Certain regular ceremonies were held by both the Unami and the Minsi in honor of the dead, and will be discussed in a later paper.
EARLY ACCOUNTS
Penn.—In William Penn’s letter,[34] dated August 16, 1683, is the first mention of any details of Lenape beliefs regarding the soul that has been found. He says:
“They say there is a King that made them, who dwells in a glorious Country to the Southward of them, and that the Souls of the Good shall go thither, where they shall live again.”
Brainerd.—The same Indian whom Brainerd saw in 1745 dressed in a bearskin costume and with a wooden mask, told him[35] that—
“departed souls all went southward, and that the difference between good and bad was this: that the former were admitted into a beautiful town with spiritual walls, and that the latter would forever hover around these walls, in vain attempts to get in.”
Later,[36] Brainerd speaks of the Spirit Land of the Lenape to the southward as being “an unknown and curious place” in which the shadows of the dead “will enjoy some kind of happiness, such as hunting, feasting, dancing, and the like.” One of his Indian informants defined the kind of “bad folks” who would be unhappy in the hereafter as “those who lie, steal, quarrel with their neighbors, are unkind to their friends, and especially to aged parents, and, in a word, such as are a plague to mankind.” These would be excluded from the “Happy Hunting Ground,” not so much as a punishment to themselves, as to keep them from rendering unhappy the spirits of the good inhabiting the “beautiful town.”
Zeisberger.—About 1748, according to Zeisberger,[37] a number of preachers appeared among the Indians, who claimed to have traveled in Heaven and conversed with God. Some exhibited charts of deerskin upon which were drawn maps of the Land of Spirits and figures representing other subjects used in their preaching. Some of their ideas concerning the Son of God, the Devil, and Hell, are evidently derived from the whites; others seem more aboriginal in character, such as purification by emetics, twelve different kinds being used. He wrote: