Superstitions about angels abound. The Irish believe that a child smiling in its sleep is having a conversation with an angel. But the Armenians believe that the snoozing smile actually comes from the fact that the child's gaurdian angel is actually tickiling him by cutting his fingernails. However the French originated the belief that a lull in the conversation is due to an angel passing through. And in Latin America it's an old custom to hang black cloths over all the mirrors when a death occurs, so that the Angel of Death does not see his reflection.
Celestial Byways Everything you ever wanted to known about angels
Haunting ghosts seem to have a purpose. Whether it's to re-enact a tragic moment in their lives, or to seekrevenge for some wrong doing comitted against them. This was done in many ways. In Europe, for example, the ghosts would achieve this by driving the trespasser mad with haunting visions. Much as Hamlet's father did in the play Hamlet, by Shakespeare, driving Hamlet to kill his murderer. The ghosts could never take revenge itself, though. In China they have a different theory altogether. There the soul of a murdered person can physicaly take revenge on their killer.
In the past, extreme measures have been taken to keep the dead from returning. In Ireland, for example, they would go so far as to take a different way home from the funeral in order to confuse the spirit, and keep it from following them home.
The Spirit Website The equivalent of ghostbusters anonymus. I'm serious.
The Shadowlands: Ghosts and Hauntings True life accounts of ghost encounters.
In many cultures through the ages the vision quest was trama induced. That is, the vision was induced by drugs, starvation, or something as equally strenuous. Modern believers tend to take a more liberal view and many believe that spirit animal appear most often to those who aren't looking.
Once contact is made the recipient may very well begin to take on certain behavioral traits and life qualities
associated with that animal. Different totems have individual meanings which vary from culture to culture.
Meanings also vary according to associations a person has to the animal.
By accident I stumbled across the exact description of a sentinel in Edgar Allan Poe's story The Fall of the
House of Usher. Which was absoulutly perfect seeing as I have not yet found anything resembling a sentinel in any
of the popular mythologies. There are gaurdian spirits, ghosts that protect their living loved ones, but nothing like
a sentinel... yet. I'll keep looking. In the mean time, I was fliping through a book on the works of Edgar Allan Poe,
because I love Edgar Allan Poe, and, BOOM, there it was. In the story, Roderick Usher, is suffering from a
strange malady that he despares of ever escaping. This is a paragraph from The Fall of the House of Usher...
He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was,
he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a
remedy --a mere nervous
affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a
host of unnatural
sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the
terms, and the
general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of
the senses; the
most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of
all flowers
were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these
from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.
The Fall of the House of Usher click here to read the entire story
Brad's Edgar Allan Poe Page three other works by Poe
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe more by Poe