Lifestyle

Bizarre funeral rituals from around the world

We’re doing death all wrong, says mortician Caitlin Doughty.

Doughty argues in her new book, “From Here to Eternity” (WW Norton), that the US funeral industry has become “more expensive, more corporate and more bureaucratic than any other funeral industry on earth.”

Doughty should know. She runs the funeral parlor Undertaking LA and is the founder of The Order of the Good Death, an online community for morticians. A follow-up to her bestselling memoir “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory,” the new book describes funeral rituals around the world in order to get readers to “see the beauty in that difference.”

“There was magic to each of those places. There was grief, unimaginable grief. But in that grief there was no shame. These were places to meet despair face to face and say, ‘I see you waiting there. And I feel you, strongly,’ ” Doughty writes.

Here are some of her featured funeral rituals from around the world — some of which might shock you.

Barcelona, Spain

The modern Altima funeral home in Barcelona is “Google-headquarters-meets Church of Scientology.” The site’s 63 employees handle one-quarter of all the deaths in Barcelona — on average about 10 to 12 bodies a day. They have gorgeously manicured grounds, white stone walls, an espresso bar and (oddly) free Wi-Fi.

They honor the long-held tradition of encasing dead bodies in glass and offer two styles: the Spanish-style viewing, where the body is behind one pane of glass like a department store window, or the Catalan-style, where the body is laid out in a display case in the center of the room.

Once the decision is made, the family can rent a room and spend an entire day with the body.

Cullowhee, North Carolina

The Forensic Osteology Research Station at Western Carolina University, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, is home to what lay people call a “body farm,” where donated corpses are used for forensic and law-enforcement training.

But Katrina Spade, the founder of the Urban Death Project there, has a different goal for the training facility: to compost human bodies. “It’s a delicate sales pitch,” admits Doughty in the book.

The goal of the center is for it to be scalable worldwide — especially in urban centers where space for burying the dead is limited.

“Mourners would carry the dead person up a ramp built around a central core made of smooth concrete. At the top, the body would be laid into a carbon-rich mixture that would, in four to six weeks’ time, reduce the body (bones and all) to soil,” writes Doughty.

Spade’s team works on the logistics of composting, mixing nitrogen-rich items (food waste, grass clippings, a human body) into a pile of material high in carbon content (wood chips) and moisture — and voila ! Rich soil. “During those four to six weeks you’re in the core, you’d cease to be human,” Spade said. “Molecules literally turn into other molecules. You transform.”

The hope is that a family will collect the soil after a month and incorporate it in a garden. “A mother who loved to garden can, herself, give rise to new life,” writes Doughty.

Tokyo, Japan

Glass Buddha statues illuminated by light-emitting diodes sit inside the Ruriden columbarium at the Koukokuji temple.Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Japanese have the highest cremation rate in the world — 99.9 percent — and many of their rituals revolve around making the ceremony as special as possible.

At the Ruriden columbarium at the Koukokuji Buddhist Temple on a quiet street in the heart of Tokyo, people’s cremated remains correspond to glowing Buddha statues that put on light shows for mourners to enjoy. “When a family member comes to the Ruriden, they either type in the name of the deceased or pull out a smart card with a chip, similar to the cards used on Tokyo’s subways. After the family keys in at the entrance, the walls light up in blue, except for one single Buddha shimmering clear white. No need to squint through the names trying to find Mom — the white light will guide you straight to her.”

Berlin, Germany

Like citizens of many European countries, German don’t buy burial plots, they rent them. In Berlin, this is 20 or so years. After the body’s allotted time is up, the corpse is placed in a mass grave. Recently, as cremation rates have climbed and cemetery land has become much more expensive, burial plots are being repurposed for a multitude of uses, including parks, community gardens and even children’s playgrounds.

Crestone, Colorado

This small picturesque Colorado mountain town houses the only legal, public open-air cremation facility — a funeral pyre — in the United States. Doughty attended the funeral of a woman named Laura there: Mourners laid juniper boughs on Laura’s body and circled her, stacking pinyon pine and spruce logs, which burn more intensely than other types of wood, watching as the fire consumed her body.

The funeral pyre attracts people from all over the world, some of whom relocate to the small town and buy land to quality for open-air cremation.

“A 42-year-old woman, dying of cervical cancer, obtained a small plot of land and when she died, her 12-year-old daughter helped prepare her body for the pyre,” writes Doughty.

The Crestone End-of-Life Project opened in 2007 and has performed more than 60 “personalized rituals” since. Each costs a mere $500, technically a donation “to cover wood, fire-department presence, stretcher and land use.”

Tibet

Tibetan rogyapas — body breakers — remove the flesh and crush the bones of the dead before leaving them for vultures.Reuters

In Tibet, where wood is too scarce for cremation and the ground is too rocky for burials, they practice something that might be shocking to most Westerners: celestial burial.

In Doughty’s words: “A dead man is wrapped in cloth in the fetal position, the position he was born . . . Buddhist lamas chant over the body before it is handed over the rogyapa, the body breaker. The rogyapa unwraps the body and slices into the flesh, sawing away the skin, and strips the muscle and tendon.”

Meanwhile, huge Himalayan griffon vultures — with nine-foot wingspans — gather and watch, waiting for the signal to descend upon the body.

“The rogyapa pounds the defleshed bones with a mallet, crushing them together with tsama, barley flour mixed with yak butter or milk.

The rogyapa may strategically lay the bones and cartilage out first and hold back the best pieces of flesh. He doesn’t want the vultures to have their fill of the best cuts of meat and lose interest, flying off before the entirety of the body is consumed.”

When the vultures finally descend and the body is consumed, the body is considered “return[ed] back to nature, where it can be of use.”

The Tibetan government banned any documentation of celestial burials in 2005, but tourists (mostly from eastern China) still arrive by the busload to watch the spectacle.

Guanajuato, Mexico

This home of a famed mummy collection scared the pants off “Fahrenheit 451” author Ray Bradbury when he visited the site in the late 1970s. “The experience so wounded and terrified me, I could hardly wait to flee Mexico,” he wrote. “ I had nightmares about dying and having to remain in the halls of the dead with those propped and wired bodies.”

But those bodies were not meant to frighten. In the late 19th century, corpses buried in the local cemetery were given a “grave tax.” If the families couldn’t cough up the dough, remains were disinterred to make room for a corpse whose family could pay the fee. During one unearthing, they didn’t find bones but mummies — thanks to the soil’s chemical components that had naturally preserved the bodies. Because they were not artificially mummified, the corpses have gaping mouths and twisted arms and necks thanks to the “primary flaccidity” of the muscles as they relax. “All of the muscles in the body relax, dropping the jaw open, loosening the tension in the eyelids, and affording the joints extreme flexibility,” writes Doughty.

As locals exhumed other mummified bodies, they decided to capitalize on their findings and put them on display in the town museum, El Museo de las Momias.