Fire and Ice
Most of my life I have related to cold. I clearly remember a deep snow in louisiana in 1962 where the whole world changed into a magickal wonderland of crystal ice. Rolling in it, throwing snow balls and sliding on the ice in the drainage ditches. All the usual mud and dried grasses turned into things of beauty. Something in this resonated deeply within me. And I followed that call all my life. Anything to do with the Arctic circle and Cold, cultures and their religions. Inuit, Sami,Migratory Cultures such as the American Indians I have looked at with a passion. Some of the aspects are surprisingly similar. This had me change what I was looking at in latter years.
Mythological and Spiritual aspects show a distinct crossing of cultures where real mixing has taken place at some point while we cannot in this day and time make the connection of the how.
Symbolism,Traditions, artworks. Carl Jung states that the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. That there is a collective consciousness that spins out archetypes which can be observed all over the world time and again throughout history.
Bearing this aspect in mind, it helps to tie the cultures closer together so that the similarities 
can be viewed in context. Compressed so its obvious what the sameness is. An example is the Sioux and Sami cultures. There is overwhelming parallelism of Mythic Themes such as animism, polytheism and shamanism.
For tribes of North Eastern American plains, the Sioux, or Dakota as they are sometimes referred to,the indigenous Scandinavian people, the Sami,The Alaskan Inuit, nature was recognized as sacred. The sacred places were , but spectacular or prominent features of the natural landscape. While natural surroundings create special sacred places, for the Sami and the Sioux the whole world is animated with the divine source of life. This idea finds expression in the Lakota Sioux Black Elk’s beautiful and profound vision of standing on the central mountain of the world:
The shaman, the Sami noaidi, was an important feature of Sami culture and spiritual tradition. The shaman was able to fulfill many practical purposes with his special talent and function as a leader in the community. Although the shaman had no formal authority, he traditionally held a dignified position and was well respected. By listening closely to the drum (called a meavrresgarri) to its “speech” or watching the particular pointers (arpa) while drumming with his hammer, it is said that a shaman could predict future events.
The drumming of the shaman also served practical purposes for reindeer herding, finding lost objects and hunting. Most important, however, the shaman served as a spiritual guide or priest, a mediator between this world and the spiritual realm, and a healer of illnesses. According to the Sami, illness was caused by a person’s soul becoming lost or the invasion of a hostile object into the person’s body. The shaman would either retrieve the lost soul while in trance or expel the foreign object by invoking the aid of spirits or powers. Although the Sioux do not specify a specific cause for all illness, the shaman or medicine man employs a generally similar technique of entering into a trance-like state and calling for the assistance of natural powers.
Black Elk recalls how he was “drumming as I cried to the Spirit of the World, and while I was doing this I could feel the power coming through me from my feet up, and I knew that I could help the sick boy” (Neihardt). One important distinction between Sioux shamanism and that of the Sami is how one becomes a shaman. An old chieftain of the Oglalla Sioux, Chief Piece of Flat Iron, describes how shamans are chosen by a higher power:
To the Holy Man comes in youth the knowledge that he will be holy. The Great Mystery makes him know this. Sometimes it is the spirits who tell him…he goes into the hills in solitude. When he returns to men he teaches them and tells them what the Great Mystery has bidden him to tell. He counsels, he heals, and he makes holy charms to protect the people from all evil. (Campbell)
This simply shows roots of basic religious aspects we cannot prove go far further back than our minds can hold.And that not one group, but all mankind is a part of. That not one person is repsonsible for Religion but I beleive our very Dna is coded with the begining.Where there are those of us that think that what we do is the only way, or that there is only one right way,But the very exisitence of the similiar aspects of ancient religions proves otherwise.
Light and Love
Starwalker
