Haudenosaunee cosmology begins with a fall. Sky Woman drops through a hole from the Sky World, is caught by birds, and is set down on the back of a turtle where the animals bring up soil to make the earth. The world is therefore secondary and the Sky World is where people came from — which gives the afterlife its direction. The dead do not go down or across. They go back.
The route is the Milky Way, the Path of Souls, and the journey is described as pleasant and not trivial. There are lights, flowers, springs of good water, and wild strawberries along it — the strawberry has particular standing in Haudenosaunee thought as the first fruit and a marker of the road home. There are also ordeals; accounts differ on their nature, and the passage is often described as taking about a year to complete rather than being instantaneous.
What is unusually well-defined is the ten days at the start. For ten days the spirit remains present and is treated as present: not spoken about in the past tense, addressed directly, and given a share of the food. On the tenth day the community holds the Ten Day Feast, at which a portion is set aside for the dead, personal belongings are distributed, and the spirit is formally released to begin the journey. The Haudenosaunee also hold, at intervals afterward, feasts at which the dead are remembered collectively. The structure is precise about when grieving stops being a private matter and when the dead stop being a household presence.
The Condolence is the other half, and it is doing something different. When a chief dies, the Condolence Ceremony is performed by the moiety opposite the bereaved one — the mourning side is always consoled by the other side, never by itself — and its content is the Requickening Address, which names the parts of a grieving person that grief has disabled: the eyes clouded with tears, the ears stopped, the throat obstructed. Each is wiped, cleared, and restored in turn. Only then is a successor raised up to the title. The reasoning is political as much as pastoral: a mind darkened by grief cannot deliberate, and the Great Law requires clear minds at the council fire. The Condolence exists so that the Confederacy does not make decisions while it is grieving.
The framework is therefore two-directional in an unusual way. The dead have a definite road, a definite starting delay, and a definite destination. But the ceremonial weight — the long formal oratory, the wampum, the whole apparatus — is spent on returning the living to a condition in which they can think.
