Funerary Customs for Earth-Goddess + Sun-God Religion

What sort of death rites should the Altlings (the humanoid protagonists of my story) have?

Their religion and world-view is really quite simple: There's The Void, meaning more or less the universe and the stars they can see in the night-sky, and there are many deities roaming through it. The world they live on is the body (the forehead, specifially) of one such deity, Eden Earthmistress, also styled "Mother of Mothers", "Lady of the Land", and "Weaver of the Waters".

Eden was alone and barren until She met another deity, Altar Allfather, who became Her companion. He is also styled "Sky-sire", "Lord of the Light", and "The First Flame" (milking Added Alliterative Appeal for all it is worth, as you can see). The Couple is dancing through the Void: Sometimes, She faces Him, but because He wears The Veil (which is blue because She wove it out of you-know-what), the only part of His that's actually visible is The Eye, one of the world's suns. Sometimes, She faces away from Him, which is when one can once more see the Void. Originally, Altar had two eyes, but he plucked one out to give it to Eden, who was blind.

The physical world is the product of the intersection of a duality, water and fire, and a quality, cold to mild to hot, which results in the six elements. Eden represents water and cold, and thus is primarily associated with the elements ice and liquid. Altar represents fire and hot, and is associated with flame and lava. Steam (being water and hot, and which includes air) and ash (being fire and cold, and which includes earth) are associated with both, of course. [The terminology here is still a work-in-progress, but the basic idea is there.]

According to their creation myth, Altar made the animals, including the Altlings themselves (note the naming connection there) from His ash (per Carl Sagan's immortal words, "we're made of star-stuff"), and gave them to Eden. She then made the plants so that they'd have something to eat.

I have three religious functions in place, more or less. The first is a short ceremony held every sunrise and sunset, and involves the ceremonial slaughter of an ellefant (think "lamb" (to the proverbial slaughter), in case the term is not yet familiar). Some of the blood is spilled on the ground and some of the hair burned, to honour the gods. That seems like a very appropriate sacrifice, in either case. The second is the wedding ceremony, in which the groom gives the bride a representation of an eye and the bride gives the groom a representation of a veil, to symbolize the exchange of gifts made by the Gods, as described above. If the couple is poor, the representations can be simple hand-made things, like a wood-carving and a piece of cloth; if they are rich, the representations should be correspondingly elaborate. The third is the installation of a new High Priest or Priestess, which takes the same form as the wedding, minus the representative aspect: Men pluck out one of their eyes, women make an eye-patch out of a piece of their own skin. This serves as proof of true devotion, clearly. But, as I said somewhere wayyy above, I don't really have any appealing ideas regarding a burial ceremony appropriate for this background. The most straightforward approach would be to bury part of the body and burn another part, thus returning it to both deities, but dividing up the corpse just seems wrong, somehow. Any better suggestions would be appreciated.

Burn the body and scatter the ashes over a body of water. That's my absolute first thought.

Ok, further thoughts:

Something like the alleged Viking burning ship burials: pyre built on a raft or on a wooden platform in or over the water, when the platform or raft burns through, the water gets what's left.

Similar but not, as far as I know, an actual human custom ever: built the pyre in a pit that has been dug so that a stream or river would run through it if not for a wooden dam, or wooden plugs in a series of small holes in the walls of the pit. Eventually the wood is burned away, and the water floods (or seeps, whichever you prefer) in and extinguishes it.

edited 31st Aug '12 8:12:21 PM by Madrugada

I'd thought about the legendary "floating pyres" already, but rejected that as too elaborate for everyday use. Maybe for the Elect (nobility, roughly), though.

Your first idea is admirably elegant, though; it never occurred to me that there'd still be ashes to be scattered after burning the whole corpse. I mean, humans do that, too, and I already mentioned ash above - talk about mental disconnects! *rolls eyes at self*

If there were a lot of lava pits around, tossing bodies into those would fit the bill, too: returning it to the fire and to the ground at the same time. But there ain't, so that's an idle thought. I think I'm still vacillating because burial has a relevant symbolism as well, turning the corpses of the God's creatures, which consume the Goddess's plants during their lifetime, ultimately into food for the plants in turn...

It doesn't have to be an elaborate ship. A woven wicker (or wicker-equivalent) boat, like the basket boat would work. I suspect that even one made from bundles of grass would float for a while. Probably not long enough to completely burn the body, but the unburned remnant could simply be allowed to sink.

If you don't want volcanic pits or caldera, geysers or steam vents would also work.

edited 1st Sep '12 7:07:49 AM by Madrugada

Wouldn't a body thrown into a geyser just be spat back out, the next time it erupts? I imagine the flesh would eventually fall off the bones due to being thoroughly cooked, but that's still not much of a funeral, somehow.

I had two new thoughts, in the meantime. One could bury the corpse to feed the plants, and then dig up the bones some time later, and burn those. Apparently, something similar is done in Taiwan and other parts of the Far East (see here, and just for fun here on the same page, and a photographic chronicle here), minus the last step. The question being, how well do old bones burn?

Or, one could use a process called "resomation" (see last section here), which basically means the complete dissolution of the organic components of a human body in lye water, which can subsequently be used as a fertilizer, like agricultural slurry. In other words, this means doing properly what criminal villains often try to do haphazardly by pouring lye onto a corpse. This would be appealing since water is directly involved in the disposal of the body, but unappealing because there is no fire involved at all. Plus, it doesn't seem very dignified, or there's at least a significant amount of Value Dissonance.

On the geyser thing, no, not really, unless it was a very short-cycle geyser. There's not only heat, there's pressure involved (that's why they erupt).

Just tossing my two cents regarding the funerary ship idea:

How fatalistic are these people about death?

One idea is that each person builds their own boat/ship over the course of their lives (e.g. starting out with a hollowed out log and getting more and more elaborate over the years). This would make the deaths of children very tragic as they have no boat to burn, and a parent then offering his/her own boat would be taken as a huge sacrifice and a sign of extreme devotion, love and mourning for the dead child. Plus, anyone who hires others to build a boat for them would be seen as unacceptably lazy whilst building/completing boats for those who can't (e.g. dead orphans and fallen warriors) would be a highly selfless and charitable act.

For extra significance, the person's life story will be reflected in the complexity and on certain elements of the boat.

edited 1st Sep '12 11:50:25 AM by peasant

This is a really good question, and one which I hadn't really thought about, as such.

The most natural extrapolation of the creation myth is that individuality ends with death, completely and irrevocably. The "fiery essence" which animates animals and Altlings comes from the God and returns to Him after death. If there is burning involved at some point, then the smoke would be regarded as carrying that essence into the sky, I imagine. He then returns it to the ground later on, via the rain mentioned here, to animate the next generation of living beings. But this is not re-incarnation in the traditional sense, in which one being becomes another being, and instead more like putting a drop of water back into a bucket and then taking another drop out of that bucket: There can be no continuity on the drop-level, only at a much deeper (the molecular) level.

What may also matter is how aging is regarded in their culture: Basically, the older one gets, the more venerable one becomes. Children are considered to have only "half a soul", to put it in human terms, so a child's death wouldn't be considered to be as tragic as it is with us. They receive the "missing piece" in an initiation rite at age 36 (corresponding to mid-teens for a human, due to a shorter year), after which they are considered full adults. However, they are still not really taken seriously until they reach middle age at around 100. By age 150, they are considered eligible for leadership and teaching positions, and if they live past the usual life expectancy of 200, they are honoured elders whose council is highly sought or, if they turn senile, who are at least treated as well as the village can possibly afford.

So, how would that shape their view of death? I'd imagine that they wouldn't invest a lot of time thinking about or a lot of effort preparing for it, and that a funeral would be considered more a matter between the remainder of the community and the Gods than about the deceased themselves, pretty much.

But I'm certainly open to arguments to the contrary, if anyone draws different conclusions from those two factors!

Well, there's this way of looking at it.

1) If it's important that the essence return to the Sky-Sire

and

2) The most effective way of doing that is as smoke,

then

even if they aren't particularly fatalistic, it can be seen as simply good sense to make sure that the provisions for the pyre were made before their death, so that they know it's all ready to go, and don't have to hope that someone else will take care of it. It doesn't have to be deeply symbolic, just common sense. People who don't do it, or at least make some sort of provision for making sure it's done (even if that just asking a friend to agree to take care of it) could be looked on as thoughtless or inconsiderate, rather the way many modern Americans react to hearing that an adult has no life insurance at all.

edited 1st Sep '12 7:29:08 PM by Madrugada

"Irresponsible" is the word I was looking for there.

They wouldn't really have to "hope" that someone else would take care of it, in as far as the village-level community is very strong; almost as strong as the nuclear family, which Altlings consider less important, is with us.

Typically, villagers will spend at least a quarter of each day as a group - eating, mending stuff, socializing, and so on. Children are raised by the village as a whole as much as by their mothers. If someone gets ill or injured, they're taken good care of as a matter of course.

So, arranging and preparing a funeral for one of theirs would not be seen as an inordinate burden, I'd say. However, the suggestion that it would be seen as somewhat "inconsiderate" for the deceased to not have contributed themselves may still be applicable. After all, it's not quite the same thing as the things I listed above: Ensuring that children are raised well and that the ill and injured recover will eventually be repaid by those themselves, by becoming productive members of the community in turn. The same obviously can't be said for someone who's just died. I'm still leaning slightly in the other direction (the villagers are glad to be able to do one last thing for one of their own), but I'll think on this.

My two cents: Sky Father-Earth Mother model is a veeery archetypical model of religion. I'd recommend doing research on the funeral rites of, to begin with, Indo-European peoples. You may find quite a number of examples to get ideas from. I think most of them did burn the body. The scattering of ashes sounds uncommon in real life, but I approve of it in story.

Of course, unless you want to avoid Fantasy Counterpart Culture, because that's what you might end up with if you do too much research on historical societies.

Eh, I'm not too worried about "counterparting" my culture, exactly because of the fact that the basic parallel is so generic that it's found in many different contexts. Research's certainly never done nobody no harm... so, thanks for the prod!

Did the research, but it wasn't much use, to be honest. Mostly, earth-mother/sky-father funeral rituals involve either burying or cremating the body, just as those of other religions do.

The obvious way to deal with my requirements would be to divvy up the body, it seems to me: Drain the blood and pour it into the nearest body of water, burn the hair so that the smoke can go into the sky, bury the rest so that it can feed the earth. That's what they do with slaughtered animals, except of course that they don't bury the "rest" but turn it into food and leather and stuff. But doing that with one of their own, even if there is no afterlife for which the body should be kept "intact", seems disrespectful to me, both in general terms and specifically exactly because that is what they do with slaughtered animals. On the other hand, doing just a burial or just a cremation might be frowned upon by the deity who doesn't get their "fair share".

Therefore, I think that Madrugada's approach is pretty much ideal: Instead of divvying up the body and doing different things with the parts in parallel, do those things with the whole body sequentially. Like in those picturesque Medieval punishments in which they start by killing the victim and then proceed to kill the victim's dead body over and over again in a variety of inventive ways for the sheer craftsmanship and entertainment value of it. I just haven't come across a method yet which implements this as ideally.

ETA: Oh, new idea - they could have one version for the bodies of dead men and another version for the bodies of dead women, since there's no afterlife for the family to be re-united in anyway. Yeah, I think that's it. Burn the male body to return him to the Allfather, then use the ashes as fertilizer to give back to the earth which nourished him. Bury the female body to give back to the earth which nourished her, then a few years later dig up the bones and chuck those into a stream or the sea to return her to the Mother of Mothers. Details to be worked out, but this seems like a very reasonable compromise.

edited 12th Sep '12 2:24:38 AM by kassyopeia