Bone Idle
A Sky Burial site in Tibet - note the hammer for pulverising the bones.
So, has some better method been devised? Is it now time for a widescale reassessment of how we dispose of our dead? I believe that the answer to both of these questions is a definite yes. The Swedes have developed a method which is termed `Promession' and it seems to me to offer a brilliant solution to the environmental damage inherent in present methods of disposal. Basically promession involves freezing the corpse to -18 degrees celsius and then dipping it in a tank of liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees celsius.
The corpse then becomes very brittle, so much so that that if it is vibrated it collapses into a powder. At this point, mercury and other metals are separated using an induced magnetic field and what remains is approximately 27 kilograms of powder which can be buried and will become thoroughly composted, adding nutriments to the soil, in about six months time. This is clean, eco-friendly technology which, it seems to me, we really ought to adopt and the sooner we do so the better. It would certainly be of great benefit to the environment if the funeral industry put some energy into developing this method of disposal, advocating it and making it widely available. It is my hope that the prometorium will be to the twenty first century what the crematorium was to the twentieth.
Bone Idle
`Roman Catholicism is set to become the dominant religion in Britain for the first time since the Reformation because of massive migration from Catholic countries across the world.
Catholic parishes will swell by hundreds of thousands over the next few years after managing years of decline, according to a new report, as both legal and illegal migrants enter the country..... The growth of Catholicism in Britain comes as the established Church of England and the Anglican provinces in Scotland, Wales and Ireland face continuing, if slow, decline.' Or so I read in today's Times newspaper.
Before I pass comment on this news, I should clarify that I am not and never have been a member of the Church of England. I have, on occasion, attended funerals in Anglican churches but this is about the limit of my involvement with it. I was raised a Roman Catholic, went regularly to mass and studied Theology in a University department which was run by Jesuits. I may not see eye to eye with all aspects of Catholic teaching now, nevertheless I cannot deny that I have strong emotional ties to the Catholic Church and many of my most deeply ingrained views are, without doubt, the product of my upbringing. It is my natural spiritual home. Having said that, I do find today's news somewhat unsettling. Although I owe no particular allegance to Anglicanism, its apparent and ongoing demise is a source of sadness to me. The good old CofE has always represented something quintessentially British (English?). To my mind, it epitomises qualities such as fair play, moderation (especially in not appearing to be too religious), gentlemanlike conduct, trying to be all things to all men and, dare I say, a delightful fogginess on matters of Theology. Anglicanism seems to be one of those timeless British institutions that we happily take for granted but don't realise quite how much it meant to us until it has gone. And if it does eventually implode, it will take with it an irreplacable aspect of British self-definition and that, in my opinion, would be a great tragedy.
This article in the Times put me in mind of a book I read recently - a rather sobering book entitled "Last Rites: The End of the Church of England" (2006) by Michael Hampson, a somewhat jaded ex-clergyman. He makes the case quite convincingly that the Church of England, riven as it is by the seemingly intractible in-fighting between evangelicals and liberals, severely wounded by the fall-out over the ordination of women and deeply divided on the issue of homosexual clergy, has become increasingly marginalised and irrelevant to mainstream contemporary British society and is, because of these factors, in a state of irreversible and terminal decline. Overall, Hampson posits the view that the CofE has had its day and must reform itself and`downsize' quite considerably if it is to survive at all. It will certainly cease to be the Church of the Nation so perhaps today's news should come as no surprise. It is simply another nail in the Anglican coffin, confirming the inevitable.
The more I mull over this, the more its implications seem to multiply (with regard to our constitution, culture and so on). This is an important topic which I shall, no doubt, return to and expatiate upon in the future.
Bone Idle
Dr William PriceDr William Price (1800-1893) of Pontypridd, South Wales was a remarkable character. Price was a medical practitioner and an antiestablishment freethinker who, in his day, was considered at best eccentric and at worst a raving lunatic. With the benefit of hindsight, Price was probably a visionary and many of his `eccentricities' would not seem so out of place nowadays. He declared himself to be an Archdruid and dressed accordingly. Price championed such causes as vegetarianism and naturism. He denounced such things as the wearing of socks, marriage and the Christian religion and he outraged the good people of the South Wales valleys by naming his (illegitimate) child, fathered in his eighties, Iesu Grist, which is Welsh for Jesus Christ. Price also railed against the practice of earth burial and in 1884 he performed an act that caused him to be vilified locally and resulted in his arrest and trial. The five month old Iesu Grist died and Price cremated the body in what many saw as a provocative act of blasphemous paganism.
Price believed burial to be the antithesis of all that was aesthetic, hygienic, and scientific, resulting in "wastage of land, pollution and danger to the living" and so...
`Three days after death he took the tiny body of Iesu Grist...wrapped in white linen to the top of a nearby hill [Caerlan fields, Llantrisant]. He gently placed it in a barrel of paraffin oil [a case report states `ten gallons of petrolium'] and set it alight. People returning from chapel were astonished to see the fire and thick black smoke and rushed to the spot. The partially consumed body was snatched from the burning pile and the crowd threatened to mob Price. The arrival of the police prevented this, and Price was placed under arrest. Conducting his own defence at Cardiff Assizes, William Price was acquitted of the charges against him. Cremation was deemed lawful, provided that it did not constitute a public nuisance. The proceedings attracted international interest. Price's next scheme was to build a public crematorium locally, but he was unable to finance this. He demanded that he be given the body of his own child and, determined and fearless, he succeeded in carrying out his cremation unmolested three months later, when he burned the body in a half ton of coal.'
This rather macabre tale was of immense historical importance however. What Price did horrified devout non-conformist Wales but the cremation of Iesu Grist was something of a landmark in that it clarified the legality of cremation in Britain thus paving the way for the cremation act of 1902 and the popularisation of this practice thereafter.
Bone Idle
Ullr - the Norse god of snow 
I am aware that some of my recent postings have, perhaps, focussed a little too narrowly on certain strange and gruesome incidents in Indian religions. In the interests of balance and fairness however, I might opine that such tales of decapitation (which was always very much a minority pastime anyway) and the like are no more bizarre and awful than the phenomenon of self-castration in the Christian world. It is probably because of its identification of sex with sin that Christianity has thrown up its own fair share of those who were drawn to this most extreme of measures, in order to avoid any form of concupiscence whatsoever. Historically, perhaps the most highly organised and widespread example of this was the heretical Russian Orthodox sect known as the Skoptsy ("the self-castrated ones"). The Skoptsy movement began in the late 18th century and lasted well into the 1930s. This weird sect adopted a literalist reading of Christ's words: "...for there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven..." (Matthew 19:12). Just as the Gospels say that "if an eye offend you, pluck it out," so the Skoptsy avoided sexual temptation by removing all of the male genitalia and mutilating the female pudenda and lactatory glands. At its zenith in the 1800s, the sect reached 100,000 to 300,000 followers, with about half of the sect so castrated. Laura Engelstein has penned an eye-watering account of their history and practices in her 1999 book `Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom'. Although fundamentally an academic work, this book is quite accessible to the general reader and includes much anecdotal evidence from the Skoptsy themselves. Drawn almost entirely from the ranks of the Russian peasantry, once converted, Skoptsy males set about removing the testes and, usually six months later the membrum virile - procedures which were undertaken using the tools and techniques of animal husbandry. It was also customary for these new converts to perform this excrutiating procedure on their sons just prior to the onset of puberty - aargh! I must admit, though, that I did find some humour in Engelstein's book. The Skoptsy were outlawed in Tsarist Russia and when caught and brought to trial, often came up with some quite implausible explanations for their emasculation. One Skopets, for example, claimed that he had castrated himself to facilitate greater comfort in horse-riding! I could not help but to feel sorry though for the tragic plight of those unfortunate Skoptsy youths who would later, in all probability, reject their parents' belief systems. Engelstein traces the history of this sect until it died out with the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, but I can't help wondering if any of them went `underground' and survived into the present day. Are there any Skoptsy still out there? If anyone who chances upon this post can shed any light on this question, I'd be interested to hear. 
A rather curious (if a little extreme) religious practice is that of self-beheading. Apparently head offerings were highly valued in ancient southern India. The ultimate offering which a Sakta (one concerned with the worship of the divine feminine) could make was that of his own head. This procedure was performed by lopping the head off with a sword, a sabre, or an ingenious instrument called a gandakattera - a tool which was designed specifically to facilitate auto-decapitation. The Venetian merchant Nicolo di Conti, who visited India around the year 1420 gives this vivid description of how the gandakattera was used:
