Bruce Lincoln’s Afterlife Passage Story

“The American theologian Bruce Lincoln parsed the totality of Indo-European cultures’ accounts of passage to the afterlife. Lincoln deduced: ‘The picture that emerges is as follows. On the way to the otherworld, souls of the dead had to cross a river, the waters of which washed away all of their memories. These memories were not destroyed, however, but were carried by the river’s water to a spring, where they bubbled up and were drunk by certain highly favored individuals, who became inspired and infused with supernatural wisdom as a result of the drink.‘”

Source: Expanding Mental Models · (Ancient Ukraine’s Don-sounding Rivers)

The common IE afterlife narrative reconstructed from all branches. River crossing, memory loss, spring of wisdom. Present in Irish, Indian, Greek, Germanic, and Iranian traditions.

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