Re: OT: Chinese zither

--- 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!

> 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?

> I think that the culture never really got back
> to normal again after that episode.
Some interesting shifts in culture, there!

> 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.

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.

> They don't consider it defilement of the body
> to handle the bones, as long
> as it is done respectfully.  Their favorite
> method of burial is for the
> village to have two barrows, one for bodies and
> the second for bones.
Reminiscent of the catacombs under Paris.

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.

Anymore, they dig under the lanes of their towns
and lay the cleaned bones in little niches down
in the catacombs.

> 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.

Padraic.


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