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A group of Australian farmers have won permission to open a ‘feet-first’
graveyard.
The eco-friendly cemetery will bury the deceased vertically to save space
and in bio degradable bags in a field to be used later as pasture.
Tony Dupleix, chairman of the farmers’ cooperative set up 20 years ago
when the idea was first mooted, said it was a ‘no fuss’ alternative to
traditional burials.
"When you die, you are returned to the earth with a minimum of fuss
and with no paraphernalia that would affect the environment," he
said.
"You’re not burning 90kg of gas in a crematorium and there’s no
ongoing maintenance costs.
This is news? One of the most persistent and profound traits ingrained
in EVERY human culture ever encountered is rituals associated with burial,
the afterlife, and the transition from this life to the next. Yet within
this universal cultural manifestation the individual cultural variety
is astounding.
Almost every conceivable burial position has been the way to go in some
society or other. The clear favorite over time is the tried and true
fetal position, on the theory that it was the position we assumed BEFORE
coming into this world, so we should return to it when we check out.
However, we have seen corpses sitting cross legged, sitting legs folded,
sitting on haunches, sitting on a chair, standing, standing on head,
kneeling,
kneeling because the legs were cut off, lying on side, lying on back,
cannonball style, cannonball style stuffed in giant clay urns, all-fours,
doggy style, arms splayed, legs akimbo, hanging from trees and shrunken
into thick glass jars, to mention but a few.
We took the above photo on our recent trip to Peru at the Huaca Juliana,
a pre-Incan site quite near downtown Lima. This is currently a very active
site, despite having been scoured for gems, precious metals and salable
artifacts years ago. It is only recently being systematically unearthed
and examined by archeologists, who are discovering new stuff daily. While
we were there, for example, they discovered the first flight of stairs (the rest of
the complex uses inclined ramps). Interestingly, this culture, coincidentally
called the Lima, believed in a particularly bloody
form
of Feng Shui.
Their pyramids were built up over centuries, basically by periodically
razing the exiting structures, laying a new floor on the rubble, and
building the next layer on top. However, when performing one of these periodic
make-overs, their religion demanded that they make multiple human sacrifices
and leave the bodies interred under the new floor, to insure the spiritual
sanctity of the new digs. In the specific room where we took the
photo diggers told us they had discovered 8 bodies, all young women between
10-12, all killed immediately before burial when the floor was set.
Our own teen sacrifices, like the Olsen twins, might not have it so
bad after all…..
As to our own personal preference, we can’t make up our mind. We vacillate
from one position to the other. Right now, we are leaning toward being
buried
in the classic
NFL lineman three-point stance. Haven’t decided yet which helmet we’ll
wear into the Valhalla Hall of Fame…
from Ananova
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