THE SOUL
The doctrine of the survival of the soul or spirit after the death of the body, forms an integral part of Lenape belief. The spirit is supposed to leave the body at the moment of dissolution, but remains in the vicinity eleven days, during which time it subsists on food found in the houses of the living, if none has been placed at the grave. Some say that the actual food is not consumed but that the ghost extracts some essence or nourishment from it.
THE LAND OF SPIRITS
On the twelfth day the spirit leaves the earth and makes its way to the twelfth or highest heaven, the home of the Creator, where it lives indefinitely in a veritable “Happy Hunting Ground,” a beautiful country where life goes on much as it does on earth, except that pain, sickness, and sorrow are unknown, and distasteful work and worry have no place; where children shall meet their parents who have gone before, and parents their children; where everything always looks new and bright. There is no sun in the Land of Spirits, but a brighter light which the Creator has provided. All people who die here, be they young or old, will look the same age there, and the blind, cripples,—anyone who has been maimed or injured,—will be perfect and as good as any there. This is because the flesh only was injured, not the spirit.
This paradise, however, is only for the good, for those who have been kind to their fellows and have done their duty by their people. Little is said of those who have done evil in this world, except that they are excluded from the happy Land of Spirits. Some Unami say that the blood in a dead body draws up into globular form and floats about in the air as a luminous ball, but this is not the true spirit.
The Minsi seem to have retained a more archaic belief, for they say that the Land of Spirits lies to the southwest, in a country of good hunting. Here they say, the wigwams of the spirits are always neat and clean, and happiness prevails. But between our world and the spirit country flows a river which the spirit must cross on a slender foot-log or in a canoe.
GHOSTS AND MEDIUMSHIP
Ghosts do not seem always to have left the earth at the expiration of the twelve days, or else they have the power of returning, for the Lenape claim that boys, dreaming for power, have sometimes been pitied and given some blessing by the ghosts, who remained their guardian spirits through life. Such people were considered to have the power of talking with the departed and sometimes made a practice of it, but mediumship was by no means confined to them. Among the Minsi formerly they were accustomed to hold meetings in the burial grounds at certain times, when some medium, it is said, would communicate with the spirits.
The late James Wolf, one of the principal Minsi informants, was said to have this power. One time a man was drowned in the Thames river near Munceytown in Ontario, and the body could not be located. Wolf, it is said, walked up and down the river-banks, with a companion, talking to the water. At last a strange sound was heard, and Wolf stopped. “That was the dead man’s spirit,” he said; “the body lies right over in that hole.” Surely enough, when they procured a boat, they found the body in the hole, wedged beneath a sunken log.