For more than 300 years, the Parsees of Mumbai have been famous for their Towers of Silence: Atop these circular stone platforms, they expose their dead for vultures to devour. Earth, fire, and water are all sacred elements, the Parsees believe, and are essential for life; they must therefore not be polluted by exposure to death. This rules out disposing of corpses by burial, burning, or consignment to a river. Instead, they are carefully laid out on these stone floors—men here, women there, children in another place—for the circling birds to feast upon. “One afternoon,” wrote Edward Ives in the 1750s, “I resolved to satisfy my curiosity so far as to peep into one of these edifices. I perceived several dead bodies, but there was little flesh left upon the bones; and that little was so parched up by the excessive heat of the sun, that it did not emit those stinking effluvia which there was reason to expect.”
In fact, until quite recently, when India’s vulture population crashed after widespread poisoning, this method of disposing of the dead was both highly organized and extremely hygienic: Nobody was allowed to touch the bodies, lest they spread contagion around the city. The corpses were instead maneuvered by means of metal hooks. Vultures, moreover, worked “more expeditiously than millions of insects would do, if dead bodies were buried in the ground,” as the Parsee Sir Ervad Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (1854–1933) explained. “By this rapid process, putrefaction with all its concomitant evils, is most effectually prevented.”
On the treeless Tibetan Plateau, where the soil is thin, rocky, and often frozen, the Buddhists don’t worry about even the leftover bones. In their traditional “sky burials,” the corpse is first defleshed by ritual specialists. Its skeleton is then pounded into fragments with hammers. Within an hour of the first vulture’s arrival, not a scrap is left, making this perhaps the most ecologically pure of all methods for the disposal of human remains.
Elsewhere, carcasses were often left exposed on platforms for months on end. Some Australian tribes occasionally gathered beneath such podia, which had been suspended from trees, to anoint themselves with the fluids dripping down from their decomposing cargoes. Eventually, whatever bones remained would be collected and buried. Funerary groves such as these—be they in Australia or the Caucasus or North America—were sites both holy and dreadful. Nevertheless, as a Goulburn Island Aboriginal woman once commented matter-of-factly, “It’s cleaner on a tree than under the ground—and we can go back and look at them sometimes.”
IT’S A MAN-EAT-MAN WORLD
Exposure is often associated with excarnation—deliberately stripping the flesh from a corpse to turn it into a skeleton as quickly as possible. Sometimes the reason has to do with ritual, as in Tibetan sky burials. At other times, the goal is the brutally immediate—and nutritive—one of the human flesh itself. “All the vampire stories have developed out of facts concerning primitive cannibalism,” declared MacLeod Yearsley in The Folklore of Fairy-Tale (1924). His facts may be suspect—anthropologists have debated the scope and extent of human cannibalism for decades—but how much does the grisly practice pertain to the origin of vampire stories?
Deep in Spain’s wooded Atapuerca Mountains is a cluster of caves that have long provided a wealth of ancient human remains. In one cave, Gran Dolina, bone fragments recovered in the mid-1990s show clear evidence of having been butchered with stone tools. Dating from 780,000 years ago, they represent the oldest archaeological evidence of cannibalism ever discovered.
In 1976, a nearly complete hominid skull was unearthed near Bodo in Ethiopia. Dated to 600,000 years before the present, it bears cut marks indicating it was deliberately defleshed—yet another sign suggesting cannibalism. Judging from the number of later Paleolithic bones displaying similar expertly placed incisions, cannibalism may have been a common practice. The uncertainties of Stone Age hunting and gathering, after all, placed a premium on protein gathered from whatever sources were available.
Travelers’ tales describing smoked flesh hanging in huts, or prisoners being fattened in wooden cages, or “long pig” gracing chiefly tables were once routine from Africa to the South Pacific. The conquistadors brought back their own lurid tales of the supposed Aztec and Mayan predilection for human meat. As 19th-century Chicago anthropologist Rushton M. Dorman noted,
The Mayas also ate the flesh of human victims sacrificed to the gods. In Nicaragua, the high-priest received the heart, the king the feet and hands, the captors took the thighs, and the tripe was given to the trumpeters. The natives of Honduras said the Spaniards were too tough and bitter to be eaten.
That was exo-cannibalism, or the eating of people from outside one’s own community. Endo-cannibalism, on the other hand, is typically practiced as a reverential funerary rite, and it may have once been widespread. Among the Tapuyas of Brazil, for example, Dorman claimed that, “when an infant died it was eaten by the parents. Adults were eaten by the kindred, and their bones were pounded and reserved for marriage-feasts, as being the most precious thing that could be offered. When they became old they offered themselves to their children, who devoured them after putting them to death. They thought their spiritual substance became incorporated.”
However exaggerated these reports might be, the idea of incorporation was the motive behind all funerary cannibalism—which did not necessarily entail a feast of flesh. One way of incorporating the dead was “to grind their bones to powder or to burn them to ashes,” according to Frazer, “and then to swallow the powder or the ashes mixed with food or drink.” The Yanomamo, an Amazonian tribe, mixed the ashes of their dead into plantain soup, which they drank from gourd bowls. That way, in Dorman’s words, they “received into their bodies the spirits of their deceased friends.”
The most heart-wrenching cannibal accounts must surely be those of mothers eating their dead children. Among certain Australian tribes, in which infant mortality was high, the bereaved mother might partake of her departed child in a bid to facilitate its rebirth. If such practices were widespread in prehistoric times, their dim memories could conceivably underlie the legends of child-eating lamias, witches, and ogres, as such archaic practices might have become (understandably) demonized over time.
Perhaps ceremonial endo-cannibalism, misremembered and reembroidered over countless generations, is the vestigial fact underpinning many folk- and fairy tales. Certainly the pagans accused the earliest Christians of eating flesh and drinking blood in a deliberately calculated insult to the Eucharist. Hurling their own charges in return, the Christians accused pagans of blood sacrifices. And because it was under Christianity that the vampire evolved into the refined bloodsucker we know today, his buried links to cannibalism may not be all that far-fetched.
Voltaire, wouldn’t you know it, had his own take on cannibalism. “The body of a man, reduced to ashes, scattered in the air, and falling on the surface of the earth, becomes corn or vegetable,” the French philosopher and dramatist wrote in his Dictionnaire philosophique in 1764. “So Cain ate a part of Adam; Enoch fed on Cain; Irad on Enoch; Mahalaleel on Irad; Methuselah on Mahalaleel; and thus we find that there is not one among us who has not swallowed some portion of our first parent. Hence it has been said, that we have all been cannibals.”
CONSIGNED TO THE FLAMES
In 1658, when Sir Thomas Browne published his Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, he had been reflecting on some ancient funerary urns—containing the ashes of men and women deceased for untold centuries—that had recently emerged from the muddy Norfolk flats that were his English home. “To be knav’d out of our graves,” Browne mused, “to have our sculs made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into Pipes, to delight and sport our Enemies, are Tragicall abominations, escaped in burning burials.”
Judging from the remains of “Mungo Lady”—discovered in 1969 at Mungo Lake in Australia, and marking the earliest-known cremation—burning burials have been around for at least 40,000 years. Mungo Lady’s skeleton appears to have been deliberately shattered after she had been burned, but before she was put to the torch a s
econd time. What apocalyptic deeds she may have committed in life to deserve this treatment after death, we shall never know.
Deliberately putting the fleshly tabernacle to the flame, reducing it to sifting ash and crumbled bits of bone, seems to be a late addition to the panoply of funerary options—possibly because cremation, as we have seen, is trickier than it appears. Because of the high water content in fresh bodies—the intestines and heart being notoriously incombustible, as in the cases of Joan of Arc and Percy Bysshe Shelley—proper cremation demands an intensely hot and enduring flame. Nevertheless, it seems to have been widely adopted in the prehistoric period—part of a confusing flip-flop from burial to cremation and back that continues to puzzle archaeologists today. Not until the Bronze Age, with its improved high-temperature fire technology, did the pyre replace the grave—but even then only for a while. The so-called “Urnfield culture” dominated the death rituals of heavily forested central Europe for about half a millennium, from roughly 1300 to 750 B.C.E.
Cremation made short work of many a troublesome corpse problem, yet it tended to release the soul with a roar, before it was ready, thus magnifying its maleficence. In the Balkans and parts of eastern Europe, there persists a deep tradition, touched on in Chapter 6, that the soul requires 40 days before it is ready to leave its former lodgings and push on. The arrival of Christianity and its emphasis on the resurrection of the body extinguished pyres all across Europe.
Cremation is a rapid and violent desiccation. Deliberate smoke drying is a statelier one. On the Lower Murray River, the Aborigines often smoked their dead, by placing them in a sitting position (but with arms outstretched) on a bier above an outdoor fire. Once the skin blistered, the body was removed, its hair was scraped off, and its apertures were all sewn tight. The smoke-dried corpse was then smeared with red ochre—a naturally antibacterial iron-oxide pigment derived from tinted clay. Placed above a second fire, this one contained within a special hut, the dead person would smoke away while wailers brushed off the flies. After being removed, wrapped, and carried about with the tribe for several months, the body might at long last be cremated, after which a kinsman would retrieve the skull and—yes—fashion it into a drinking bowl.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
And that leaves burial. Using high-tech methods to fix the date of remains found in Israel’s Skhul Cave, anthropologists have concluded that modern Homo sapiens were being deliberately interred by at least 120,000 years ago. Yet, intentional burial may be far older than that. Nearly 30 skeletons have been recovered from the thousands of hominid bones filling the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) in Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains. They had been lying there for at least 350,000 years, and some—but not all—archaeologists believe they represent a ritual deposit.
Burial was certainly a feature of human societies by the later Stone Age, or Upper Paleolithic (between about 40,000 and 10,000 years ago), given that 150 or so examples from that period have been discovered. The triple inhumation at Dolní Vestonice, in today’s Czech Republic, has elicited much comment. Two male bodies were placed flanking a female body in sexually suggestive poses, as if the trio had been killed for some sexual transgression around 26,000 years ago.
Burial became common after the establishment of settled agricultural communities in the Neolithic. At Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, dead ancestors were sometimes deliberately incorporated into living households—for example, some were buried beneath sleeping platforms. At British hill forts, slain warriors were interred behind the battlements, thus inviting their supernaturally empowered spirits to help protect the ramparts from assault. There are even cases where the living agreed to be buried alive so that their spirits might guard the community. Spanish conquistadors recorded an episode in which an Inca girl volunteered to be interred on a remote Andean peak as an offering to the sun god, so that she would be revered forever after as a goddess of healing and abundance. And some priest-kings of the Dinka in southern Sudan chose to be inhumed while still alive, convinced that their spirits would eternally hover above their villages.
Live burial also has a rich if macabre history as an enforced punishment. In ancient Rome, for example, four (and later six) virgins were charged with tending the sacred fire kept burning on the altar of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. If any one of them was discovered to have broken her vow of chastity, she was led down a ladder to a small underground cell, supplied with a little food and water, and covered up with earth. A citizen passing by would thus be reminded that here is where it happened, that beneath this spot still lie the scandalous bones. It all points up a central fact about burial: Graves are specially charged places, and as such can readily come to be haunted.
Even in today’s secular world, few would care to spend an entire night in a cemetery. The ancient tombs of forgotten peoples can be even spookier. In parts of North America, each new spring plowing once turned up bones from old Indian mounds. These are deposits of the dead that tribes such as the Hurons and the Iroquois gathered annually from scaffolds, trees, houses, temples, and rock shelters for burial in an ancestral ossuary. Scattered across western Europe and the British Isles, meanwhile, large communal graves—among them bank barrows, long barrows, round barrows, passage graves, and megalithic tombs—were serving as bone repositories long before the time of Christ. Subsequent generations viewed such places as haunted. A century ago, historian John Arnott MacCulloch, having studied Norse sagas, claimed that in “ancient Scandinavia the idea that the dead were alive in their barrows gave rise to the belief that they might become unhallowed monsters of the vampire kind…. Parallels occur in Saxon England and among the early Teutons and Celts.”
In agricultural societies, in which the underworld was seen as both the abode of death and the seat of fertility, the buried body, like the buried seed, gave rise to new life. In Egypt, the billowing grain flanking the Nile rose annually from the buried god Osiris. In Scottish balladry, Sweet William becomes a green-red rose and Barbara Allen a briar. And in Slavic folklore, claimed Sir James Frazer, a “tree that grows on a grave is regarded by the South Slavonian peasant as a sort of fetish. Whoever breaks a twig from it hurts the soul of the dead, but gains thereby a magic wand, since the soul embodied in the twig will be at his service.”
Yet, the dark side of burial may have been uppermost in the minds of its earliest practitioners. Archaeologist Timothy Taylor suspects that burial might originally have been conceived as a form of punishment—a kind of ostracism for the community’s scapegoats. Those bodies being laid in the backs of caves (or sunk deep in lakes, or interred in earth whose chemical properties deterred decomposition) could never be physically reincorporated into the community; instead, they were exiled to its cold, dark margins.
Over the past few centuries, for example, hundreds of remarkably well-preserved bodies have been recovered from the bogs of Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula (the same general area where the Gundestrup Cauldron was found). Mostly dating from 100 B.C.E. to about 400 C.E., these finds include many—Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, Windeby Girl, Yde Girl—who have won a peaty immortality because the stubble on their chins or the plaits in their hair look nowhere near the several thousand years old that scientists have determined them to be. The bodies were buried in these bogs for a reason. And because their Iron Age communities overwhelmingly cremated their dead, that reason must have something to do with sacrifice or punishment.
Forensic anthropologists have figured out that many of those buried here were victims: They had been hanged, garroted, or otherwise strangled. In addition, many had been beaten and broken—perhaps after death, perhaps before. It is therefore likely that they had violated some taboo. Taylor believes they were buried in bogs in order to “vex the ghost and prevent the progress of the soul.” Pinned down by preservative peat, their bodies could not decay—and release their souls in the process.
It’s easy to see how a superstitious community might come to believe that its scapegoats, its sacrificed outcasts, the sick, lame,
or deformed lying out there in those lonely graves might resent their fate and—especially if their corpses weren’t decomposing—might return one night to seek revenge.
LIFEBLOOD
Dead bodies may have been charged with supernatural power, but so were living ones—if it resided in their blood.
Those stately columns and orders—Doric, Ionic, Corinthian—that grace our courts, capitols, and schools are rooted in the traditions of Greek temple architecture. But that means they are also steeped in blood: The pillars evolved from the posts to which sacrifices were once tied, creating scenes that second-century Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria called “disgusting murders and burials.” In a Greek temple, the holiest of altars was also the most sanguinary, distinguishing the structures as places where, in the words of Nietzsche, the “beauty tempered the dread, but this dread was the prerequisite everywhere.”
Sacrifice enshrined the most ancient of bargains. The gods might hurl their thunderbolts, but men propitiated (and even manipulated) them with offerings of life and its vehicle, blood. Pagans did not need to read in Deuteronomy that “the blood is the life” to realize the essential truth of that statement. Blood—lose enough of it and you die. That was as obvious to the primitive as it is to the 21st-century physician. Blood, served by the heart, must be the seat of vitality.
Roman gladiators gulped the blood of fallen opponents, thereby doubling their strength. Ancient Europeans poured blood into graves to slake the thirst of the dead. In the Odyssey, Odysseus placates those in Hades by slitting the throats of sheep and letting the blood soak into the earth. The blood of martyrs, of patriots, of innocents and kings—all had magical healing powers. In some places, a single drop of blood is believed to possess power enough to reanimate old bones. The sacred smolders in bone, too—but not like it does in blood.
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