Death Rituals, Ceremonies & Traditions Around the World Death rituals are nearly non-existent in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and death ceremonies often consist only of a wake or a funeral, and then...nothing. This wasn’t always the case. ...
Death rituals around the world Buddhism Buddhists believe that death is a cycle they call Samsara. When we die we are reincarnated and we prepare for our re-birth. This cycle is only broken once we reach a point of enlightenment called Nirvana. For Buddhists of all cultures, the transition...
Last year I went back to Indonesia with producer and VJ Bjarke Ahlstrand to record some video on the amazing rituals they practice in Tana Toraja. Have a look at our little teaser here:About the photographer Klaus Bo is a freelance photojournalist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. With a long an...
Nevertheless, the death is not complete until the spirit has liberated itself from the body. This consideration has been taken into account in deathbed and mourning rituals that are intended to assist the soul to abandon the body and proceed on its afterlife journey. It was not unusual to ...
With the completion of these rituals, the soul of the deceased leaves this world for its yearlong and perilous journey to Yama’s kingdom. The family is now formally cleansed. The men shave their heads, and the women wash their hair. The family’s tutelary god (removed by a friend at ...
There it was laid to rest, or cremated and given an urn burial, in a family plot that often contained a structure to house the dead. Upon returning from the funeral, the family purified themselves and the house through rituals of fire and water. ...
…objects, in styles, and in burial rituals have been used to subdivide the period. The most basic division uses the same criteria as Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s Three Age system, in which the material used for producing tools and weapons distinguishes an age. This has resulted in a disti...
ritualssolidarityLife is normally expected to proceed through childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. What happens then if death occurs at some earlier phase of life and not at a far distant time in people's everyday lives? This will most often be a sudden and unexpected death. How do ...
To live through the death of one's own child is perhaps one of the most painful experiences known to humankind. It is instinctive in parents to nourish and protect their child. Death is to be fought, even to the point of sacrificing their own life. If the fight is lost, life is quite...
Religious belief and practice had given priority to helping the dying person leave this world in a state of grace and to providing a proper funeral with meaningful and comforting rituals. This tradition was overstressed by the reality of catastrophic death: too many people dying too quickly with ...