ABSTRACT
In the native New World, as anywhere else, religion responds to geography, economics and language, phenomena which over that continent prove to be extremely varied. Yet underlying a diversity of local cults and practices, certain doctrines or ‘orders of service’, proper in the first instance to religion, may be discerned as nothing less than paradigmatic. A clear case is the trance journey, typified by a visit to the nether world: prevalent in cosmogony throughout North America, including Mexico and parts of Central America, this other-worldly quest has been widely instituted as a principle of religious initiation in such traditional priesthoods as that of the Midewiwin, on the uppermost Mississippi. Noting the tests, rhythms and astronomical correlatives of the trance journey takes us into what may be considered a true shamanist substratum of the whole northern sub-continent, comparable with that analysed by Mircea Eliade, and by Ake Hultkranz in his study of the North American Orpheus motif.
