and they make him great cheer, on whom the lot falls, and with great joy they crown him with flowers upon a bed prepared in the said ditch all full of flowers and sweet herbs, on which they lay him along, and lay great store of dry wood on both sides of him, and set it on fire on either part, and so he dies” and “that the victim took great pleasure” in being sacrificed.^[42]

Mesoamerica

The Mixtec players of the Mesoamerican ballgame were sacrificed when the game was used to resolve a dispute between cities. The rulers would play a game instead of going to battle. The losing ruler would be sacrificed. The ruler “Eight Deer” was considered a great ball player and won several cities this way, until he lost a ball game and was sacrificed.

The Maya held the belief that cenotes or limestone sinkholes were portals to the underworld and sacrificed human beings to please the water god Chaac. The most notable example of this is the “Sacred Cenote” at Chichen Itza where extensive excavations have recovered the remains of 42 individuals, half of them under twenty years old.

In the Post-Classic period, the victims and the altar are represented as daubed in a hue now known as Maya Blue, obtained from the añil plant and the clay mineral palygorskite.^[43]

The Aztecs were particularly noted for practicing human sacrifice on a large scale; an offering to Huitzilopochtli would be made to restore the blood he lost, as the sun was engaged in a daily battle. Human sacrifices would prevent the end of the world that could happen on each cycle of 52 years. In the 1487 re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan some estimate that 80,400 prisoners were sacrificed.^[44][45]though numbers are difficult to quantify as all obtainable Aztec texts were destroyed by Christian missionaries during the period 1528-1548.^[46]

According to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, “between 10,000 and 80,400 people” were sacrificed in the ceremony. The old reports of numbers sacrificed for special feasts have been described as “unbelievably high” by some authors ^[46]and that on cautious reckoning, based on reliable evidence, the numbers would have been in the hundreds for yearly feasts in Tenochtitlan.^[46] The real number of sacrificed victims during the 1487 consecration is unknown.

Michael Harner, in his 1997 article The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice, estimates the number of persons sacrificed in central Mexico in the 15th century as high as 250,000 per year. Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, a Mexica descendant and the author of Codex Ixtlilxochitl, claimed that one in five children of the Mexica subjects was killed annually. Victor Davis Hanson argues that an estimate by Carlos Zumárraga of 20,000 per annum is more plausible. Other scholars believe that, since the Aztecs always tried to intimidate their enemies, it is more likely that they could have inflated the number as a propaganda tool.^[47][48]

Tlaloc would require weeping boys in the first months of the Aztec calendar to be ritually murdered.

Sacrifices to Xipe Totec were bound to a post and shot full of arrows. The dead victim would be skinned and a priest would use the skin. Earth mother Teteoinnan required flayed female

Tags: Inca

The Voynich manuscript

By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each. About 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. There is strong evidence that at one point in time the pages of the book were rearranged into a different order.

The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with “bullets” on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, suggesting that the scribe understood what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being inked onto the page.

The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs, usually separated from each other by narrow gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each.

Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 “words” of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled but others may not.

Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf’s law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so “labels” attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant.

On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript’s “language” is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. Firstly, there are practically no words comprising more than ten glyphs, yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within the word is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section – an arrangement found in Semitic alphabets but not in the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets (with the exception of the Greek letters Beta and Sigma).

The text seems to be more repetitive than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with unusual frequency.

There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. In the last page, there are four lines of writing which are written in (rather distorted) Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the 15th century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language. Also, a series of diagrams in the “astronomical” section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the Iberian Peninsula. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text, or were added at a later time.

Tags: Bacon, Magic, Manuscript