Near-Death Experience and the Origins of the Alleluia Religion
Historical NDE of the Month
The Alleluia (or “Hallelujah”) church is an indigenous-Christian syncretistic religion of Guyana, on the northern coast of South America. It had its origins in the NDE-like shamanic afterlife experience NDE of its founder, Bichiwung of the Makushi people, in the Kanuku Mountain region sometime after 1845. The religion proper, however, was founded by an Akawaio prophet named Abel, following his own spontaneous NDE.
According to indigenous testimony, Bichiwung worked for an English missionary who not only taught him English but also took him to England for a time. While there, Bichiwung claimed that he overheard the missionary telling his wife that despite what he was promising Bichiwung, he planned to withhold from him the secrets of God’s teachings. Bichiwung was baptized but was instructed to stay alone in a house to which he was brought, to work as a security guard. Far from his home and his people, feeling betrayed and maneuvered into a job he didn’t agree to, Bichiwung grew lonely and depressed.
Based on her fieldwork among the Akawaio in the 1950s, and synthesizing the accounts she was given, the anthropologist Audrey J. Butt summarized:
He began to think about all he had been told and he wanted to see God for himself to find out for sure that the white man had told him the truth. The white people had shown him a trail to God and he went off that way on his own.
According to one account, the trail led to the top of a hill where Bichiwung prayed. Then his soul followed those of three boys who had recently died. They were allowed to enter heaven, though Bichiwung could only get halfway through the door because God would not allow him in due to his sins. It is likely that Bichiwung had been taught by the missionaries to follow the “path” of Christianity – a figure of speech he took literally, which was then manifested in his shamanic-type experience. Another version states simply that “He slept and spirit went to heaven to find God.” In any case…
When Bichiwung met God he wanted to get into heaven but God said that he could not go in and He asked Bichiwung why he had come. When Bichiwung said that he wanted to make sure that he was being told the truth by the white man God let him into heaven and showed him round the place. God spoke to him and said that the white people were deceiving him and that it was Alleluia which was good. So Bichiwung got Alleluia from God then, and God also gave him a bottle of white medicine and words and songs and also a piece of paper which was the Indian Bible. These things Bichiwung was told to lock in his canister and only to take out on his return to his homeland. Bichiwung liked heaven and wanted to stay there [particularly “a wonderful garden” he saw] but God said that he could not stay because he had not yet died. God told him to go back the way he had come, to continue guarding the white parson’s things and then to return home to help his family and to teach Alleluia.
Bichiwung followed these instructions. He abandoned reading the Christian books and instead took back to his people the Alleluia teachings and the “Indian Bible,” “which he had got on his own, from God.” According to one version, he did not take a physical book from heaven, but merely wrote down what he had been told by God after reviving. Regarding his return, one source stated:
When Bichiwung was speaking to God he saw his wife and children. After he saw his wife and children he wanted to go to them; God said he mustn’t go that way to his wife and children, otherwise he would fall down dead. He wanted to go back to them without passing over the sea but God said he must go back the same way that he had come.
After his return, Bichiwung had further out-of-body afterlife experiences in which his spirit went to heaven and he again met God, and Alleluia “became apparent to him.” He converted first his family to the new religion, then the rest of his people. On one of his otherworld journeys, God gave him one seed for every kind of local fruit and vegetable, and when he planted them they became a miraculously abundant garden.
But his success and popularity led to jealousy among certain sorcerers, one of whom killed Bichiwung. His wife, however, was able to revive him with the “white medicine” he was given in heaven. He was then killed a second time, and though his body was “cut into two or three pieces,” his wife was again able to reassemble and revive him by use of the medicine. He was finally killed permanently when his body was chopped into small pieces and some of them could not be located.
Some of the secrets of Alleluia were unfortunately lost with his passing, though his people continued to practice what they could remember, combining it with other local traditions. Some years later, however, a shaman and sorcerer named Abel would restore Bichiwung’s teachings following his own NDE.
Abel, believed to have been born in 1836, was a wicked man who “had killed many people” and laughed at the Alleluia religion when he was first told about it. According to one elderly woman:
When Abel died, or nearly so, for he slept for almost a week, his wife and children were crying. They blocked up the path to heaven, which is like a big sea, so that he couldn’t get past it. He said to them on waking up that kapong [the Akawaio people], mustn’t cry when people die, otherwise the deceased can’t get to heaven. The mourner must just pray; after the body is put in the grave people can cry, but not before…. Abel slept six days, then he got Alleluia from God…. God spoke many things to Abel…and when Abel woke up he said what God had told him.
After his NDE, Abel reformed and became a better person, concerned for the well-being of his people. He also undertook deliberate journeys to heaven to understand Alleluia, during sleep and through prayer, when “his spirit was wandering apart from his body.” On one such journey he met a deceased brother-in-law, but at the “gates of heaven” he was told by God that he could not enter because of his sins, and “you have to wait until you have died.”
Like Bichiwung, Abel taught resistance to colonialist authority and Christian religious teachings. Abel prophesied that the Europeans would come and take their land. He was also told in a vision that if the people follow Alleluia, white people will become their servants; if not, they will become servants of the white people. This prophecy was seen as fulfilled after many natives converted to Seventh Day Adventism and became “servants of the white man.” These factors demonstrate how NDEs can be enlisted as tools of political and cultural resistance.
“His spirit was wandering apart from his body…”
While there is obviously no way to confirm that any of these events actually occurred nearly 180 years ago, it seems likely that at the heart of the accounts lie actual NDEs. It should be remembered that NDEs were not a part of any orthodox Christian teachings the indigenous people would have been subjected to by the missionaries. This means that it’s highly unlikely that they simply learned about the phenomenon from missionaries – especially given their resistance to their other religious teachings. It is, in fact, not surprising that the occurrence of such extraordinary experiences would lead to new religious beliefs, and indeed that such “direct” indigenous evidence would supersede foreign teachings found in Christian books and explained by missionaries.
In contrast, such experiences are consistent with indigenous shamanic traditions. The Akawaio practiced soul-retrieval, in which shamans would send their souls to the spirit world to retrieve those in danger of dying and help restore them to their bodies.
Similar religions originated with the afterlife experiences of other South American prophets, including two Baniwa Brazilian prophets, Venancio Aniseto Kamiko in 1857 and Aniseto in 1875; the Tukano prophet Alexandre Christo in 1858; and an Arapaco named Vincente Christo in 1878. Similar dynamics are also found among northern Native Americans and in indigenous societies in the Pacific regions, in a phenomenon known as “revitalization movements” in which a society undergoes a concerted effort to maintain and reinvigorate their culture and religion in the face of external domination.
A claim by one Akawaio informant that God told Bichiwing that the missionary teachings did not come from Him, and that they were out of date, recalls highly similar arguments from the Salish people of the Pacific Northwest in the 19thcentury, the Innu of Canada’s northeast in the 18th century, and various others. Finally, as with Alleluia, these other religious movements were maintained by the shamanic replication of the original experiences. In other words, shamans continued to travel to the other world and NDEs continued to be valorized because of the information gained through them in the spirit world.
Like Bichiwung, Abel was also killed by sorcerers and brought back to life twice, before they finally killed him permanently in 1911. The Alleluia movement eventually spread to Brazil and Venezuela, and is still practiced today – including spirit-journeys to the otherworld.
See: Butt, A. J. (1960) “The birth of a religion.” In J. Middleton (ed., 1967) Gods and Rituals, 377– 435. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 380-94, 396-97, 399-405.
For NDEs and religious revitalization movements, see: Shushan, Gregory (2018) Near-Death Experience in Indigenous Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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