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A soul eater is a folklore figure in the traditional belief systems of some groups, known for sucking or eating the souls of their victims.
Soul eaters can be related to witchcraft, zombies, and other similar phenomena. The soul eater is supposedly able[ who? ] to consume an individual's spirit, causing a wasting disease that can be fatal.
Some traditional religions, including that of ancient Egypt and the Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Natchez of North America, contain figures whose names have been translated into English as "soul eater".
The concept of the soul eater also exists in Greek mythology, [1] These types of mythological figures, however, are spiritual and not human beings, and so are distinctly different from the soul eater as conceptualized by the Hausa and some others.
The traditional belief in soul eaters has been adopted by a range of modern horror fiction and fantasy writers, contemporary songwriters, and anime and video game creators.
In Hausa belief, the desire and capacity for the practice, termed maita, is rooted in special stones kept in a person's stomach.[ citation needed ] The soul eater can take the form of a dog or other animal in pursuit of his or her practice. [2]
Jerome H. Barkow states "A Maye is a witch or soul-eater, a man who is believed to hunger for souls. He can at will bring up from his stomach colored pebbles or granules (Kankara). [3] "Maye are typically a genetic trait that many Hausa believe you can be born with. Prospects can pay the Maye for Kankara and if they ingest the granules they then become a Maye. When a Maye eats a soul the body of the victim will slowly grow sick and die.
Another belief about soul eaters[ whose? ] is that they are men who were cursed by witches and have to eat the souls of humans to live their lives.
Some elements of the Hausa form of belief in soul eaters survived into African-American folklore of the United States and that of the Caribbean region. Related beliefs can be found in other traditional African cultures, like the Fulbe [4] and the Serer, [5] as well as among the groups of the Mount Hagen area of Papua New Guinea. [6] The hix or ix of the Maya and related peoples is a comparable figure; the Pipil term teyollocuani translates literally as "soul eater".
Iain Bamforth discusses how Ammit resides in the underworld and consumes people/souls. Anubis would take the heart of people in the afterlife and weigh it on the scales of justice. If the heart doesn't weigh down the scales then they can carry on in the afterlife, but if the heart appears heavy and filled with burden then it is to be fed to Ammit therefore giving the heart a second death and no admittance into immortality with Osiris. [7]
Jaques De Ville writes "she appears on top of and her feather on one side of the scale against which the heart of the deceased is weighed to establish whether he is to die a second death by being devoured by Ammit, or may proceed to the afterlife" [8]
Hades' three headed dog, Cerberus, was a protector of the underworld. He guarded the doors to the underworld so ruthlessly that anyone other than Hades who tried to enter through them was eaten by the dog, and any soul that tried to leave the underworld was consumed or destroyed by the hound as well. [9]
The afterlife or life after death is a purported existence in which the essential part of an individual's stream of consciousness or identity continues to exist after the death of their physical body. The surviving essential aspect varies between belief systems; it may be some partial element, or the entire soul or spirit, which carries with it one's personal identity.
Anubis, also known as Inpu, Inpw, Jnpw, or Anpu in Ancient Egyptian, is the god of funerary rites, protector of graves, and guide to the underworld, in ancient Egyptian religion, usually depicted as a canine or a man with a canine head.
In Greek mythology, Cerberus, often referred to as the hound of Hades, is a multi-headed dog that guards the gates of the underworld to prevent the dead from leaving. He was the offspring of the monsters Echidna and Typhon, and was usually described as having three heads, a serpent for a tail, and snakes protruding from his body. Cerberus is primarily known for his capture by Heracles, the last of Heracles' twelve labours.
Hades, in the ancient Greek religion and mythology, is the god of the dead and the king of the underworld, with which his name became synonymous. Hades was the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea, although this also made him the last son to be regurgitated by his father. He and his brothers, Zeus and Poseidon, defeated their father's generation of gods, the Titans, and claimed joint rulership over the cosmos. Hades received the underworld, Zeus the sky, and Poseidon the sea, with the solid earth available to all three concurrently. In artistic depictions, Hades is typically portrayed holding a bident and wearing his helm with Cerberus, the three-headed guard-dog of the underworld, standing at his side.
Ammit was an ancient Egyptian goddess with the forequarters of a lion, the hindquarters of a hippopotamus, and the head of a crocodile—the three largest "man-eating" animals known to ancient Egyptians. In ancient Egyptian religion, Ammit played an important role during the funerary ritual, the Judgment of the Dead.
The ancient Egyptians believed that a soul was made up of many parts. In addition to these components of the soul, there was the human body.
Damnation is the concept of divine punishment and torment in an afterlife for sins that were committed, or in some cases, good actions not done on Earth.
Sheol in the Hebrew Bible is the underworld place of stillness and darkness which lies after death.
Canopic jars are containers that were used by the ancient Egyptians during the mummification process, to store and preserve the viscera of their soul for the afterlife. The earliest and most common versions were made from stone, but later styles were carved from wood. The ritual use of the jars dates as far back as the Old Kingdom and stayed in practice until the Late Period or the Ptolemaic Period, by which time the viscera were simply wrapped and placed with the body. Canopic jars of the Old Kingdom were rarely inscribed and had a plain lid, but by the Middle Kingdom inscriptions became more usual, and the lids were often in the form of human heads. By the Nineteenth Dynasty each of the four lids depicted one of the four sons of Horus, acting as guardians for the respective organs in each jar.
Competitive eating, or speed eating, is a sport in which participants compete against each other to eat large quantities of food, usually in a short time period. Contests are typically eight to ten minutes long, although some competitions can last up to thirty minutes, with the person consuming the most food being declared the winner. Competitive eating is most popular in the United States, Canada, and Japan, where organized professional eating contests often offer prizes, including cash.
A hellhound is a mythological hound that embodies a guardian or a servant of hell, the devil, or the underworld. Hellhounds occur in mythologies around the world, with the best-known examples being Cerberus from Greek mythology, Garmr from Norse mythology, the black dogs of English folklore, and the fairy hounds of Celtic mythology. Physical characteristics vary, but they are commonly black, anomalously overgrown, supernaturally strong, and often have red eyes or are accompanied by flames.
A katabasis or catabasis is a journey to the underworld. Its original sense is usually associated with Greek mythology and classical mythology more broadly, where the protagonist visits the Greek underworld, also known as Hades. The term is also used in a broad sense of any journey to the realm of the dead in other mythological and religious traditions. A katabasis is similar to a nekyia or necromancy, where one experiences a vision of the underworld or its inhabitants; a nekyia does not generally involve a physical visit. One of the most famous examples is that of Odysseus, who performs something on the border of a nekyia and a katabasis in book 11 of the Odyssey; he visits the border of the realms before calling the dead to him using a blood rite, with it being disputed whether he was at the highest realm of the underworld or the lowest edge of the living world where he performed this.
In ancient Greek cult-practice and literature, a nekyia or nekya is a "rite by which ghosts were called up and questioned about the future," i.e., necromancy. A nekyia is not necessarily the same thing as a katabasis. While they both afford the opportunity to converse with the dead, only a katabasis is the actual, physical journey to the underworld undertaken by several heroes in Greek and Roman myth.
In religion and folklore, hell is a location or state in the afterlife in which souls are subjected to punitive suffering, most often through torture, as punishment after death. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as eternal destinations, the biggest examples of which are Christianity and Islam, whereas religions with reincarnation usually depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations, as is the case in the Indian religions. Religions typically locate hell in another dimension or under Earth's surface. Other afterlife destinations include heaven, paradise, purgatory, limbo, and the underworld.
In Greek mythology, the underworld or Hades is a distinct realm where an individual goes after death. The earliest idea of afterlife in Greek myth is that, at the moment of death, an individual's essence (psyche) is separated from the corpse and transported to the underworld. In early mythology the dead were indiscriminately grouped together and led a shadowy post-existence; however, in later mythology elements of post-mortem judgment began to emerge with good and bad people being separated.
Death rituals were an important part of Maya religion. The Maya greatly respected death; they were taught to fear it and grieved deeply for the deceased. They also believed that certain deaths were more noble than others.
Judgement in an afterlife, in which one's deeds and characteristics in life determine either punishment or reward, is a central theme of many religions. Almost all religions are greatly devoted to the afterlife, emphasizing that what you do in your current life affects what happens to you after death.
"Firebird" is the twentieth episode of the fifth season of the American fantasy drama series Once Upon a Time, which aired on May 1, 2016.
Ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs were centered around a variety of complex rituals that were influenced by many aspects of Egyptian culture. Religion was a major contributor, since it was an important social practice that bound all Egyptians together. For instance, many of the Egyptian gods played roles in guiding the souls of the dead through the afterlife. With the evolution of writing, religious ideals were recorded and quickly spread throughout the Egyptian community. The solidification and commencement of these doctrines were formed in the creation of afterlife texts which illustrated and explained what the dead would need to know in order to complete the journey safely.