Further Preparations For A Life Of Crime: Introduction to the Anthropology of Funeral Ritual Or Some Shit

“Now as life draws to its close

My slothfulness is past. Grant that steadfast I may live long

As long as life shall last

Come thou down, most precious lama

Thou my shelter be, From life’s endless round, Chenresi

Highest one, deliver me.”

That was a fragment from a Tibetan funeral hymn translated into English by Sir Charles Bell and adapted by Wiliam Lamers. This passage is read over the deceased by a lama, or Buddhist holy man, before the body is taken to its final resting place (Habenstein & Lamers, 1960, p.77). The reading of religious scripture or culturally significant folk hymns is common to almost all religions, with most people in western culture at least aware of some of the Christian prayers and hymns, if nothing more than for their objectively inappropriate use in movies about gangsters and such.

According to Professor Robert Habenstein and William Lamers, immediately after death, a Tibetan Buddhist will pass through a state called “bardo”, which they refer to as being a journey “Between the Two”, referring to the journey of the soul from life to the afterlife to receive their judgement.

This begins with what Lamers calls a “Passing Ceremony”, whereby the lama performs a private ritual to allow the soul to leave to body, conducting a magical ceremony which again has parallels in almost all other religions and cultures.

The Tibetan death ritual – or more particularly, rituals – last a total of 49 days, with ceremonies and prayers performed and repeated for the duration, and involving purification rituals and offerings of food to see the deceased symbolically fed until “bardo” ends and he or she finally makes the final transition to the afterlife. This belief in a soul or spirit separate from one’s own body is called “animism” (Kottak, 2009, .p484) and is the most basic tenet of religious anthropology.

There are four main modes of disposal of the dead in Buddhist Tibet: earth burial (or inhumation), air burial, water burial, and cremation, with embalming performed extremely rarely and reserved for a select few noble families and particularly highly regarded lamas.

Cremation is uncommon in Tibet due to the relative unavailability of wood for burning, and dung is considered inappropriate material for burning the dead. Cremation is, however, utilised occasionally; again for highly regarded lamas.

Water burial is more common, but is, according to Lamers, now prohibited in the more developed regions surrounding the capital, Lhasa, to prevent pollution of water supply, however the practice is still commonly used in less developed areas and usually provided for lepers, the indigent and sometimes infants (Habenstein & Lamers, 1960, p.81-82).

Earth burial, the traditional method most recognised in western countries, is fairly rare in Tibet, largely due to the impracticality of burying the deceased in frozen or rocky ground. Elsewhere, where the environment makes it easier, burial is amongst the most commonly practiced modes of disposal.

According to Lamers and Habenstein, by far the most common, and easily the most memorable (if I’m allowed to refer to something so objectively horrific as ‘memorable’) method of disposal in Tibet is “Air burial”, called “Ja-Tor” (Habenstein & Lamers, 1960, p.83). By this method, a body is prepared, often including dismemberment, and then laid out in a designated place, one of many scattered all over Tibet, to be eaten by carrion or dogs.

All of this grim business is designed with deeply religious motivations, with bodily disincorporation and destruction being a necessary aspect of the Tibetan religion. Lamers and Habenstein quote German explorer Heinrich Herrer as saying, “The Tibetans wish to leave no trace after death of their bodies which, without souls, have no significance.” (Habenstein & Lamers, 1960, p.84)

This simplified breakdown of the main Tibetan Buddhist funerary rites serves as a broad example and gives an interesting view of the nature of burial rituals and their development over the millennia.

Many of these funeral practices are familiar to people of all religions, with a few philosophical differences of varying degrees of significance. Burial and cremation are commonly used methods for the disposal of dead bodies in almost all cultures, ubiquitous from the east to the west, with notable exceptions being people of Islamic and Sikh faith. Muslims cannot be cremated, and Sikhs are almost never buried (Church of England, 1985, p.28).

Water burial is slightly less common in other places, almost never practiced in western cultures, with exception to burial at sea for those lost on the ocean. It is still widely practiced in Japanese Shintoism, as well as other religions, although its popularity has waned. One of the significant reasons for water burial, for instance in the Hindu religion, is the belief in purifying the body. This translates to the Catholic ritual of washing the body, sanctifying the flesh.

Air burial, which is by far the least common mode of disposal in western culture, is still found in other cultures. It is a widely popularised aspect of Norse Viking culture, and continues to be used by Zoroastrians of India, with elaborately constructed altars, called “Towers of Silence”, built as a final resting place atop mountains scattered all over the country where carrion birds can scavenge flesh from the corpses before putrefaction can take place, which is regarded as bad for the escaping spirit. An important aspect of air burial in those religions that practice it is the belief that letting birds and other animals devour your flesh allows you to be re-incorporated into the environment and commit the final selfless act of providing nourishment for the creatures of earth, but in Zoroastrianism it is designed as a means of guiding the soul safely to the afterlife by preventing decomposition (Habenstein & Lamers, 1960, p.179-181).

What is interesting is how different religions, and different peoples, spread across the globe with different environmental and social factors informing their decisions and cultures, still came to develop burial rituals with striking similarities despite oceans and generations between them.

There are two significant factors that have led to the traditions we now know across the world; one is the pure religious aspect, designed as veneration of the dead for the purpose of easing the deceased’s transition to the next world, whatever that may be, and to provide comfort for the bereaved. The second significant factor is, of course, the environmental, with some cultures clearly unable to adopt certain methods of disposal for various reasons, and other events causing a change to funerary practices, like the spread of the bubonic plague in 14^th century Europe which caused people to be buried six feet underground to prevent spread of infection; a tradition which the Catholic Church carried on, and which ultimately became a phrase that is still used as a popular euphemism for death.

There are other significant developments in burial practices; notable amongst them is the emergence of consecrated cemeteries and the early tombs, such as the Mycenaean “tholos” tombs, dating as far back as 1600 BCE (Grinsell, 1975, p.144), the basic “Protogeometric” model (Kurtz & Boardman, 1971, p.26) for art and design, which re-emerged in later Greek tombs, as well as bearing some basic commonalities in function to modern mausoleums. This would speak to another tenet of the veneration of the dead: preservation.

One of the core differences between religions is simply the relationship of the body to the soul. Some cultures regard the body as sacred and wish to preserve the corpse as a mark of love and respect or because they believe that preserving the body will ease the transition to the afterlife, as with the well-documented Egyptian embalming technique, whereas some cultures regard the body as little more than a vessel for the soul, such as Buddhists with their various methods of disposal, again a prime illustration of animism.

But there are still the emotional aspects to consider on the part of the bereaved, and the impact that religious ritual, particularly where death is concerned, might have on them.

In Peter Metcalfe’s anthropological study, Celebrations of Death, he talks about the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, and his theories about the social reaction to religious ritual and the effect of commonly held beliefs creating “collective representations” that could unite individuals for a kind of emotional support while compartmentalising the individual and, in a sense, insulating the individual from the grief and emotional distress of death (Metcalfe, 1991, p.28-29).

Effie Bendam, in her 1930 study, Death Customs, simplifies this idea to its spiritual core, saying that the “great importance attached to the disposal of the body seems to be universal. We may state that the principle is invariably the same – the dead would ‘walk’ unless the body is disposed of with the appropriate ceremony” (Bendam, 1930, p.45). This, of course, brings us to ghosts and supernatural beings, another important element of animism and, to some degree, totemism, or the belief that animals or objects can harbour the spirits of ancestors.

Put simply, the significance and influence of the funeral ritual doesn’t change a lot from one culture to the next – with a few outstanding exceptions –, with the core values, traditions and rituals remaining largely the same within a few key variations, albeit with widely different expressions; but the influence of culture has a significant impact on the funeral ritual with environmental and historical influences dictating certain changes in the course of funerary culture all over the world.

Karl Anderson

Bibliography

Bendamm, Effie; Death Customs: An Analytical Study of Burial Rites Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930

 

Church of England; Funerals and Ministry to the Bereaved London: Church House Publishing, 1985

Grinsell, Leslie; Barrow, Pyramid and Tomb: Ancient Burial Customs in Egypt, the Mediterranean and the British Isles Boulder: Westview Press, 1975

Habenstein, Robert W and Lamers, William M; Funeral Customs the World Over Milwaukee: Bulfin Press, 1960

Huntington, Richard and Metcalfe, Peter; Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual London: Cambridge University Press, 1979

Kurtz, Donna C and Boardman, John; Greek Burial Customs Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971