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chapter 4 Death: The Journey to the Land of Darkness O n the third day of life, the vital soul journeys from the land of darkness to the land of light, guided by the soul-calling chant. At death another chant guides the souls back to the land of darkness (Lemoine 1983b:6–8), to join the ancestors and await rebirth. Several researchers have viewed mortuary rituals as the most elaborate and important of Hmong rituals, and the Showing the Way chant, which guides the souls to the ancestors, is often cited as a key to Hmong cosmology . Although accounts of mortuary rituals in diªerent locations and among diªerent groups of Miao/Hmong vary in nuances, the journey to the land of darkness is a constant among them all.1 Jacques Lemoine’s work (1972b, 1983a) on mortuary rituals focused on the Green Mong in Laos, whose practices share many similarities with those of the White Hmong in Thailand.2 Lemoine concludes that for the Hmong, death is the journey of the soul, which lives on after the body dies and travels to another existence. The purpose of the soul’s journey is to reach the village and then the house of its ancestors. There, the soul locates the sources of life, at which point it may reincarnate, ideally, through the body of a Hmong woman (1983a:6–7). In this way the returning vital soul (which I have called the third soul) per110 petuates the clan, the lineage, and the family. I found that, for the White Hmong, two souls make the journey to the land of darkness—the second soul to join with the ancestors, and the third soul to reincarnate—whereas the first soul stays with the bones in the grave. For the Hmong, the death of an older, married person who has died of natural causes sets into motion a series of rituals to ensure the safe journey of the souls from this world to the next. Hmong death rituals are concerned with the individual’s position in the community, and the continuity and cohesiveness of the community. Robert Hertz’s study on funerary practices of the Malayo-Polynesian people, which was carried out under the direction of Emile Durkheim, began with the premise that mortuary rituals were undertaken in the belief that the dead person was not only a biological individual but also a “social being, grafted upon the physical individual whose destruction is tantamount to a sacrilege against the social order” (1960:77). The anthropological generalization that mortuary rituals are a means of transcending individual deaths to maintain the continuity and solidarity of the social order appears to be accurate for the Hmong (Hertz 1960:77; Malinowski 1948:52–53; Radcliªe-Brown 1964:285). Funerals are a means by which the fragmentation of the social group, and the grief created by the loss of one of its members, can be healed. In addition, the concept of death as necessary to the continuation of life (through the rebirth of the individual soul in a diªerent body) illuminates Hmong beliefs about the meaning of life itself. Their concept of death and rebirth gives the Hmong a way to contend with the contingencies of life and death, and provides them with the assurance of continuity. During my stay in Flower Village, I attended three funerals. At two of these I was able to attend only part of the ceremony, but I witnessed the funeral of one elderly man in its entirety, except for those times when I left to get some sleep. The full sequence of mortuary events is divided into two complementary parts. In the rituals described below, the first part lasted for the recommended period of thirteen days, commencing in the house of the deceased with the Showing the Way chant. The dead man was taken from the house and buried on the tenth day. For three more days after the burial , men of the dead man’s household, especially his eldest son, fed the ancestors and the deceased. Finally, on the thirteenth day, the Xi Plig ceremony to free the first soul was held at the dead man’s old home, in silence, with 111 Death only the household in attendance. (Other clans perform these ceremonies in diªerent ways; I will be report here what I saw in the Muas clan.) The second part of the ritual was the Freeing of the Soul ceremony (Tso Plig). Whereas the Xi...

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