Until We Too Are Buried in the Sky
Their numbers have now declined to perhaps a few hundred thousand, at the most, but in antiquity the Zoroastrians were one of the great religious movements of the world. Manichean before Manichaeism, the faith divided the world between the good and the evil, who tussle together until the inevitable final triumph of the good. Thus everything in the world, if I understand correctly, could be considered pure or impure. And one impure thing is the human corpse.
This isn’t hard to understand, on an intuitive level, but it stands in some tension with the reverence with which human bodies are treated in most other cultures. So sure were the Zoroastrians that the dead body was unclean that they shunned burial, which risked poisoning the earth. But the common human urge to honor the dead appears to have motivated them as well. How then to dispose of the remains of those whose time had come? Through a dakhma, a Tower of Silence.
A Tower of Silence was a structure built with an open top, the ceiling slanted towards a central pit. Around that ringed top the Zoroastrians would leave the bodies of their honored dead. Carrion birds such as vultures would come and pick the corpses clean, taking whatever was human with them and reintegrating that flesh into the great cycle, life into nutrients, nutrients into life. In time the bones would tumble into the central pit or else be pushed, and over the passage of centuries they themselves would turn to dust. And in this way the impure body was disposed of while showing proper reverence to the dead. Sometimes this practice is referred to as “burial of the sky,” and similar practices can be found in certain strains of Himalayan Buddhism, sometimes in the animistic Hinduism of Bali, and in a few indigenous cultures of Australia and North America.
I am an atheist and do not believe in an eternal soul. I find the Tower of Silence somehow gorgeous and visceral in a way that would still, I’m sure, be quite foreign to the Zoroastrians. Most major faith traditions hold that the self is not the body, but I have become convinced that there is only the body, that there can only be the body, as sad as that is. And as a wise man once said, “eventually, all our graves go unattended.” But in a Tower of Silence my decaying flesh itself may become in time a next generation of winged life, both delicate and ugly, and someday I might soar over dry and sprawling Persian lands, armed with eyesight that can spy the living and carrion alike and tell each from each, can know how they are different and how they are the same. There are places where the great and recently-departed Thich Nhất Hahn led people that I cannot go, ideas that tread too close to the mystical and the divine. But in his basic insistence that water may cease being a cloud and become rain or cease being rain and become a river, but never cease being water, he was plainly correct. This is a very spare form of reincarnation and one which, if you think about it, provides little comfort. But it’s true: our matter endures, as long as the red earth rolls.
Perhaps I mean to say today only that a memorial should, at its heart, be unto the mourners what a dakhma was to the buzzards: we take for ourselves all that was human, we bring it back into the great gyre of life, and then we must fly away, leaving behind that which can only be left behind. It’s all we can do.