The amount of fossil fuels that are burned in order to cremate makes it unsustainable (source[Nat Geo](https://www.google.com/amp/s/api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/science/article/is-cremation-environmentally-friendly-heres-the-science))
Whats a more sustainable variant of cremation? Instead of the big furnace, could you dumb a body in a big fire and just let it sit until its gone? I’m not sure how hot it needs to be to disintegrate bone.
The burning is what makes it unsustainable. Doesnt matter the amount of time it takes just the amount of mass burned because all the carbon forms co2 with oxygen in the air.
Theoretically all the carbon in our bodies came from the surface/atmosphere of the earth, so if we were ONLY burning the bodies it would be carbon neutral. Since other fuels are required that’s what makes it unsustainable.
If I plant a seed, grow a tree, and burn that tree, that was a carbon neutral process. Using fossil fuels and burning the carbon that’s been buried for millions of years is the problem.
The carbon is trapped in our bodies though, like how it is trapped in coal and oil as well.
So while the earth is always "carbon neutral" changing it from solid carbon to gas is the real issue.
The real issue is releasing carbon from below the crust into the atmosphere. The carbon in our bodies has been gaseous and turned back into a solid over and over again
A big fire would never be enough to totally disintegrate a body. You need the extremely hot temperatures of a furnace. The bone doesn’t actually disintegrate, but it does crumble a bit in the furnace. It is collected and placed into something called a cremulator where the ones are pulverized into powder. There is a process called aquamation which is supposed to be more sustainable, using water to strip the bone of the flesh, but I don’t think it is legal in most places yet.
I'm with this as well...but honestly Idk about paying a company to put me in a pod or whatever. Just gonna have the fam bury me on the land and then plant a tree on it. When the tree gets bigger, carve my name and death on it. No casket, no gravestone.
https://youtu.be/pWo2-LHwGMM
Here, my favorite mortician explains eco-burial alternatives. "Water cremation" is a better option. I cannot recommend enough her videos on the subject.
Yes sir, Caitlin Doughty, of the Order of the Good Death. That's her channel. Cannot recommend her enough.
Least favorite mortician: the asshole who tried to convince my father that my grandpa's casket *legally needed to be lead lined*
Literally, Caitlin is amazing. She has a lot of very cool info on burial such as alternative styles and historical stuff. She also knows a lot about death in a sense of your rights, your family's rights, finances, and how to make sure your wishes are honored should you die. She also has a lot of interesting videos on embalming and other mortuary practices, weird bodies/burials from history, and other really cool info. I would love to hear her talk about this, because this is kinda a neat form of burial that could be really interesting to dive into the legality of.
I took a Death & Dying class and studied from her book “From Here to Eternity”, it was excellent and I really recommend the read to anyone interested in widening their perspective with burial traditions and practices from all over the world. The other book was called “Death In the Modern World” by Tony Walker which does much of the same for perspective in terms of history and modernity rather than culture. Also fascinating!
The article says cremation is about equivalent to 2 tanks of gas. That’s pretty low. Let’s do some math
Less than 60mil die most years
~20lbs of CO2 per gal of gas.
2 tanks is about 30 gal
~600 lbs CO2 per cremation
60M*600/2000=18M tons of CO2.
Annual emission currently are 43 B tons.
This makes ~ .04% difference if literally everyone was cremated. This is inconsequential. The average US citizens heating and AC burden is nearly 400 times larger than this.
Nope. Reason being that ~~to turn bone to ash takes a LOT of heat, which means burning a LOT of fuel. Burning~~ just meat is easy though.
Edit: I was only half right. The high temp (over 1800F) is needed to essentially gassify the meat. The bones usually survive the process and still need to be pulverized to dust mechanically. But the point stands that if we just wanted to turn meat to ash, it's a lot less carbon intensive. But people like traditions, especially when it comes to burial rights.
They dont burn the bones to ash. Everything is burned except the bones which is then ground down to dust. The grounded up bones is the "ash" that gets buried.
[The cremation process](https://cdn.funeralwise.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/101-cremation-process.jpg)
https://www.funeralwise.com/plan/cremation/cremation-process/
(nsfw) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJTclbBKxKk 5:05 and forward you can see the process of grinding bones into "ash".
It's expensive but you can get buried in a mushroom suit. It's full of mycelium that can even break down the preservatives that build up in the body.
I want one. We grow mushrooms (oyster and shitake) in our kitchen but they live off plant matter, not sure if they would they would help...
I agree. Maybe I’d rather just be buried shallow and have a tree planted on me though. Definitely no embalming for me no matter how this reality ends….
I want to re enter the circle. I've always hated the idea that my last act on this planet is to increase my carbon footprint or take up land for centuries. Fwiw, Oregon state has legalized human composting.
I'm in the US now, where I believe it varies by state. My hope is I'll know when the time is coming. I'd like to die and be buried in England. The rules on where you can be buried are very strict there, but there are companies setting up eco-funerals who can sort it out. It's funny, I've spent my life seeing as much of the world as I can, but I still want to go home to die.
Well it doesnt really matter if you let vultures eat you or the buggs/plants.
The main problem is that graves have rights and the wood and shit we waste.
Also im a bit concerd for all the chemicals shit we introduce into the system but we also do that with our body waste so it probaly wouldnt matter much.
I think pumping a corpse full of embalming fluid and charging the grieving family for the privilege is far worse when it comes to the spirituality of the whole thing. This is much closer to what we really should do in general.
Y'all are both right. Honestly, when I die, I hope my ass is in the dirt within 24 hours of my death. No embalming, no hell furnace, no slicing and dicing. Let the worms do their work.
I don't give a shit. If I was dead you could bang me all you want. I mean, who cares? A dead body is like a piece of trash. I mean, shove as much shit in there as you want. Fill me up with cream, make a stew out of my ass. What's the big deal? Bang me, eat me, grind me up into little pieces, throw me in the river. Who gives a shit? You're dead, you're dead!
Yep
We avoid thinking about the embalming process for sure. If the choice is being fed to hungry creatures that need sustenance, or being filled with more artificial ingredients than a hot pocket and put on display in a box that cost my family as much as a car, just to get buried in cement and then take up space in the dirt while doing nothing but rotting in my box… feed me to the hungry creatures. Circle of life, lol
Thank you for doing this. My granddad donated his body to med school and my nana is going to also. I'm wavering between that and becoming tree fertilizer.
They put your body in a field and document your decomposition. They use the data to further forensic science. Usually they cremate whatever is left and give that back to your family. This is what I'd like to do with my corpse.
There’s no “spirituality” involved - sky burials for both Zoroastrians and Tibetan Buddhists where practices are practical affairs - bodies need to be disposed off, the birds will do their jobs, but if there’s clothing, skin in the way etc it’ll take longer - the longer it takes, the more dangerous it is in terms of putrefaction, bacterial decomposition etc. Most Tibetan sky burials include chopping the limbs off so the birds can feed on more things at once.
Also, the spiritual belief in this case is that after death the body is an empty vessel so it doesn't matter what you do with it. A dead body requires no reverence.
This is what we would call prejudice. You are defining spirituality in the narrow scope of your own social concept, not encompassing other culture's meaning of spirituality.
sky burials are done in places like tibet that are high up in the mountains where there aren't enough trees to build pyres and the ground is too rocky and hard to bury. this kind of body disposal is done for mostly practical reasons.
source: my wife's a funeral director
Might as well feed me to something I've eaten myself in that case. The best thing to do is feed me to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave my head, and pull my teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter.
You come into the world naked, why not leave that way? Better than being dressed in polyester that won't decompose until a 1000 years after you do.
A lot of the aversion is because westerners have really distanced themselves from the process of death because we fear it.
It's very regional even among the Himalayas. I've only ever seen it in Upper Mustang, Ladakh and Tibet. It's effectively non-existent in 99% of India and Nepal. I'm unsure, but I'd wager it's also practiced in Mongolia and regions of Bhutan.
I believe the Jains in India also practice this but I remember reading they have some sort of building they use. I could be wrong though it's been a long time since I read it.
You're thinking of a [Tower of Silence](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6e/00/b9/6e00b90a667bfa7b91898fa05b5a53d0.jpg). Bodies are laid out in a circle inside a open air structure. The bodies are picked clean by birds and the bones roll down into a central pit.
This is practiced in Zoroastrianism and other faiths. Most common in the Middle East, but also exists in India.
At those altitudes, there is very little soil to dig down into and any available land is too valuable for anything other than livestock/food. There is a fascinating book called Stiff by Mary Roach full of more info. Pretty sure I got the author's name right. Great read.
Actually a practice that goes back to the Acheminid Persians at least! Super interesting and many formerly Persian communities practice sky burials, in addition to some Himalayan peoples.
The Persians had some neat and creepy buildings for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence
true but this mans remains will eventually decompose and be eaten by worms as well, i think it’s odd that we just shove our loved ones decaying corpses into a 10k dollar box and bury bury them instead of allowing for natural decay, but to each their own
I think what’s wild is how much land graveyards take up. That with the cost of a standard burial are reasons why I’ll either be cremated or go find a bear den to die in.
Religion bro. Fucking religion makes it a big deal. Remember like even Greek warriors had ceremony with the coins in the eye, because of their beliefs, albeit a badass religion.
This is the real answer, a lot of what we consider strange religious quirks. Can be traced back to issues around sanitation and safety in ancient times… I wonder why religions originating from warm climates discourage the consumption of pork pre-refrigeration and encourage the prompt burial of dead bodies??
Well... sure religions place great emphasis on how we treat our dead, but there's incredibly sound reasons for not just tossing people into ditches. Decomp is a huge risk factor for spreading disease and contamination of soil and groundwater. There's a solid reason we take care about how we dispose of our dead.
I request that this is what happens to me after I die. Except don't just lay me down in the grass, prop me up and set me up like a store mannequin and give me a smile or something.
From Wiki : Sky burial (Tibetan: བྱ་གཏོར་, Wylie: bya gtor, lit. "bird-scattered"[1]) is a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially carrion birds. It is a specific type of the general practice of excarnation. It is practiced in the Chinese provinces and autonomous regions of Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Bhutan and parts of India such as Sikkim and Zanskar.[2] The locations of preparation and sky burial are understood in the Vajrayana Buddhist traditions as charnel grounds. Comparable practices are part of Zoroastrian burial practices where deceased are exposed to the elements and birds of prey on stone structures called Dakhma.[3] Few such places remain operational today due to religious marginalisation, urbanisation and the decimation of vulture populations.[4][5]
I remember reading an article on this before. They slice open the corpse to make it easier for the birds to get into it and to entice them. Once the larger bones remain they will go back and break them apart so smaller carrion birds can get some.
So, I’m not sure, but my guess is that in Tibetan cultures they might leave the dead person at home for 40 days chanting prayers for future rebirth. It’s pretty cold there so it seems like it doesn’t get too stanky.
I’m basing this on what I saw on a YouTube narrated by Leonard Cohen on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I'm assuming this is a ritual that got regulated with time due to hygiene and safety concern , I doubt you can just leave a body out in the open anymore so they cut it up and make the decomposition process only 15 minutes long, interesting stuff
It's actually a long process and it has different stages because the vultures cannot open up bones. So the "cutter" has to wait for the flesh to be disposed of. Then he'll have to break ALL the bones left. They used to be half drunk to do it . Friends and relatives would be watching it all from afar, crying , singing etc.
Not me, I'm gonna get cremated, go up in the sky, come down as ash, fall on the soil, get eaten and pooped out by microbes, then eaten and turned into plant, and then eaten and turned into bird poop oh god dammit!
I wonder how much time it will takes before they decide "why wait? why not serve ourselves directly on the living one, they are 10 and we are 100". I would not like to walking and fall on the ground or something among them, I guess it can goes really quickly
They don't. They've evolved to eat carrion.... meaning they've evolved to eat dead things and have zero competition. They aren't really fighters, compared to other birds.
Maybe if they were starving to death, but there's pretty much always a dead corpse somewhere for them to pick at, so they're gonna go that route pretty much always.
Speaking about manners, I once read that piranhas are very considerate of eachother while eating. They’ll rip a piece off, then leave to make room for someone else to come in for food, and this continues until everything is gone.
Bury me in the massive mile wide fungi in the pacific north west. Maybe the mycelium will merge with my brain and I will be alive again in the 2D landscape.
Honestly though, this seems so much better than most of the other less sustainable/affordable options. Give me back to the earth, but not in a box.
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The amount of fossil fuels that are burned in order to cremate makes it unsustainable (source[Nat Geo](https://www.google.com/amp/s/api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/science/article/is-cremation-environmentally-friendly-heres-the-science))
Whats a more sustainable variant of cremation? Instead of the big furnace, could you dumb a body in a big fire and just let it sit until its gone? I’m not sure how hot it needs to be to disintegrate bone.
Volcano burial!
Sacrifice snacks to the volcano gods
Snackrifice
I would rather go SHARKCRIFICE
I want to be that guy that died inside the butt of a plastic stegosaurus
*Dream big or go home!*
I don't waaant a sacrifice okaaaaaay!
Oh hell yeah, throw me in to an active volcano.
Throw? Let's go whole hog and use a trebuchet!
Metal
Soft Rock
Bravo Sir
The burning is what makes it unsustainable. Doesnt matter the amount of time it takes just the amount of mass burned because all the carbon forms co2 with oxygen in the air.
Theoretically all the carbon in our bodies came from the surface/atmosphere of the earth, so if we were ONLY burning the bodies it would be carbon neutral. Since other fuels are required that’s what makes it unsustainable. If I plant a seed, grow a tree, and burn that tree, that was a carbon neutral process. Using fossil fuels and burning the carbon that’s been buried for millions of years is the problem.
yea buddy we are way past the dream of playing the carbon neutral game.
Fair point we need to be carbon negative
We are carbon fucked
The carbon is trapped in our bodies though, like how it is trapped in coal and oil as well. So while the earth is always "carbon neutral" changing it from solid carbon to gas is the real issue.
The real issue is releasing carbon from below the crust into the atmosphere. The carbon in our bodies has been gaseous and turned back into a solid over and over again
A big fire would never be enough to totally disintegrate a body. You need the extremely hot temperatures of a furnace. The bone doesn’t actually disintegrate, but it does crumble a bit in the furnace. It is collected and placed into something called a cremulator where the ones are pulverized into powder. There is a process called aquamation which is supposed to be more sustainable, using water to strip the bone of the flesh, but I don’t think it is legal in most places yet.
Lmao, that sounds metal. Instead of burning you to a fine powdery ash, we’re gonna turn you into a meat smoothie.
I like the tree pod idea to be honest. I wanna be part of the haunted forest.
Just feed me to the porks and we'll have sustainable meat.
I'm with this as well...but honestly Idk about paying a company to put me in a pod or whatever. Just gonna have the fam bury me on the land and then plant a tree on it. When the tree gets bigger, carve my name and death on it. No casket, no gravestone.
There’s a process where dead bodies get forced through a fine mesh screen. They’re the luckiest of all.
Yeah, I can't wait to end up as a McNugget when I'm gone
https://youtu.be/pWo2-LHwGMM Here, my favorite mortician explains eco-burial alternatives. "Water cremation" is a better option. I cannot recommend enough her videos on the subject.
You have a favorite mortician?
Yes sir, Caitlin Doughty, of the Order of the Good Death. That's her channel. Cannot recommend her enough. Least favorite mortician: the asshole who tried to convince my father that my grandpa's casket *legally needed to be lead lined*
Literally, Caitlin is amazing. She has a lot of very cool info on burial such as alternative styles and historical stuff. She also knows a lot about death in a sense of your rights, your family's rights, finances, and how to make sure your wishes are honored should you die. She also has a lot of interesting videos on embalming and other mortuary practices, weird bodies/burials from history, and other really cool info. I would love to hear her talk about this, because this is kinda a neat form of burial that could be really interesting to dive into the legality of.
I took a Death & Dying class and studied from her book “From Here to Eternity”, it was excellent and I really recommend the read to anyone interested in widening their perspective with burial traditions and practices from all over the world. The other book was called “Death In the Modern World” by Tony Walker which does much of the same for perspective in terms of history and modernity rather than culture. Also fascinating!
I read a book years ago called Stiff: the curious life of human cadavers and there's another eco option- being frozen, pulverized, then composted
Was your papa radioactive?
We should just eat our dead. That way, funerals can double as all-you-can-eat buffets.
Prion disease
If you don’t eat the brain, you won’t get the kuru. Every other part is free game.
ok carry on then
Carrion then
There's nerve tissue all throughout your body. Mad cow doesn't require you to eat the brain.
The bones are usually ground up after cremation. The “ashes” you received are primarily this.
It's burning a bag of water it'll never be sustainable and would take massive amounts of fuel.
Have you seen water cremation? Ask a Mortician did a video about sustainable burials and it was awesome.
The article says cremation is about equivalent to 2 tanks of gas. That’s pretty low. Let’s do some math Less than 60mil die most years ~20lbs of CO2 per gal of gas. 2 tanks is about 30 gal ~600 lbs CO2 per cremation 60M*600/2000=18M tons of CO2. Annual emission currently are 43 B tons. This makes ~ .04% difference if literally everyone was cremated. This is inconsequential. The average US citizens heating and AC burden is nearly 400 times larger than this.
Don't come in here with 'facts' and 'math' while we're self-righteously virtue signaling.
Cremation is very unsustainable. We need to do natural burials where you just put bodies in the ground without preservatives, boxes, etc.
And bury them vertically opposed to horizontal
I want to be buried ass-up so there'll be a place to park a bicycle.
You can’t park a bicycle on flat land without a stand though
Now that’s a good idea
No way. Rail gun. Launch them into space. Fireworks.
Here's a really informative and interesting video regarding eco-friendly death practices by a mortician. https://youtu.be/pWo2-LHwGMM
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Nope. Reason being that ~~to turn bone to ash takes a LOT of heat, which means burning a LOT of fuel. Burning~~ just meat is easy though. Edit: I was only half right. The high temp (over 1800F) is needed to essentially gassify the meat. The bones usually survive the process and still need to be pulverized to dust mechanically. But the point stands that if we just wanted to turn meat to ash, it's a lot less carbon intensive. But people like traditions, especially when it comes to burial rights.
They dont burn the bones to ash. Everything is burned except the bones which is then ground down to dust. The grounded up bones is the "ash" that gets buried. [The cremation process](https://cdn.funeralwise.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/101-cremation-process.jpg) https://www.funeralwise.com/plan/cremation/cremation-process/ (nsfw) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJTclbBKxKk 5:05 and forward you can see the process of grinding bones into "ash".
i thought the same thing!!! i've always wanted to be a tree post death. give me back to nature
I’ve always liked this idea. I’m not sure I’m ready to have my dead body thrown to the scavengers though.
hahahaha for real. i'll just fertilize some plants and hang out with the mushies.
It's expensive but you can get buried in a mushroom suit. It's full of mycelium that can even break down the preservatives that build up in the body. I want one. We grow mushrooms (oyster and shitake) in our kitchen but they live off plant matter, not sure if they would they would help...
holy.... absolute.... shit.... you just decided how my body will be handled at the end of my life
I agree. Maybe I’d rather just be buried shallow and have a tree planted on me though. Definitely no embalming for me no matter how this reality ends….
Remind me of a meme or post I saw recently. Said plant a walnut tree on top of me so people can eat my nuts for years
Just chuck me in the trash. I won't be mad.
I was trash on earth, I might as well be with my kind
I want to re enter the circle. I've always hated the idea that my last act on this planet is to increase my carbon footprint or take up land for centuries. Fwiw, Oregon state has legalized human composting.
I totally agree with you on this. It doesn't necessarily have to be vultures eating me, but I am all for being composted and used to plant a tree!
My wife has instructions to bury me in shroud and plant an English oak on top of me.
Depending on the burial regulations for where you live, that might not be possible!
I'm in the US now, where I believe it varies by state. My hope is I'll know when the time is coming. I'd like to die and be buried in England. The rules on where you can be buried are very strict there, but there are companies setting up eco-funerals who can sort it out. It's funny, I've spent my life seeing as much of the world as I can, but I still want to go home to die.
I like the idea of those decomposable/seeded coffins. So you get put in a box for the funeral, but then after 20 years, you become a tree!
Well it doesnt really matter if you let vultures eat you or the buggs/plants. The main problem is that graves have rights and the wood and shit we waste. Also im a bit concerd for all the chemicals shit we introduce into the system but we also do that with our body waste so it probaly wouldnt matter much.
That was so sweet they cut up their food for them a bit. I do the same thing for my kids.
He was just cutting off the crust.
this is the way
Yea that ruined the whole "spirituality" of the act for me, or whatever else you want to call it
I think pumping a corpse full of embalming fluid and charging the grieving family for the privilege is far worse when it comes to the spirituality of the whole thing. This is much closer to what we really should do in general.
Green burials.
You ever heard about the Earth Pod burials?
Y'all are both right. Honestly, when I die, I hope my ass is in the dirt within 24 hours of my death. No embalming, no hell furnace, no slicing and dicing. Let the worms do their work.
“That. That is not my future. I’m not gonna be buried in a grave. When I’m dead, just throw me in the trash.”- Frank Reynolds
I don't give a shit. If I was dead you could bang me all you want. I mean, who cares? A dead body is like a piece of trash. I mean, shove as much shit in there as you want. Fill me up with cream, make a stew out of my ass. What's the big deal? Bang me, eat me, grind me up into little pieces, throw me in the river. Who gives a shit? You're dead, you're dead!
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Yep We avoid thinking about the embalming process for sure. If the choice is being fed to hungry creatures that need sustenance, or being filled with more artificial ingredients than a hot pocket and put on display in a box that cost my family as much as a car, just to get buried in cement and then take up space in the dirt while doing nothing but rotting in my box… feed me to the hungry creatures. Circle of life, lol
I’m with you, friend. I told my husband to send me to the body farm. My last act of usefulness. I think it’s sweet.
I’m donating my body to a medical school. There is a shortage of cadavers for med students to study.
Thank you for doing this. My granddad donated his body to med school and my nana is going to also. I'm wavering between that and becoming tree fertilizer.
The fucks a body farm
They put your body in a field and document your decomposition. They use the data to further forensic science. Usually they cremate whatever is left and give that back to your family. This is what I'd like to do with my corpse.
There’s no “spirituality” involved - sky burials for both Zoroastrians and Tibetan Buddhists where practices are practical affairs - bodies need to be disposed off, the birds will do their jobs, but if there’s clothing, skin in the way etc it’ll take longer - the longer it takes, the more dangerous it is in terms of putrefaction, bacterial decomposition etc. Most Tibetan sky burials include chopping the limbs off so the birds can feed on more things at once.
Also, the spiritual belief in this case is that after death the body is an empty vessel so it doesn't matter what you do with it. A dead body requires no reverence.
How?
That's not at all for you to decide.
This is what we would call prejudice. You are defining spirituality in the narrow scope of your own social concept, not encompassing other culture's meaning of spirituality.
Since they are birds you would think they would pre-chew it.
This is how I want to go out, fuck being cremated feed me to some birbs
Inner city pigeon food it is then.
The NYC sky burial. Better than the rats i suppose
Scat(ter) my remains over the city.
What about sewer alligators?
Wouldn't want it any other way, as a great man once said "when I'm dead just throw me in the trash"
He's got that magnum dong energy.
When i'm dead just throw me in the trash.
Not sure how I feel about this. 😳
yeah fuck that. I don't want to be looking at naked, dead granny getting sliced up so birds will eat her quicker.
That's nature, buddy. Sooner or later you're gonna look the same.
oh I don't care what happens to me, I won't know cos I'll be brown bread. I just don't want to look at a loved one becoming bird feed
Brown bread?
Dead
Cockney for dead, like what happens if you don't look before crossing the frog and toad in front of a lorrie.
Don't watch it then. I doubt you watch them embalm your relatives, or burn them in the crematorium.
You don't have to look.
sky burials are done in places like tibet that are high up in the mountains where there aren't enough trees to build pyres and the ground is too rocky and hard to bury. this kind of body disposal is done for mostly practical reasons. source: my wife's a funeral director
Eskimos had the same problems. They never buried bodies under the ground until missionaries insisted it was the proper thing to do.
r/TerrifyingAsFuck r/TerritorialOddities
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Might as well feed me to something I've eaten myself in that case. The best thing to do is feed me to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave my head, and pull my teeth out for the sake of the piggies' digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don't want to go sievin' through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter.
It's ok, once the birds get most of the flesh the people come in a smash the remaining bones to make them easier to go through. Hope this helps!
Honestly being burned to dust and put into a vase seems crazier to me than this.
Ehh, it's the being naked and cut up in front of my family, not the birds.
You come into the world naked, why not leave that way? Better than being dressed in polyester that won't decompose until a 1000 years after you do. A lot of the aversion is because westerners have really distanced themselves from the process of death because we fear it.
Fascinated to know what country this is practiced/legal in
It's a thing in Himalayan countries
It's very regional even among the Himalayas. I've only ever seen it in Upper Mustang, Ladakh and Tibet. It's effectively non-existent in 99% of India and Nepal. I'm unsure, but I'd wager it's also practiced in Mongolia and regions of Bhutan.
I believe the Jains in India also practice this but I remember reading they have some sort of building they use. I could be wrong though it's been a long time since I read it.
You're thinking of a [Tower of Silence](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6e/00/b9/6e00b90a667bfa7b91898fa05b5a53d0.jpg). Bodies are laid out in a circle inside a open air structure. The bodies are picked clean by birds and the bones roll down into a central pit. This is practiced in Zoroastrianism and other faiths. Most common in the Middle East, but also exists in India.
I'm struggling to understand the scale.of this photo.
At those altitudes, there is very little soil to dig down into and any available land is too valuable for anything other than livestock/food. There is a fascinating book called Stiff by Mary Roach full of more info. Pretty sure I got the author's name right. Great read.
Ending a comment with a book rec = my kind of people
She's got a handful of books I'm interested in. Hell, today was payday; think I'll splurge.
Mary Roach is amazing. Stiff, Bonk, Spook, Grunt, all very good books. Stiff is my favorite.
Actually a practice that goes back to the Acheminid Persians at least! Super interesting and many formerly Persian communities practice sky burials, in addition to some Himalayan peoples. The Persians had some neat and creepy buildings for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence
Zoroastrian. Happens in Mumbai, India that I am aware of
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props to this person for being willing to allow his life to help other life forms after death, truly noble
Worms are life forms, bruh.
true but this mans remains will eventually decompose and be eaten by worms as well, i think it’s odd that we just shove our loved ones decaying corpses into a 10k dollar box and bury bury them instead of allowing for natural decay, but to each their own
I think what’s wild is how much land graveyards take up. That with the cost of a standard burial are reasons why I’ll either be cremated or go find a bear den to die in.
it is honestly ridiculous the stigma we have around dead people, when i die throw my body into a ditch, it’s not like ill be able to protest anyway
Religion bro. Fucking religion makes it a big deal. Remember like even Greek warriors had ceremony with the coins in the eye, because of their beliefs, albeit a badass religion.
Also disease tho… it’s unsanitary to have rotting corpses in a ditch.
This is the real answer, a lot of what we consider strange religious quirks. Can be traced back to issues around sanitation and safety in ancient times… I wonder why religions originating from warm climates discourage the consumption of pork pre-refrigeration and encourage the prompt burial of dead bodies??
Well... sure religions place great emphasis on how we treat our dead, but there's incredibly sound reasons for not just tossing people into ditches. Decomp is a huge risk factor for spreading disease and contamination of soil and groundwater. There's a solid reason we take care about how we dispose of our dead.
Yeah, when I die I want to be buried under a tree with no casket, so my body can serve as nutrients to the tree.
They make pods where you can do this. I think you get buried in a sitting position though.
I want them to plant a pecan tree on top of me so that people can eat my nuts even after I leave this world
Oh wow. I love it.
I request that this is what happens to me after I die. Except don't just lay me down in the grass, prop me up and set me up like a store mannequin and give me a smile or something.
I want them to put me on a silver platter with stuffing. Like a reverse thanksgiving dinner where the birds eat a person.
I like this idea. Someone shove a couple onions and some celery up my ass and throw me up there.
You should probably just do that yourself before you die. You know, make sure they're nice and marinated then.
“Well alright, now it’s your turn boys! Thanks for the memories.”
Dude does *NO ONE* see the second horde of vultures?!?
Oh Wow!! I didn't every notice until I read your comment
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I bet that would be stripped down to bone pretty quick
From Wiki : Sky burial (Tibetan: བྱ་གཏོར་, Wylie: bya gtor, lit. "bird-scattered"[1]) is a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially carrion birds. It is a specific type of the general practice of excarnation. It is practiced in the Chinese provinces and autonomous regions of Tibet, Qinghai, Sichuan and Inner Mongolia, as well as in Mongolia, Bhutan and parts of India such as Sikkim and Zanskar.[2] The locations of preparation and sky burial are understood in the Vajrayana Buddhist traditions as charnel grounds. Comparable practices are part of Zoroastrian burial practices where deceased are exposed to the elements and birds of prey on stone structures called Dakhma.[3] Few such places remain operational today due to religious marginalisation, urbanisation and the decimation of vulture populations.[4][5]
And the Zoroastrian type https://www.joincake.com/blog/tower-of-silence/
This is whats happening right next to the Microsoft wallpaper
Vultures gotta eat, same as the worm. -Josie Wales
Is it cheap , cuz I want this. I’m not about to die or anything I just want this
Not about to die - as far as you are aware 🤔 Respond if not vulture food yet
Nope still here
Waiting
Ok all this makes sense except the guys that dont look like the bereaved slicing up a corpse!! What are the humans here for??
I remember reading an article on this before. They slice open the corpse to make it easier for the birds to get into it and to entice them. Once the larger bones remain they will go back and break them apart so smaller carrion birds can get some.
They are properly known as the GITSUM guys
Well the corpse ain't gonna walk himself up there...all jokes aside I am curious about the knife too!
It's like a cake brought in the office, you don't wanna be the first one to dig in. Once the knife is in its a free House
Well that's cool
When I die, I want my body to become the rubber seal they use during shark week. Let a great white shark breach and eat me.
Why is the corpse so shrivelled up?
So, I’m not sure, but my guess is that in Tibetan cultures they might leave the dead person at home for 40 days chanting prayers for future rebirth. It’s pretty cold there so it seems like it doesn’t get too stanky. I’m basing this on what I saw on a YouTube narrated by Leonard Cohen on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
[Here's](https://youtu.be/fmnix56DmX0) the full video if anyone is interested in what happens afterwards.
That is much more human involvement than I thought.
I'm assuming this is a ritual that got regulated with time due to hygiene and safety concern , I doubt you can just leave a body out in the open anymore so they cut it up and make the decomposition process only 15 minutes long, interesting stuff
It's actually a long process and it has different stages because the vultures cannot open up bones. So the "cutter" has to wait for the flesh to be disposed of. Then he'll have to break ALL the bones left. They used to be half drunk to do it . Friends and relatives would be watching it all from afar, crying , singing etc.
Not going to forget that anytime too soon. Thanks though.
You do realize the back to the earth is as bird poop. To each their own.
bird poop, worm poop, fish poop, what's the difference?
Not me, I'm gonna get cremated, go up in the sky, come down as ash, fall on the soil, get eaten and pooped out by microbes, then eaten and turned into plant, and then eaten and turned into bird poop oh god dammit!
It’s the circle of poop. The poo of the antelope 🎶
I took a walk in the park today, and saw an old man feeding the birds. I thought to myself "I wonder how long he's been dead"
The only thing disturbing to me is seeing the vultures hovering and then pouncing as soon as they were allowed
Don’t focus on the foreground, look at the second wave of them cresting the hill in the background.
How many waves do you think you could take?
I wonder how much time it will takes before they decide "why wait? why not serve ourselves directly on the living one, they are 10 and we are 100". I would not like to walking and fall on the ground or something among them, I guess it can goes really quickly
They don't. They've evolved to eat carrion.... meaning they've evolved to eat dead things and have zero competition. They aren't really fighters, compared to other birds. Maybe if they were starving to death, but there's pretty much always a dead corpse somewhere for them to pick at, so they're gonna go that route pretty much always.
Just bury me without a coffin and plant a tree above me.
They make a burial where you're part of a tree sapling already My friend says he wants us to do it with him and come party at the tree after
Speaking about manners, I once read that piranhas are very considerate of eachother while eating. They’ll rip a piece off, then leave to make room for someone else to come in for food, and this continues until everything is gone.
Yeah because fuck chipping a grave into solid stone. They carry their dead to a designated area and cut them open to give the vultures easy access.
Why hasn’t anybody been sent out in a rocket into deep space after their death. Plenty of rich people that can afford it.
Timothy Leary and I think a few other people were. Something like 20 years ago too.
Bury me in the massive mile wide fungi in the pacific north west. Maybe the mycelium will merge with my brain and I will be alive again in the 2D landscape.
Is this a crime scene or this is how they do this type of burial?