Throughout history, stories murmur of souls so fiercely devoted that they set themselves ablaze under the weight of religious persecution. Yet, the records grow strangely mute about what came next—no tales of blazing funeral pyres or feasts to honor the fallen. It’s as if some heavy-handed authority scrubbed these rites from memory, leaving us to ponder: why the silence?
Consider a time of sweeping religious upheaval—a moment when flames became a grim refuge. Why choose self-immolation, a death so savage it stops the heart cold? The answer flickers clear: it was a desperate act to complete sacred funeral rites in one blazing instant. With no one left to tend the pyre, these defiant spirits seized control of their end. Across the ages, the burning of so-called heretics warped into something sinister—a twisted parody of ancient funeral feasts held by those deemed outsiders or dissenters.
Certain powers, it seems, mastered the art of disrupting death’s natural flow. They tampered with the body’s endgame, blocking the martyred soul from ascending to higher realms. For these rebels, self-immolation wasn’t mere escape—it was a final, living chant sung to themselves as the fire roared. Yet, some traditions recoiled from cremation, eyeing it with distrust or outright rejection. Curious, isn’t it? Sacred texts often suggest the body should turn to dust, not fester—fire, not rot, as its destiny.
So, what’s the true road for a soul to cross into the beyond, and where does cremation fit? Imagine a mythic past, shimmering a few centuries back, where death wasn’t the shadow we fear. Life stretched long and golden—no one plotting their exit. At a peak of spiritual growth, people slipped into an enchanted, dreamlike slumber. The mighty rested in grand tombs, the humble in simple crypts—sleepers all, tended by keepers of the old ways.
In this trance, over months, their bodies reshaped, emerging timeless, like butterflies breaking free. Awake, they’d shatter the crypt’s lid—crafted to ward off beasts—and step into the light. Life as we know it? Just a crude first act. After this deep sleep—echoing tales of resurrection—they’d live on, radiant in reborn flesh.
Death struck rarely, mostly on battlefields. Kin wove a cycle of return: an elder, nearing the end, might pact with their line to rejoin as a child. Chanters—long since silenced—called the rites. Lovers could bind their fates across lives; if one fell, the other might leap into the pyre, aligning their rebirths to walk anew.
Picture it as a fable of a lost Golden Age, where the funeral pyre wasn’t dread but deliverance. It shattered the body fast, unmooring the soul and its ethereal twin from earthly bonds. A person’s essence—spirit and flesh—clung after death until decay crept in. Cremation severed those ties. With a funeral feast, the soul rose free to higher planes, while its shadow became a guardian, tied to the kin by scattered ashes. That threshold, blessed with ash, turned sacred—no greetings across it, lest you slight the spirits. In unions, one carried the other over, weaving them into the protective fold.
“Foes at the gate” wasn’t mere talk—it was the kin’s unseen sentinels at work, scaling up to shield the homeland. This was the ancients’ unbreakable web—centuries young in body, victorious until cataclysms and floods ripped it apart. Invaders mopped up the rest, and soon, elders couldn’t name their forebears. Conquerors reshaped the survivors: new names, a death-obsessed creed, alien garb, calendars, and rites—erasing the old ways.
Today’s death-words? Empty husks. “Funerary” once meant a vault—a store for treasures, not corpses. “Buried” was to hide, to safeguard—nothing of death. Graveyards were hoards, not tombs. Death itself? Its root hints at “to measure,” a shift in realms, not a hard stop. Terms like “departed” tied to slumber, not slaughter—think trance, not termination. “Rest” meant peace, a sync with the world, not its farewell.
Then the outsiders swept in. They found crypts teeming with sleepers—beings mid-leap to immortality, like legends of rising after torment. The invaders razed it all. Kin fought to “bury”—to save—their dreaming loved ones, birthing our skewed rites. Crypts sank into vaults or fields, and “graveyard” twisted from “treasure hold” to bone yard. The new rulers staked the sleepers’ hearts, spun yarns of monsters, and burned dissenters to snuff out any rebirth.
Wisdom faded. Healers mistook deep slumber for death, burying the living with the gone. Tales of clawing from graves sparked stone slabs—traps to cage the “risen.” Dissections sealed the fate, slashing any hope of waking. Cremation vanished, and with it, the soul’s ascent. Buried bodies lingered, chaining their shadows—not protectors now, but leeches draining the living.
Graveyards morphed into death altars, relics and mummies pinning mighty souls to earth. The finest—warriors, sages—trapped by undecayed flesh, lost their cosmic trail. Burial birthed a death cult; the Golden Age drowned in soil. Now, corpses don’t even crumble—stuffed with preservatives, defying dust. Who’s left to notice?
Only those who’ve scaled the heights of spiritual mastery can slip into the deep, mystic embrace of lethargic sleep. That’s why the bodies of saints defy the ravages of decay—not dead, but cradled in this sacred slumber. To tell sleep from death, time is the arbiter: the departed must be set aside, “withdrawn” for at least three days, to see if rot creeps in. The sleeper, still and serene, is borne to the tomb for this quiet watch.
Should the body begin to smolder—faint tendrils of decay curling forth—it must be given to the flames. Fire alone can liberate the astral shadow, the soul’s silent twin, setting it free to rise. Left tethered to a smoldering shell, that shade lingers for years, a spectral leech drawing vitality from the living kin who remain.
To entomb the body in the earth? That’s a forbidden act—a violation of this unseen order.
There’s a belief, woven through the threads of esoteric wisdom, that cremating a corpse and burning a living soul are not one and the same. Nature’s hidden laws draw a sharp line between the two: fire after death unshackles the spirit, releasing it from its earthly husk, while flames consuming the living might bind the soul in ways unseen, trapping it within this realm.
