Re: OT: Chinese zither

At 10:37 PM 9/20/03 -0700, you wrote:
>--- Isidora Zamora <isidora@...> wrote:
>
> > The idea of them refusing to undress a body
> > after death was one that came
> > to me sort of off the cuff as I was writing
> > some stuff on them one day, and
> > I may yet change it.
>
>No need!
After the extended hypothetical explanation that I wrote out for it
yesterday, I don't think now that there's any need to change it.  I think
that the custom is now adequately explained as a cultural relic from a
specific period in their history.

> > But one reasonable
> > explanation for the custom may be
> > that in warfare it has always been *absolutely*
> > forbidden to strip a dead
> > enemy naked.  [...]
>
> > After a few generations of this,
> > they began to fail to
> > distingush between the treatment of their own
> > dead and that of their enemy,
> > and so didn't feel right about removing the
> > clothing from their own dead,
> > even to reclothe them, even if there was
> > clothing to be spared.
>
>Question is, why did they feel compelled to leave
>an enemy so clothed? Or did I miss something?
You didn't miss anything.  I never said why, but there is a very good
reason.  They consider it to be nothing less than a divine command.  In
their late pre-history/very early history, they were visited by someone
whom they believed to be either one of the gods or their mesenger.  This
being instructed them on many points, and thus they name him Tovleis, "The
Instructor."  Unfortunately, he did not tell them about how the world
began, so they have no creation myth, or how it would end, although he did
tell them about certain things that would happen in the future.  There is
an awful lot of mythological content that any other culture would have but
the Cwendaso do not because Tovleis did not tell them about those
things.  He didn't even tell them the names of the gods or which ones to
worship.  He did tell them that not all of the gods were good, and that
they should therefore be very careful about which gods they chose to
worship.  Much of what he told them had to do with how they should behave
as "civilized people."  One of the things that civilized people do is not
to allow any dead body to be defiled (and some specifics were given as to
what constituted defilement.  One of those specifics was not to leave a
body lying naked.)  Another thing that civilized people do not do in war is
to attack non-combatants.  (And that does mean "non-combatants" to them,
not "women and children."  Any woman or child who attacks them is certainly
fair game and likely as not to end up dead, but they don't get into such
situations with regularity as it is rare for them to be found attacking a
village, since civilized people go to war only to defend themselves, as
they have been taught.)  They would consider it murder to kill an enemy who
surrenders or who has been captured.  (Any ideas on how Cwendaso might deal
with prisoners of  war?  I know how the Trehelish dealt with prisoners:
they didn't take them in the first place -- or they sacrificed them to
their god.  Actually, the modern Trehelish are in general much nicer people
than this war makes them sound, but they are somewhat more brutal than the
surrounding cultures, exept possibly for one related culture to the south
of them, about which people I know very little.)

> > I think that the culture never really got back
> > to normal again after that episode.
>
>Some interesting shifts in culture, there!
Quite profound shifts, really.  (Though I think that the general lack of
grave goods can be attributed as much to their practice of reinterring the
bones at a later date as it can to the war.  When the bones are interred in
the bone barrow, they are not placed separately into an ossuary, but are
stacked --carefully, of course -- together with everyone else's
bones.  Usually the body is divided up, with all the skulls going into the
same rooms of the barrow, usually the two closest to the entrance and
working backwards if necessary, while the other bones are neatly piled
starting in the terminal room of the barrow and eventually filling up the
entire barrow back to front if the barrow is in use long enough.  In such
circumstances, what are you going to do with the grave goods?)

Some time this summer, when I was reading _The Fellowship of the Ring_ to
my children and wanted them to understand what a barrow was, I located this
site. http://web.ukonline.co.uk/megalithics/index.htm There are a number of
barrows on it, and most of the sites on this site have a series of full
spherical VR panoramic photos of them. You will probably have to download a
browser plug-in to view them with, but it's worth it.  It's like standing
there and being able to look in any direction.  (BTW, I think that most
modern Cwendaso barrows are not megalithic like most of the ones on this
site are, but built up of a multitude of medium-sized stones laid together
and then covered with earth.)

It turns out not to have been only the Cwendaso who underwent a permanant
culture change due to these wars.  The Trehelish (their opponants, who won
the war) did as well.  Somehow, (I haven't figured out how just yet), the
Trehelish went from being ruled by a multitude of little warlords to
becoming a centralized, representative democracy shortly after the wars
were over.  Their women also came out of 150 years of war with the right to
vote, though it wasn't by the same proccess that the Cwendaso women earned
this right, since the Trehelish women didn't become trained warriors as the
Cwendaso women did.  (I think that with nearly all the men away fighting
battles for such an extended period, the women may have just taken control
of things at home and started running things because there was no one else
to do it, and then they refused to stop having a say in things after the
men came back.)

> > So how does that sound for a plausible excuse
> > for why they treat their dead
> > in what any other culture would consider a
> > rather shocking manner?  (I'm
> > actually interested to know whether it sounds
> > reasonable.)
>
>I don't think it's unreasonable. So much warfare
>is bound to create stresses in a people's culture
>and practices are certain to change.
After writing it, I think that it is not an unreasonable reaction.  I
certainly learned a lot about my conculture in writing that yesterday.  I
already knew about the century and a half of war that drove them into the
mountains and how very brutal it was.  I already knew that their women
voted as well as the men, and I already knew that tomboy behavior was
tolerated.  And, of course, I had already written that about not undressing
the dead.  But it wasn't until I wrote that post yesterday that I connected
all of these things with the war they had suffered.  It all seems to piece
together very nicely, I think.

>The Bolghadaine (the most xenophobic of all
>Daine) are still severely affected by the horrors
>of the war of the kindreds, perhaps a hundred
>thousand years ago. The demons that haunt the
>darkness of their imaginations have yellow hair
>and use fire as a weapon - the instigators of
>that ancient war were yellow haired Daine who
>torched their servant races by the tens of
>thousands.
Do you have anything online about the Daine?  And, by the way, did you get
the URL that I sent you a few days ago?

>The Daine of Westmarche still practice a similar
>burial method. Having lived cramped in barrios
>and underground for many years, they couldn't
>bury their dead in the usual fashion (which
>anciently was to expose the bodies up on raised
>platforms out in the wilds). They took to letting
>the rats and similar work their magic on the
>flesh, and then gathered the bones into small
>niches in chambers burrowed under the streets and
>buildings of the city.
Very much a difference in culture.  Exposure of a body is taboo, and so is
allowing animals to get at them.  That is why they stand guard over a
battlefield that they have won -- to keep off the scavengers until someone
comes to claim the bodies for proper burial (or cremation in the case of
the Trehelish.)  The alternative is to bury the securely bodies on the
battlefield.  Securely means deep enough that an animal can't come by and
dig it up.  The doors of Cwendaso barrow are sealed tightly when not in
active use precisely so that no animal can enter.  But I can see how rats
would be a good solution for the Daine if their preferred method is exposure.

> > The
> > former is pretty yucky, since the bodies of the
> > dead are placed in it for
> > burial and they lie there and rot.
>
>Quite. Rats no longer do the work, but they have
>a place away from town where bodies are allowed
>to rot away.
Yes, barrows are not located in the town but on the outskirts, not for fear
of the dead because Cwendaso have no fear whatsoever of the dead (unlike
Trehelish, who are almost uniformly scared out of their minds by the
thought of ghosts.  After the conquest, the Trehelish have been left with
this little bit of a problem of their new land being dotted here and there
with these huge Cwendaso barrows.  Serves them right, maybe.), but simply
because the barrows are quite large and would get in the way were they
placed in the center of a village, and because of the rotting flesh.

My husband commented last night that he almost hesitated to ask what any of
this had to do with the Chinese zither.  I told him that the thread was
listed as being off topic, wasn't it?

Isidora

Isidora