Abel

Abel of Amokokupai was the Akawaio prophet who founded Hallelujah (Areruya), the indigenous semi-Christian religion of the Kapon and Pemon peoples, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. According to the ethnography of Audrey Butt Colson, Abel fell into a death-like trance, journeyed in spirit to heaven, and returned with songs, prayers, and moral teachings received directly from God, which he combined with older shamanic cosmology into a new ritual practice. He is remembered as a revered ancestor-founder rather than a divinity, and his religion was later carried to the Pemon and other neighbouring peoples.

Domains

• prophecy

Powers

• to journey in trance to heaven and receive songs and prayers from God

Sources

• Abel was the historical Akawaio prophet who, following a visionary near-death experience in the late nineteenth century, founded the Hallelujah (Areruya) religion that remains central to Kapon religious life.: Audrey J. Butt [Colson], 'The Birth of a Religion: The Origins of a Semi-Christian Religion among the Akawaio', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 90(1): 66-106, 1960. (secondary); Neil L. Whitehead, Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death, Duke University Press, 2002. (secondary)