What do you do with a dead body? The American way of death (which happens to be the title of a rather boring book) usually seems to involve burial in a coffin or cremation.
Over in Ghana, some people have become quite creative with their coffins, crafting ones that often reflect the life of the deceased (Were you a pilot? Get buried in a plane! Did you like beer? Why not a beer bottle coffin?) that are creative, artistic, and expensive. National Geographic has an interesting video about the trade in unique coffins.
As for the past…in Victorian England, the fear of being buried alive was so pervasive that dozens of inventors created bell-and-pulley systems for coffins to alert those above ground of a premature burial. People bought caskets with glass partitions that could be smashed by a hammer or pulley system (they didn’t realize that these systems would fail from soil interference).
Before that, Roman children who had lived to forty days and begun teething were called rapti and burned in the case of death, while their Greek infant counterparts were never buried during full night or day but only during Ἡμέρας ἀρπαγίω, the gray dawn just before morning appeared.
Today, you can have yourself or your loved one turned into a postmortem diamond (with the help of LifeGem)…or even, supposedly, a pencil . Alternately, Memorial Spaceflights will release a “symbolic portion” of cremated ashes into “deep space” or take the ashes on a return-trip flight in a commercial or scientific satellite.
Another commonly cited, currently practiced burial tradition is that of sky burial. Tibet supposedly has nearly 1,200 sky burial sites. Although details vary, monks generally prepare bodies (stripping flesh, dipping certain sections in yak butter or flour, crushing bones) for the consumption of vultures and other birds of prey. Zoroastrians practice a similar form of burial at the Towers of Silence, on top of which corpses are placed in rings (men around the outside, women in an inner ring, and children inside that) and bones are collected in an ossuary pit at the center. Water burial, also common to Tibet, involves allowing fish to take care of the body—although due to water contamination this practice has greatly decreased in popularity.
——
On that cheerful note, I’ll introduce myself (since I’m new to the blog). I’m Kristin Ginger. I’m currently a senior English major/Spanish minor at Carleton College in Minnesota and have a wide range of leisure reading interests that will probably surface here from time to time. Not all are as morbid as this one,
fortunately.