Pretas

In Buddhism, Pretas, the "Hungry ghosts" are pitiable creatures with huge, empty stomachs which suffer constant hunger...

Buddhists believe that beings are reborn as hungry ghosts because of their greed, envy, addiction, obsession, and compulsion and jealousy...

And yet, in the summer there are hungry ghost festivals throughout Asia that feature food and entertainment for the hungry ghosts...

The origin of Buddhist "hungry ghosts" is in Hinduism, where originally Preta was understood as the ghost of any deceased individual. The Sanskrit word "preta" (प्रेत) literally means "departed, deceased, a dead person" derived from "pra-ita" meaning "gone forth, departed"...

Today, the dead are burned and the food is given to them "for a year, until they reincarnate"...But I wonder if this belief about the hungry dead originates from the time before Hindus started to be burn their dead and before Hindus started believing in reincarnation?

Here is why.  Today the Hindu families ritually feed the deceased "whose spirit is often symbolised by a clay mound somewhere in the house"...Why? Is this a remnant of the memory of the the time when the dead were buried under the mounds of clay (earth), under tumuli?

Is it possible that this belief and ritual came to India from the steppe with the Indo-Europeans? Who did bury their dead under the tumuli. And is it possible that these are actually remnants of the ancient Ancestor Cult?

The same ancestral cult featuring ever hungry and thirsty ancestors found among the Slavs for instance? I talked about this in many of my posts, like "Soul breads", "Dead man loaf" and , in which I talked about the breads made for the hungry dead...

It is interesting that Hindus feed their "hungry dead" rice balls, "which are said to symbolise the body of the deceased"...Just like in the Slavic ancestor cult where ancestors are believed to be the source of grain. 

I talked about this in my post "Diduch", about Diduch (grandfather), symbolic representation of the the dead ancestors who govern the lives of the living... 

BTW, Romans too saw direct link between the dead and the grain. I talked about this in my article "Lapis Manalis", about the sacred water stone which covered the entrance into the underworld/grain storage pit...

BTW, while I was looking for a suitable illustration for "lapis manalis" (we don't know what it actually looked like), the sacred stone used as part of a Roman "aquaelicium" (calling of the waters), rain making ceremony performed during droughts, I suddenly realised what cup and ring marks look like...

We find the same link between the dead, the god of the dead, Osiris and grain in Egyptian religion too. I talked about this in these articles where I talk about why Egyptians believed that grain grows from the body of Osiris...I talked about this in my post "The beard of Osiris" and "Braided beard"...

It is this life giving power of the dead, which Pluto (Hades), the giver of wealth, appropriated for himself. And this is why Hades and Persephone are depicted sitting on their throne in the land of the dead, with sheafs of wheat and flowers...I talked about this in my post "Pluto"...

In the Mesopotamian and Hittite ancestor cult, we also find hangry and thirsty ancestors who are also linked to rain and grain. Talked about this in my article "Care of the dead" about the care of the dead in Mesopotamia and Anatolia...

"...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the Hittites have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with their dead..." - Last Hittite king Suppiluliuma II.

Statue of Suppiluliuma II, Hatay Archeology Museum

The last thing that I will say about the "hungry ghosts" is that in China the hungry ghost festival is held on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month which corresponds to Jul/Aug in Gregorian calendar...

During the festivals, people give food to the hungry ghosts and hope for blessings from their ancestors in return...This is the old contract between the dead and the living. The living feed the dead so that the dead will feed the living...The contract the Hittites broke...

The Chinese seventh lunar month, is actually known as the "Ghost Month" or "Hungry Ghost Month," and is believed to be a time of the year when the gates of the underworld open, allowing spirits to roam the earth...

Very interesting, considering that in Mesopotamia, July, or month of Ab, was dedicated to the dead and the dead god, Tammuz, who died and went to the underworld...You can read more about this here...

The rituals of this month, consisted in eating bread in the funeral feasts for the dead god of life, who now reposed in hell, and in carrying torches by night for the souls of the dead who during this month ascended from the underworld to the world of the living...

Interesting, right?

Braided beard

An Egyptian Bronze Figure of Osiris, 21st/26th Dynasty, 1075-525 BC.

Why does Osiris wear "braided", "plaited" false beard?

Remember my post "Sphinx" about this 2,800 year old ivory was recently discovered in the old Hittite capital Hattusa, Turkey and the Sphinx as a Deified Lion animal calendar marker?

And do you remember the followup post "Giza lioness" about the Queen Hetepheres II sphinx from the Cairo Museum and the meaning of the part of the Egyptian creation myth that says that: "...lion emerged from the primeval mass within the primeval waters before all other animals, and mankind"?

Well in that post I talked about the importance of  the fact that the Great sphinx originally had "a long braided ‘divine beard’...that gods and deified kings wore, and not a short, square beard worn by living kings"...

And then I said "This is the same beard worn by Osiris, the god of resurrection directly linked to the annual flood..." I talked about this beard and its meaning in my post "The beard of Osiris". I also talked about Pharaohs who wore a false beard to pretend to be Osiris (who wore a false beard to pretend to be a dead ancestor 🙂) and about the cult of the dead in Ancient Egypt. Grain growing from the body of Osiris.

When I posted the link to this article on Facebook yesterday, a friend of mine asked me a very interesting question:

"A puna šaka brade?" (What about the expression "hand full of beard"?)

The "puna šaka brade" (hand full of beard) is an expression from Serbo-Croatian which means "big gain, big fortune, big happiness, big satisfaction"...

In this article (in Serbian) the author argues that the expression comes from the fact that "rubbing one's chin, or stroking one's beard is a natural expression of satisfaction"...

I've seen old people doing this so many times all over the Balkans...And now I am one of the "old people" stroking my beard as a sign of great satisfaction that I had stumbled across another interesting "syncretism" 🙂

In my post about the fake beard of Osiris, I talked about the Egyptian cult of the dead, and the cult of the dead in general, and how the dead ancestors, represented by the guys with long beards, were linked to grain agriculture and grain fertility...

Now remember my post "Wheat cross" about "wheat cross" decorated with "wheat wreath" harvest traditions from Central Europe?

In it I said that the wheat wreath was always made by women, and was made "the way you would plait women's hair"...

Which (thank you @another_barbara) looks like ear of wheat...

Which means that the girl carrying the wheat wreath was the embodiment of the Grain/Wheat/Corn Maiden...

Now this is what real plaited, braided beard actually looks like. It also looks like ear of grain...Very fitting as a symbol of Osiris, the god of the fertile black soil from which grain grows...

So is this why the (false) beard of Osiris and Deified Pharaohs (Deified Ancestors) is plaited? To look like grain growing out of the (grateful) dead?

Diduch (grandfather), symbolic representation of the ancestral spirit which governs the lives of the living. 

From Central European Slavic mythology / folklore. More in my post "Diduch"...

I talked about the importance of keeping the dead happy if you wanted your grain to grow in my post "Care of the dead"...

Remember this depressed dude? This is the statue of the Last Hittite king Suppiluliuma II. And he said: "...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the Hittites have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with their dead..."

Maybe Osiris wore "grain beard". Or maybe this is all just a coincidence...And this has nothing to do with anything: The last harvested sheaf of wheat was in the past in some parts of Serbia used to make "Velesova brada"(The beard of Veles, Slavic sun/summer/harvest god) or just Božija brada (God's beard)...

The "grain spirit" is in European folklore usually preserved as female "corn dolly" made from the last harvested sheaf of wheat. I talked about this in my post "Corn dolly" and "The old woman of the mill dust"...

The spirit of the "Mother of Grain" (Mother Earth). After all grain grows from earth...

I talked about this in my post "Mother of grain"...Grain seed and vulva symbolism...Link between female fertility and earth/grain field fertility...

But did (some weird) Serbs, just like (weird) Ancient Egyptians, associate the grain fertility with a male god...And hence preserved the "grain spirit" in the male God's beard?

Again, let me remind you of this

Serbs, like all the other Balkan people, are descendants of pretty much everyone who ever lived in the Balkans...Which is why, I thought then, and still think, we can find so many interesting bits of many old lores in Serbian folklore...

There is of course another possibility. A long beard, means long life...In the past, in the Balkans, men had long life only if they were fucking lucky...

This is Serbian gusle player and epic poems singer Rajko Ivković. Born in 1880, in the village Gradovi on mountain Rudnik in Serbia. Survived 3 wars. Had many stories to tell. The word history deep down means "what old people saw". From my post "History"...

Anyway, speaking of "stroking ones beard as a natural expression of satisfaction" 🙂 Remember my post "Sceptre"?

Church decoration, Mansilla de la Sierra, Spain. 

Serbian expression "he acts as if he pulled god's beard", which means "he acts like god gave him power", has another version "he acts as if he pulled god's penis". 

I hope you liked this. Have a nice evening 🙂 And "May your beards grow long". Unless you are a woman of course.

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...

Care of the dead

Two Assyrian soldiers forcing Elamite captive to grind bones of his family, 7th - 6th c. BC. This wasn't like most people think an act of random cruelty...Making someone destroy the bones of their ancestors was a deliberate forced act of sacrilege...

Assyrian culture, like all the other Mesopotamian cultures, was built around the cult of the dead. Assyrians, often buried their dead under house floors. They also practiced "kispu", regular, ritual feeding and watering of the deceased after their burial...

Based on this, in the "Death as a Stage for Performing Identity in the Assyrian Empire" Petra M. Creamer concludes that "Socially, this indicates deep linkages to familial practices and ancestral memory".

So, it is precisely because Assyrians respected their dead ancestors so much, that I am sure that them forcing their Elamite captives to destroy the bones of their own ancestors was a lot more than just ordinary act of cruelty...

We actually know why they did this. There is a  King Ashurbanipal’s inscription in which he says that he exposed the grave of the Elamite kings and deprived them of sacrificial food and drink offerings...

Destroying the bones of the enemy ancestors was done for the same reason: To prevent the Elamites from sacrificing food and drink to their dead.

But why was sacrificing food and drink to the dead so important to the Mesopotamians and their Iranian neighbours?

And we know that it was very important, because we have written records, from the 3rd millennium BC onwards about "kispu" (the care of the dead), which involved regular "feeding and watering" of the dead though food and water sacrifices...

The other day, I came across a paper entitled "Peace for the Dead, or kispu(m) Again" by Akio Tsukimoto, in which he talks about mentions of this practice in Sumerian, Old Babylonian and Kassite records...

In it we can read that the dead were served with food (grain) and drink (water) offerings not only during their funeral ceremonies, but also regularly thereafter, at least once a month, and in some cases possibly even every day...

There were also two festival dedicated to the dead ancestors with big feasts in which the living ate and drank with the dead. I will talk about these in my next thread.

Importantly, the dead were kept fed and watered because otherwise they would get angry...

Neither Petra M. Creamer nor Akio Tsukimoto explain why feeding and watering the dead was soo important to the Mesopotamians and kind of punishment by the angry dead were they afraid of. But I did, in my post "The house of bones".

In it I talked about the mystery of the missing bones of the Hittite royals. And I proposed that the bones were taken by the Hittites with them, when they abandoned their capital Hattusa, because they wanted to be able to continue to sacrifice food and drink to the dead...

Just like the Chaldean king Meredach, who, when he fled from Babylon to Elam, in front of the advancing forces of Sargon, "took with him all the gods of the land and all the bones of his ancestors from their graves"...

And I explained that the Hittites, just like their Mesopotamian and Elamite contemporaries, remembered their dead and sacrificed food and water to them regularly, because forgotten, hungry and thirsty dead ancestors will take revenge on their living descendants...

And one of the ways they would do that is by causing droughts, storms, floods and other natural disasters that would cause grain crops to fail, and would result in famine and the death of the living...

Eeeee where did you get this idea? From here: Serbs and other Balkan Slavs believed that if the dead were not given water, they would drink it from the clouds, and would cause drought. I talked about this in my article "Thirst", "White feast"...

Serbian belief system, according to ethnographers, was based on the cult of the dead. They regularly shared food and drink with their dead. And they even took the bones of their dead with them, when they were forced to move due to wars or famines. I talked about this in "The house of bones".

BTW, this belief in the world of the dead being a thirsty place seems to have been widespread in the past.

Ghandara culture graves, Pakistan, 1200-800BC...The drinking vessels were placed in graves with drink "for the other world"...I talked about this in my post "One for the road".

But how could Serbian/South Slavic folklore help us understand the Hittite culture?

Serbs, like all the other Balkan people, are descendants of pretty much everyone who ever lived in the Balkans...Which is why, I thought then, and still think, we can find so many interesting bits of many old lores in Serbian folklore...

Anyway, back to the Hittites. Remember this depressed dude? This is the statue of the Last Hittite king Suppiluliuma II. And he said: "...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the Hittites have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with their dead..."

He then promises in the name of the Hittite kings and in the name of his subjects that they will do everything in their power to rebuild this sacred bond again...

But that was too little too late...The Hittite empire collapsed, their capital Hattusa was abandoned and Hittite royals disappeared from the face of the world...Together with the bones of their ancestors...

It turns out, that I was right about the reason for the Hittite empire collapse. According to this recent article from Nature, "Severe multi-year drought [my comment: caused by the angry ancestors] coincided with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC"...

BTW, this is not the only thing found in Serbian/Slavic folklore that I used to unlock the secrets of much older, seemingly unrelated cultures. I discovered the key for unlocking the secrets of ancient animal calendar markers among the Serbian/Slavic snake and goat folklore...

If it wasn't for that, we would still be looking at all these animals depicted on all these ancient artefacts, and talked about in all these ancient myths, legends, folk stories, without having a clue what they mean...

Anyway, I might one day give you the chronology of the discovery of each animal calendar marker and what helped me figure it out. If anyone cares...

I will stop here. This is just an intro into much more important thread about the Sumerian "Zadušnice" festivals of the dead 🙂

The beard of Osiris

Figurine of a bearded man by the Naqada I culture, 3800–3500 BC, from Upper Egypt. Pic by Rama.

Today I came across this article "Heliopolis and the Solar Cult in the Third Millennium BC"

In it I read about the "Souls of Heliopolis", "Souls of Hierakonpolis" and Pharaohs as great prophets, great seers, who received their sacred knowledge and legitimacy from their ancestors...all the way to the procreator god..."

And this got me thinking: Was ancestral worship at the core of the early Ancient Egyptian religion? Is this why Pharaohs wore false beards?

Apparently, Pharaohs (divine rulers) wore false beards to signify their status as a living gods. 

And not any god. Osiris. In ancient Egypt, Osiris was considered as being the perfect example for pharaohs...

Thus, in order to get closer to and bond with the perfect pharaoh Osiris, his pharaonic successors wore a false beard to imitate his appearance. But Osiris didn't actually have a real beard himself...

Osiris, wore a false beard in his role as ruler of underworld while he judged the dead. Apparently, he wore the false beard "as a symbol of his great wisdom"...

Why would a beard be a symbol of great wisdom? Cause beard is a symbol of an elder, an ancestor...Someone of a great age with great experience and hence knowledge, wisdom...

The older you were, the wiser you became...And longer your beard grew...

And then you died and went to the underworld. So the underworld was full of dead ancestors with long beards...

So Osiris wearing a false beard while judging the dead, was symbolically proclaiming the judgement of the ancestors...Cause it was really the ancestors who judged their descendants...And gave them what they deserved...

Remember this?

"...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the Hittites have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with their dead..." - Last Hittite king Suppiluliuma II.  I talked about this in my post "House of bones"...

Statue of Suppiluliuma II, Hatay Archeology Museum, with a pretty depressed looking expression on his face...

In the above post, I proposed that what caused the demise of the Hittites was a severe multiyear drought, and that to understand why Suppiluliuma II talked about the dead, we need to look at the beliefs of Serbs and other Balkan Slavs. In the Balkans people believed that if the dead were not given water, they would drink it from the clouds, and would cause drought. You can read more about the eternal thirst of the dead in my post "Thirst"

Romans linked rain, and agriculture, with the will of the dead too...You can read more about this in my post "Lapis Manalis" about the Roman agricultural rituals which link the (thirsty) dead living under (holy) stones, rain and agricultural fertility...

It turns out, that I was right. According to this recent article from Nature, "Severe multi-year drought coincided with Hittite collapse around 1198–1196 BC"...

In Egypt, agriculture depended not on rain, but on the annual Nile flood. And who was the god directly linked to the annual Nile flood that created the black (fertile) soil? Osiris. 

Osiris with wheat growing from his body. From the coffin of Nespawershepi.

I talked about the link between annual Nile flood, fertile black soil and Osiris in my post "Holy carp"...

Osiris the Perfect Pharaoh. He who made the land fertile and who liked to wear a false beard, pretending to be symbolic ancestor...Did Ancient Egyptians also have in their religion the link between the dead and water and fertility? I think so...

Osiris, who was thus emulated by the Pharaohs who wore a false beard to pretend to be Osiris (who wore a false beard to pretend to be an ancestor 🙂)...

What was the most important role of a Pharaoh? To feed his people of course...

BTW, this is Diduch (Grandfather, Ancestor), depicted as a sheaf of grain, to symbolically show the link between the dead and the grain fertility...I talked about this in my post "Diduch"

This was fun 🙂 What do you think?

I want to thank my friend @another_barbara for this great insightful comment:

I've been thinking about the things you posted since last night. People "planted" their dead in the soil that fed them, scatter their ashes into life giving rivers or seas that provided for them...

Dead man loaf

In Bulgaria, a special loaf of bread was made immediately after a person died, during the washing of the body. It was a simple round loaf, sometimes with a cross. In northeastern Bulgaria it was baked from dough which was made with the water used to bathe the deceased...

Sources:

"Glasnik Etnografskog muzeja u Beogradu knjiga 19 godina 1956"

"Bread in the folk culture of the Serbs in its pan Slavic context"

The dough for the bread was kneaded in a wooden throw. Before the kneading of the bread started, a candle was lit and put next to the through. And the dough was kneaded until the candle burned out...

In some parts of Bulgaria, this bread had to be made by a "clean" woman who had no sexual intercourses, either a virgin girl, a widow or a grandmother...

The name of this bread was пътнина (patnina), meaning "(bread for the) journey". In some parts of Bulgaria, this bread was placed in the coffin with a bottle of water and a bottle of wine, so the deceased would have enough food and drink for his journey to the other world...

This is very interesting. Remember my articles about the pots and pans found in Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age graves all over the world. Like these Ghandara culture graves from Pakistan, dated to 1200-800BC...Were the drinking vessels placed in graves with drink "for the other world"...

 I talked about this in my post "One for the road"...Why would the living bother with making sure the dead had enough food and drink in the otherworld? 

Our ancestors believed that it was the dead ancestors that directly affected the life of the living and in particular the land/grain fertility. 

I talked about this in many of my posts like my post about Diduch (grandfather), symbolic representation of the ancestral spirit which governs the lives of the living.

The dead had to be remembered, and fed and watered by giving them regular food and drink (mostly water) sacrifices. Cause forgotten, hungry and thirsty dead ancestors will take revenge on their living descendants. And one of the ways they would do that is by causing droughts, storms, floods and other natural disasters that would cause grain crops to fail, and would result in famine and the death of the living...

I talked about this in my posts "Thirst", "White feast", "Soul breads". I talked about the link between the dead and rain and grain fertility in Roman mythology in my post "Lapis Manalis"....

Also, remember this? 

"...humiliation of the Hittite kingdom is the result of the fact that the Hittites have forgotten to respect the sacred bond with their dead..." - Last Hittite king Suppiluliuma II.  From my post "House of bones"...  

Statue of Suppiluliuma II, Hatay Archeology Museum with a pretty depressed expression on his face...

This is why people not just buried their dead with food and water, but also regularly feasted with the dead. 

Starting from the funeral feast. 

In some other parts of Bulgaria, the bread was, while still warm, broken over the deceased person's head, making sure that steam, representing the deceased person's soul, rose the broken bread...The bread was then ritually eaten by the people attending the bathing of the body...

BTW, in Herodotus 4:73 we read that when a Scythian man died his family would put the body on a cart and take it to all his friends houses. They would bring the body into each house where they would eat and drink together with the corpse...

Through the quarterly remembrance feasts. 

There is a custom among Serbs of "feasting with the dead". Four times a year, once per season, on a day called "Zadušnice" (Souls day) a family goes to the graveyard, spreads the tablecloth on the grave, lays food and drink on the grave and has a feast with the dead. 

And literally any other feast.

Serbs actually always feasted with the dead. Every family feast was symbolically eaten with the dead. This prompted some Serbian ethnographers to propose that the whole Serbian belief system was based around the cult of the dead...

Soul breads

As late as the mid 20th century, there was a custom in Poland to bake small loaves of bread for the dead on the All Souls day. Because the All Souls day is in Polish known as Dzien Zaduszki (the day for the souls), the bread was also called zaduszki, bread (for) souls...

Originally these were just a plain sourdough flatbreads...But the recipe gradually evolved into this:

Lublin All Souls' Day breads (powałki)

1 kg of cooked flour potatoes

2 eggs

400 g of wheat flour

100g of fresh yeast

1 teaspoon of sugar

2 flat teaspoons of salt

Press the previously cooked and cooled potatoes through a press, add eggs, flour, salt and yeast grated with sugar. Knead the mixture into a loose dough. Tear off pieces of dough, form thick flat patties and place them on oiled baking tray.

Decorate each patty with a grid pattern using a fork, and leave them to rise for 30 minutes. Bake for 20-30 minutes in an oven preheated to 160°C. 

That's the traditional recipe. If you want, you can add cheese, ham, spices or any other topping of filling to suit your taste...

The origin of this ritual in the old Slavic feast called Dziady, which in Polish means Grandfathers, Forefathers, when the souls of Forefathers would come back to our world to visit their descendants. And the little (soul) breads were made as food for the visiting ancestors.

The soul breads had to be prepared a few days in advance, as people did not want to light the fire on the hearth on All Saints' Day, as they believed that the visiting souls gathered around the house hearth, and they didn't want to disturb them...

Two interesting things here.

First: Slavs believed that it was the (happy) ancestors (satisfied with the way their descendants treated them) who were the source of all good that their descendants enjoyed. Including (and especially) good grain harvest...I talked about this in my post "Diduch" (grandfather), about the East Slavic symbolic representation of the ancestral spirit which governs the lives of the living. 

So a bread for the dead now makes a lot of sense, right? I talked about the ancestral cult root of Slavic agricultural rituals in many of my blog posts and twitter threads. This post, "Wheat cross", is a good jumping point for exploring this subject further. It talks about the ceremonial "wheat cross" from Romania, which was made on the last day of the wheat harvest to carry the "wheat wreath" from the fields to the village. And about the related Slavic harvest traditions and ritual.

Second: Hearth as the place where the dead gather when they visit the house of their descendants. I talked about the link between the dead and the hearth in my post about "Verige" (hearth chain). 

As you can see from the above picture, in the past, the hearth was the focal point of every house. So it is easy to imagine that the souls of the dead ancestors would also gather around the hearth to warm themselves up on the cold November night...

This is confirmed by the fact that in the past in Poland, on All Souls eve, people used to set up bonfires on the crossroads, in order to help the souls of the ancestors warm up a bit...Why on crossroads? Allegedly to show wandering souls their way home...

But interestingly:

In some parts of Serbia, on Christmas eve, a single man from a village would go to a crossroads and lay down a feast for wolves. He would then run home without turning...I talked about this in my post "Wolf feast", about the link between wolves and the ancestors in Serbian folklore. 

And also:

Diduch (Grandfather), the grain effigy representing "The Ancestor" made in Ukraine for Christmas, was in some areas, burned on New Year's eve, on crossroads, "one of the favorite hangouts of evil spirits and vampires"...

See how the souls of the ancestors ended up becoming evil spirits and vampires...With a little help of Christian priests...

Finally, some Serbian ethnographers proposed that the belief that the dead gather around the house hearth might also be a remnant of the ancient (really really ancient) practice of burying the dead under and around the hearth...

I am very important! 

Love this little guy 🙂 Neolithic Vinča culture anthropomorphic terracotta figurine, 5000 BC, Serbia.

"These figurines were found in houses, often near fireplace, sometimes carefully arranged, which indicates that they had ritual, cult value".

Did they represent the deceased, the ancestors?