Story by Sarah Frey
Illustrations by Charlotte Cheng
The dead don’t bury themselves. Funerals are not a new phenomenon—evidence of ritual behavior and death rites have been found in archaeological excavations across the globe. In Russia, an excavated body of a 40,000-10,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic man was discovered buried with 1,500 ivory beads and partial burning on the bones of his feet, suggesting a ritualistic burial. Archeologists believe the burns have meaning and the beads were purposefully placed with the body, implying the burial had cultural significance. But more importantly, the evidence suggests humans have coped with death through culture for a very long time. The following rituals illustrate how cultures worldwide have embraced death. Through these practices, what becomes evident is that death, whether high in the Himalayas today or thousands of years ago in near-Arctic waters, is a social process.
In Fear of the Departed
Ghosts were anything but a source of comfort for the Apache-speaking tribes of the American Southwest. The Kiowa Apache Plains Indians believed spirits of dead relatives appeared as guides to the afterworld, so the living created elaborate rituals to defend against these ghosts. Families were terrified by the possibility of the deceased staying to chat, and many believed the faster the burial, the better.
To expedite transition into the afterlife and to avoid interacting with ghostly visitors, relatives sometimes paid someone outside the family to prepare a body for burial. The hired person washed the body with yucca suds and painted it with yellow and red ochre, according to Morris Opler and William Bittle in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology.
Sometimes family members mourned the departed to the point of self-mutilation. “Close relatives wailed, tore their clothes, and exposed their bodies without shame; some shaved the head, lacerated the body, and cut off a finger joint,” write Opler and Bittle. Often, a widowed woman clung to the neck of her husband’s favorite stallion after the horse was shot in the head or cut down, soaking herself in its blood. Animals slaughtered graveside were thought to follow the deceased into the afterlife. Although personal items were buried with the dead, any remaining nonliving property was destroyed following a funeral. The deceased’s departure was easier without the memories such objects might evoke. Most funerals occurred within 24 hours of death, and grave sites were avoided from that day on.
Gift to the Sky
Tibetan sky burials are practiced in the Himalayan Mountains where cold, hard tundra isn’t suitable for burying bodies. Ritualistic sky burial is called jhator, meaning “giving alms to the birds.” This ritual is influenced by Buddhist beliefs, which promote the idea that the deceased’s body transfers sustenance to the living. Nearly 80 percent of Tibetans have named sky burial as the preferred method of honoring loved ones.
During burial preparation, a corpse remains untouched for three days while Buddhist monks pray for its spirit. The body is then wrapped in cloth and carried to a designated cutting area in the mountains where it is dismembered and the organs are removed. The bones, once picked clean by vultures, are mashed with mallets and combined with the organs in a barley-flour mixture that is offered to nearby birds of prey. Then the deceased’s family watches as vultures, likened to angels in Tibetan culture, return to the sky.
The Burning of the Widow
The sati, or suttee, ritual is considered an ultimate expression of marital devotion in Rajasthan, a northwestern state in India. Women practiced this tradition, commonly referred to as “the chaste wife,” for centuries before modern controversies brought it to an end. The ritual only occurred when a husband died before his wife.
After death, his body was placed on a wooden pyre, sometimes organized atop a stone table. The eldest son then circled the pyre, generally backwards, and recited spells before setting it alight. If there was no eldest son, another family member performed the rites. Women who practiced sati often chose to sit calmly next to the deceased, waiting to be consumed by flames as an expression of devotion and purity. If a woman refused to sacrifice herself, she could be forced onto the pyre and tied down by members of her husband’s family.
Sati was first outlawed in India in 1829 and again in 1956. Another ordinance was passed in 1987 after a young bride in northwest India committed sati at her husband’s cremation. The act sparked global controversy, but even in the 2000s cases of sati have been reported in rural villages.
Dress the World in Black
Victorian England (1837-1901) was a socially stratified culture in which the poor suffered harsh working conditions and exposure to deadly diseases such as tuberculosis. Funerals commonly began in the home where, despite the stench, the deceased was laid upon a kitchen table for days while family members paid respects. Later, funeral processions of horses and carriages adorned with bells and whistles were hired to transport the deceased to a graveyard. To provide the dead with an honorable burial, working-class families often spent more on funerals than any other life event. “To be buried in a pauper’s grave was a great misfortune,” says Edward Beasley, a professor of British history at San Diego State University. Pauper’s graves held unclaimed corpses that were tossed into mass graves like ragdolls.
Following a husband’s death, wealthy widows were expected to dress in “widow’s weeds,” or completely in black, for a period of two years as a reflection of spiritual darkness. Queen Victoria famously chose to remain in widow’s weeds until her own death nearly 40 years after her husband’s.
This Ship Won’t Sail

Norse burial laws are clear concerning high-status men. Derived from myth, it’s believed that the god Odin only allows souls to enter Valhalla, the hall of the afterlife, after being cremated on a pyre. Wooden Viking ship pyres could be floating or stationary, depending on whether the burial was land or sea-based.
The deaths of chieftains and warriors were matters of great importance, and after surrounding the dead with objects of value such as silver or gold jewelry and iron weapons, ocean-bound ships were set on fire. Slave girls to be placed on the pyre were sometimes raped by multiple kinsmen of the deceased and strangled to death before being sacrificed. Land-based pyres were burned to ashes, releasing enormous plumes of smoke as the flames consumed them. The smoke was believed to carry the dead into the heavens.
Viking ship burials were usually performed immediately after death to ensure the deceased’s social status continued into the afterlife. When only ashes remained, a mound of rock and earth was built upon the site in honor of the departed.

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Deathly Departed