Cultural Section: Funeral Rites
About what we can learn from how countries treat their dead
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Funeral Rites of the Continent
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» […] If you want a quick view into how countries differ or share common ground, funeral rites are an interesting, if often overlooked component that can be vastly revealing.
Someone having trouble understanding why Oril and Ustine are constantly at each other’s throats ever since their respective founding dates, for example, need look no further, it is quite visible here already:
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Cremation — Oril
prefers to burn its dead. Any dead, really.
From the lowest commoner up into the highest echelons of society, no one gets spared. They make no difference between their royals nor even a traitor that way.
In death, while in Oril, everyone truly is the same.
That is, at the very least on the surface level of it. If you look more closely, customs do vary a bit throughout time and across different regions and families as to what accompanies that base occurrence at its heart. Orilian royalty, for example, has, at times, not been treated any different than commoners overall. At others, however, the pomp and ritual components around cremation have been quite substantial; quite enough indeed to rival the abundant amount of processions, offerings, and riches included in the ceremonies of other countries.
It is possible to draw quite vast conclusions about each period of time and its rulers from these facts alone. […]
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Entombment — Ustine
[…] however, frowns upon this practice, in the specific as well as the general.
To an Ustinian, this whole ordeal would be quite unthinkable. Blasphemy. In direct opposition to hallowed traditions—that, ironically, few ever question.
Why do the Ustinians preserve and entomb their dead?
Ustine does not -officially, at least- subscribe to any cult of ancestry.
There are no shrines in anyone’s home to lauded ancestors, and no invocation of ancestors for either everyday uses or even very specific occasions other than around the Hallowed and Saints. But those are not hailed in death, they are hailed for their lives, their deeds, their heroics or specific virtues and mercies.
And yet, preservation of the dead is seen as tantamount and the desecration of dead bodies is a capital offense. Some of the Ustinian Church’s most widespread application of power is based in the importance of graveyards and tombs, their protection and rites about preserving their sanctity.
In this, they share, ironically, close roots to their disavowed cousins, the Risnosians. (Who do have that ancestry cult Ustine has renounced during its history. — Yes, dear Readers, Ustine once had the same; though most anyone today would not know this; an item that would seem to be of some curiosity, did one not know about the intricate tangles of its history and why that abjuration happened. This is not the place and time to discuss that specific matter, though, so I would advise you to consult my other works, specifically the Knotted History of a Spotted Country in this case, if you are interested in these historic roots.)
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In Ustine, that feeling of near-blasphemy also pertains to treating a traitor the same as a noble, much less the Emperor or his consort. Indeed, even the commoner would feel misused to not get better treatment.
More importantly for our comparison here: Can you guess what that treatment of a traitor is, when it comes to their dead body?
Indeed. It is the wholesale burning of their remains, so that none and nothing of them may ever remain, so that everyone shall forget they ever existed.
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Can you start to guess by now, what difficulty lies at the very heart of Ustinian people’s very Faith, when trying to console themselves with their closest neighbors?
I’ll give you another irony, however, that might boggle the mind on first glance and threaten your beginning understanding:
Ustine is on good terms with the High-Elven Electorate, more or less wholesale. Guess what those High Elves do, when they want to die?
They traditionally go die in a fire.
A ship set ablaze, to be precise; one built for this very occasion and no other. Commonly taking a substantial part—if not indeed the whole—of their household with them, to be burned alive one and all, so that they can ‘follow them into the afterlife’. Whatever ‘different plane’ it is that they expect to end up in after losing their physicality.
Now, why does Ustine not abhor this, which should, by all regards, be thought of as a much worse offense against human sensibilities and anyone good-natured?
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Maybe the answer lies therein that it is only the Electors themselves that do this, of their own choice.
Why would that be a good thing? Well, it obviously ‘proves’ the inferiority of the High-Elves, doesn’t it? Looked at out of Ustine’s perspective, they proclaim themselves as not worthy of remembrance by doing so.
Good on them. It makes them good subjugates, if you come at it from a sufficiently sarcastic standpoint.
The same cannot be said, however, for a people who all share the same view—and this quite without being pressured into it by ‘bad rulers’ who would destroy them at the same time that they also happily, willingly, bow the neck to someone else’s cause as the Electoral kind do—that people should be one and the same, high or low, mighty or not, famed or unknown, judged only by their actions and remembered only as long as the stories of their peers and family carry them, if they did good; in short: that rulership has to be earned.
You can easily see how that would come info conflict with a system purely based on blood inheritance and gender restrictions, now can’t you? […] «
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[Excerpt of “Of all that is Good and Proper — An Analysis of Inheritance Systems Across Countries” by Theodonius Elowil Ostian, Orilian Ishkay(*) turned philosopher]
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An extra for the people still reading this far :
(*) Editor’s Note:
Ishkays will be found explained in a separate article.
For a very short and coarse definition, they are the original warrior caste of Oril, these days mostly a formal and ritualistic category since castes have been abolished.
That being said, they still are some of the most formidable warriors you will find around these parts of the world, and members of the Imperial Guard are to this day and time still chosen almost exclusively from their ranks. At other times in history, these two categories have even been entirely synonymous, the difference wiped out for a generation or two before it was reinstalled by imperial successors with either more traditional views or who had far more controversial ideas—indeed, viewed by some later historians as well as several well-known peers of their times as downright outrageous—about the uses of having both these categories (e.g., as just one example, for more ranks to bestow upon their allies by a more intricate ranking system, even going as far as keeping their subjects occupied not only by vying for rank, but also debating the specific merits and favors in question, in short: which rank had higher value and should be held in higher esteem; a question the imperials at the time left intentionally wide open).
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(*) Ordinarius’s Note as towards the recent submission:
Recipients: Collegiate; the respective student and their sponsor
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In Ostian’s case, she is historically mostly accepted as having been a member of the Orilian Imperial Guard before her retirement and transformation into a researcher of her own right, albeit a hotly debated one (for the obvious lack of neutrality, of course, not the other stories that circulate about her that are, quite frankly, laughable).
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Yes, she. Do not get confused by the term “Theodonius” here—this is not a given name and no indication that she ever changed her sexual denomination either. At her time, Theodonius was a title—and the fact that she signed her books still proudly bearing and including it should tell you quite a lot already about her leanings as well as her actual standing with the court. Had she truly been dishonorably discharged from the service, as some of our colleagues want to make a case for, it would have been unthinkable for the Imperial Court as a whole, her former colleagues included, to let her carry that title any longer. Signing a book with it would have been tantamount to signing her own death warrant at the time. And we all know well that she still lived at least twenty years after her disputed discharge, or this book here would never have come into existence. She was not in exile in Ustine either, as some have proposed, but has been proven to have still resided in Oril as main residence, albeit going on travels wide and far to collect her many stories. And yet she always returned to Oril.
Indeed, her residence remained not even all that far from the court at Hochberg (not Oril’s Haven during that time—anyone missing that surely has not read even their basic histories well). Painting this situation as… a relational entanglement inside the court could not explain this; especially with how well known her residence must have been for not only a stroke of lucky registries, but also various tellings of proceedings there to have survived until our time. We must most definitely repudiate such rumors that are clearly slander on part of political enemies. And someone who even locates the court of the time at the wrong place in their attempt to paint this Grand Lady of Orilian history and philosopy as having been ‘hidden away in a secluded location far from the court’ must be viewed as someone simply revealing the righteousness of any doubt cast on their worthiness of holding a seat in our esteemed Collegiate. We all know full well that her writings are works of their time and most definitely not neutral; cannot be. That, in itself, is enough of a flaw. There is no need to slander Ostian on the basis of unfounded rumors, showing a critical lack of the historical rigor we expect from our Collegiate.
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This, I propose, is what you get when you let rank and family buy seats. Should we not have learned from history about such cases? And all of this in a controversy about a noble caste dabbling to their best of their ability, if at least mostly well-intentioned—nonetheless a valuable source of the time that remains to us, granted, if only we apply the necessary methods to sort fact from fiction, rumors and slander according to their sources and attributions, political standings, views, and interrelational influences. The irony.
I have thus taken it upon me to sort out the factually relevant pieces here and remove whatever had no place under this specific topic anyway. Let that be a lesson to your studies, please, dear ‘colleague’, and refrain from further nonsense submissions. I am letting this slide exactly once, thanks to the interference of your uncle, who pleaded with me for you and who is in high standing with this Committee as we all know and should be spared any unnecessary public shame. I can and will, however, not let this continue.
I hereby kindly ask the gracious Collegiate to well take care that our dear student will receive the appropriate extracurricular studies to equip them for said studies as their family has asked, to the utmost of your abilities.
And please educate our dear student about the difference between a belief in a physical afterlife and actual necromantic practices. I sincerely hope this is not some veiled attempt to gain access to the Necromancy section. I shall cite this one nonsense here as a cautionary tale:
» We all know what Ostian is insinuating here, since even Risnos does not share in the practice despite its ancestor cult, right? Necromancy. «
I have deleted this sidenote from the article in question, as one of many, which I am sure you will all agree on is the better choice for our reputation in a scientific collection. Painstakingly. Having had to basically rewrite the whole article that was meant to be our dear ‘colleague’s’ submission to it.
I will not have my time imposed upon thus again.
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Yours faithfully as ever,
I.E. Koewem
(who, contrary to said ‘colleague’, will not go into listing all their supposed merits and titles; as thankfully some of us still have no need for their reputation to be self-cited)
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[ You have been reading a fictional article / excerpt
of a fictional work from inside the world of the Hunter Series. ]
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Book 1: “Origin” is being published in parts every weekend
( changes may apply )
( since the translation follows hot on my heels of translating the work, so there’s not much of a buffer right now; this is a WiP, but the first 2 1/2 books are preexistent
in various full draft stages in German already )
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If you somehow landed on this page first, never having read the series itself,
but found it to your liking anyway, I suggest starting here:
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Verstehst du Deutsch?
Psst. Die deutsche Version ist schon weiter als die Übersetzung;
da es sich bei ihr um das Original handelt ;)
Du findest sie hier.