Humans have been burying their dead for millennia, but that’s not the only way nature helps us transform corpses. In Tibet, birds of prey play an essential role in “Sky Burials” rituals, and elsewhere, Zoroastrian tradition led to the erection of Towers of Silence (Torre del silencio), places where people offered their dead to eagles.
Why have people offered their dead to eagles for over 3,000 years? This funeral ritual is seen as a way to purify the body; otherwise, a corpse becomes vulnerable to contamination by demons or evil spirits. To avoid this, the dead were taken to towers called “dakhma” where they were exposed to the elements and scavenging birds.
You might think it’s a long and messy process, but a study done at the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in Texas (USA) showed that vultures can almost completely skeletonize a corpse in just five hours. In a coffin, the similar process takes closer to five years, so the vultures are particularly efficient.
The places where people have offered their dead to eagles for thousands of years
Like Sky Burials, Towers of Silence avoids the negative impact of modern burials, which occupy approximately 404,685 hectares of land in America alone. Coffin production destroys around 1.6 million hectares of forest annually. In addition, many bodies are embalmed, which introduces approximately 3 million liters of embalming fluid into the soil, potentially contaminating the soil.
This practice would date back at least 3,000 years. For orthodox Zoroastrians, burial is so dishonorable that it was once considered a punishment for the wicked, as it prevented the soul from ascending to heaven, condemning it to the eternal underworld.
Although Zoroastrian communities (whose members are known as “Parsis”) still exist today, the number of dakhmas has declined significantly as the practice has been banned in many regions. Even in places where the practice is legal, the Towers of Silence are experiencing a decline in the eagle population.
Factors leading to the disappearance of this tradition
“Due to the rapid growth of the Karachi metropolis, the dakhma, once located on the outskirts of the city, is now surrounded by densely populated neighborhoods and there have been no vultures for 25 years. The corpses are drying fast in the hot Sindh sun, but they are not stripped of their skin, and the tower’s pit cannot cope with the number of bodies.” explains the Encyclopaedia Iranica.
Although the practice may seem shocking to Westerners who are used to burial as the norm, it can be argued that dakhmas are more environmentally friendly and carry a final act of charity, feeding the eagles and assisting the soul in its passage to heaven. In a world with a population that has exceeded 8 billion, perhaps it is time to take more seriously ecological funeral practices such as, for example, human composting.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
