Religion of the Hezhe

The Hezhe are animists. They think that all the objects and phenomena of the nature have their own spirit. They venerate also his ancestors.

They believe that every person has three souls, one who dies with the body, and other two that him survive. Of these two, one it is destined to be reincarnated in another man or in an animal, which species will depend on the observed behavior while he was alive. Other one will have to be led, by means of the opportune ceremonies, to the world of the dead persons. A world similar to that of the alive ones, inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors. East soul is capable of leaving the body in brief periods of time during the sleep. It is for it that the Hezhe give big importance to the sleep, having constructed about them a complex interpretive system.

In the nature everything has a god. Not all the gods have equal category. The most powerful is the God of the Sky, which directs everything, and the God of Three Stars, responsible for the illnesses.

The world, for the Hezhe, has three parts: the sky, the ground and the hell.
In the sky the gods live. It has seven strata that the gods occupy in importance order. In the ground the persons live. The hell is where they live through the demons.

The shamans have a very important role in the society and religion hezhe, since they are considered to be capable of communicating with not human worlds, with the skill, therefore, of solving the problems that gods or demons could cause to the men. There are several shamans' graduations, with well certain functions.

They still keep traces of a totemismo. The most important totem pole is that of the bear. Also there are clans that there says to themselves progeny of the tiger, of the fish and of the bird. Most of the people remember the legends that they narrate as his first ancestress paired off with the animal that turned into his ancestor.

The shamanism on which they were constructing his spiritual life, is almost completely missing due to the influence of the Chinese culture.

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