Dwilight University/Humanities/Burial Practices of the Desert of Silhouettes

The Burial Practices of the Desert of Silhouettes

While journeying through the Desert of Silhouettes I observed a unique concept of burial and a peculiar belief of the afterlife.

For the desert dwellers, when one dies their spirit rises out of the corpse and begins to wander. By this belief, in the Desert of Silhouettes you will find small empty villages built on the base of the Divide Mountains covered in white chalk, cloth or any other whitening material.

These empty villages are actually the desert’s burial sites. The straw houses in these villages are built over graves. They act as dwelling places for the spirits of the dead. The whitening is used to designate the literal ghost towns from living villages. The people of the desert believe that when a spirit leaves its body, it will begin to look around for something to do. This they say happens seven days after death. That is the time limit they have to build a new hut in the ghost town and bury the dead under it. A procession usually occurs from the village to the ghost town, but sometimes the distance is too great and the villagers will ignore the usual rituals for expedience. It is imperative the spirit wakes up in the ghost town, else it will be too late to have them forget their sense of direction.

The shamans told me a spirit has three options when it leaves its hut for the first time. One is to wander the vast desert in search of where they lived when they were alive, two is to stay in the ghost town and live amongst the rest of the dead, or three, to climb the mountain.

If they were to bury their dead near their own villages the spirits will enter the village and will start to harass, possess and interfere with the living. If the dead are buried next to the mountain, the desert people believe that the spirit will see the mountain as a great challenge and climb to the top. Since most desert people have either never seen the mountain or never climbed it, most spirits are excited to be able to do what they were restricted from doing during life. It is a firm belief that there is a large crowd of spirits loitering at the top of the Divide Mountains.

There is a warning for the living that approach white covered villages near the base of the mountain, if a spirit sees you they may follow you back to living civilization. To stop that from happening, one must start a fire in the direction opposite of where you are traveling. In this way, you will cause the spirits’ attention to be placed on the fire and not on yourself. Then you may safely travel away from the burial site.

We can appreciate the foreignness of this belief and perhaps find insight into our own concepts of the afterlife. How do they know the spirits wander around? What do we think happens to us after death? Would we go to the extent of building whole villages just for the dead or would we take the chance and just put our deceased anywhere? I especially wonder what a desert dweller thinks about our burial practices. No doubt they believe our cities and regions are congested with wandering spirits.

Lord Bowie Ironsides,

Summer of 9 YD (or the 18th of December, 2009)