The chunchiet animist people of Ratanakiri in remote northeast Cambodia bury their dead in the jungle. Life is a sacred jungle.
Animists believe in the universal inherent power of nature in the natural world. The Tompoun and Jarai, among many animist tribal people in the world have sacred burial sites.
This is the Kachon village cemetery one hour by boat on the Tonle Srepok river from Voen Sai. The River of Darkness.
It is deep in the jungle along the river. You need a local guide and a translator speaking the local dialect.
The departed stays in the family home for five days before burial. Once a month family members make ritual sacrifices at the site.
The village shaman dreams the departed will go to hell. In their spirit story dream the shaman meets LOTH, Leader of the Hell who asks for an animal sacrifice. The animist belief says sacrificing a buffalo and making statues of the departed will satisfy LOTH. It will renew the spirit and return it to the family.
After a year family members remove old structures, add two carved effigies, carve wooden elephant tusks, create new decorated roofs and sacrifice a buffalo at the grave during a festive week long celebration with food and rice wine for the entire village.
Years earlier I meditated on my equilibrium one hot humid Asian day standing in disparate lines waiting for my visa to be validated by a boy soldier armed with an M-60 in the third world.
He had ammunition to spare and the 90-day firearm waiting period was not in effect. His background check bounces. If he is lucky he eats rice three times a day.
If I am lucky I will get through this transformation, derivation, metamorphosis alive. I will emerge on the other side chanting my mantra, ‘Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha.’
His bloodshot eyes checked me out as he rifles luggage. He found a mirror. He saw his destiny. Death by starvation. He slipped it into his pocket giving me a sullen, apathetic, malnourished stare. He needs it. My supply is infinite.
He pointed at my battered typewriter, “What’s that?”
I smiled, handing him shredded greenbacks.
He opened my passport to a visa page from the Hanford nuclear reactor in Washington State.
It reads, “Passport - Total Exposure System. Radiation Work Permit.”
I am allowed access to non-radioactive areas with an approved dosage of 10 mrem/hr in general areas. My stay time is 500. Radiological conditions allow me 1K of Beta Gamma and 2 mrem of Alpha. I wear a dosimeter badge to monitor my dosage in high/high-high radiation areas, contaminated areas and airborne radioactive areas or particle control areas.
Down washed out rocky New Mexico roads is another magic place sixty miles from Aztec.
Chaco Canyon is twelve miles long and one mile wide. It is a complex Anasazi Pueblo culture community nation from the mid-800’s A.D. until a fundamental shift left it abandoned around 1115 A.D. due to overused land, a lack of trees, drought, and failing crops according to anthropologists.
It was the social and economic center of life, an American Cradle of Civilization in the San Juan Basin. A huge wheel of life reflecting the pueblo world view.
They were master builders constructing stone villages and six large pueblos of multiple stories with rooms larger than previously known. They began with simple walls one stone thick using mud, mortar, rubble, and the veneer of facing stones. Later they used large blocks of tabular sandstone chinked with smaller stones set in mortar and later covered with plaster.
The largest of the big houses is Pueblo Bonito (800–1200 A.D.) which is four stories high with 600 rooms and forty kivas. A kiva is a sacred religious area. A kiva is a circular room without windows with a smoke hole at the top where the men of the village would climb down a ladder to sit, smoke, and talk about history and legends.
There was a raised stone bench and reserved for the “Speakers.” Once a year to prepare for the Earth Renewing Ceremony, the Masked God society would whitewash the interior walls of the kiva and repaint the sacred symbols on the interior stone pillars.
Chetro Ketl, 1020 A.D., had 500 rooms and sixteen kivas with a large plaza. Ketl is of great interest because of its great kiva and remnants of carved birds, prayer sticks, arrows, and discs.
Pueblo del Arroyo had 280 rooms and twenty kivas. The Kin Kletso Pueblo, built in two stages around 1125 had one hundred rooms with five enclosed kivas.
Chaco was an advanced social and trading hub. Raw turquoise was imported from distant mines. People made beautiful necklaces, bracelets, and pendants. Seashells, copper bells, and the remains of macaws and parrots suggest they traded with Mexican cultures, perhaps the Toltecs.
Chaco Canyon was a spiritual center for ritual and ceremony as journeys became pilgrimages. They were in direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos; mountains, cloud, thunder, air, earth, sun. This immediacy allowed them to feel, connect, contact power and mysterious joy.
At one time 10,000 people lived in 400 surrounding settlements. They developed 400 miles of engineered and planned prehistoric roads connecting their communities.
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