Cremation

Hindu antyeshti is described within the tradition as the final samskara, the last in a sequence of rites that began before birth, and its logic is continuous with what came before. A life punctuated by offerings into fire ends with the body itself as the offering.

The chief mourner, traditionally the eldest son, lights the pyre. Partway through the burning he performs kapala kriya, striking the skull to open it, which is understood to release what is held there. The ashes and remaining bone are collected and immersed in flowing water, ideally the Ganges, and the family enters a period of impurity that ends with a formal rite.

The work is not over at the pyre. Over the following days offerings of rice balls are made, and these are understood to build up a subtle body for the deceased, who until then is in an unsettled and slightly dangerous state as a preta. A further rite incorporates the newly dead into the company of the ancestors, and an annual offering thereafter maintains them. The full sequence is set out at length in the Garuda Purana, which is read to the bereaved during the mourning period and is the text most families encounter for it.

There are exceptions and they are instructive. Very young children are buried rather than burned, and so are renunciants, who performed their own funeral rites at the time of their initiation and are held to have no further ritual debt to discharge. What determines the treatment is the person's ritual standing rather than any general rule about bodies.

Buddhist cremation follows the treatment of the Buddha's own body as described in the Pali canon, and it produced relics, which were divided and enshrined. The stupa as an architectural form starts there, which means that a very large amount of Buddhist sacred architecture is downstream of one funeral.

Judaism, Islam and historic Christianity all refused cremation, and the arguments are related but not identical: a body made in the divine image is not ours to destroy; burial returns it to the earth as the text says; the resurrection is a doctrine about bodies and not about souls escaping them.

Christianity is the tradition in which the position moved, and the reason it moved is largely political rather than theological.

Cremation was revived in nineteenth-century Europe by societies that were, in several countries, explicitly anticlerical and said so. Choosing to be burned was a public statement about the church, and the church's prohibition was in significant part a refusal of that statement rather than a claim about what fire does to a body. The Holy Office made this reasonably explicit when it relaxed the ban in 1963, permitting cremation where it is not chosen in denial of Christian doctrine. The 1983 Code of Canon Law records the same position: burial is earnestly recommended, cremation is not forbidden unless chosen for reasons contrary to the faith.

The Vatican returned to the subject in 2016 with an instruction stating that ashes are to be kept in a cemetery or other sacred place, and are not to be scattered, divided among relatives, kept at home or made into jewellery. The reasoning given is that a Christian body is not private property and that public burial is part of what the church owes the dead. That instruction is widely ignored, including by practising Catholics, and it is the clearest recent case of a doctrinal body legislating against a practice that had already become normal.

Orthodox Christianity did not move. Neither did Islam, where cremation remains forbidden without significant dissent. Jewish practice moved only within the liberal movements, and there against a background that makes the discussion unusually difficult to hold.

The Bahai position is separate and unusually specific: burial only, no cremation, no embalming, and interment within an hour's journey of the place of death.

Zoroastrian law forbids both burial and cremation, and it forbids them for the same reason it forbids almost everything else concerning a corpse. Earth, fire and water are pure. A dead body is the most polluting thing there is. It may not be given to any of them.

The traditional solution was exposure. The body is carried to a dakhma, a stone tower open to the sky, and left for birds to strip; the dry bones are then placed in a central ossuary pit where lime and rain reduce them. The system is efficient, it uses no fuel and no land, and it depends absolutely on there being vultures.

There are almost none left. Populations of the resident Gyps vultures across the Indian subcontinent collapsed by more than ninety-five per cent from the mid-1990s. The cause was identified in 2004: diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory given to cattle, which is fatal to vultures that feed on treated carcasses. India banned the veterinary formulation in 2006. The birds have not returned at anything like the rate that would matter to a community with a functioning dakhma.

The consequence at Doongerwadi, the wooded Parsi funerary estate in central Mumbai, is that bodies which once disappeared within hours now do not. The Bombay Parsi Punchayet installed solar concentrators, arrays of mirrors that focus sunlight into the tower to desiccate the remains, on the reasoning that sunlight is not one of the prohibited elements. They work in the dry season and much less well in the monsoon. Some Parsis have moved to burial or to cremation, which the orthodox regard as a straightforward abandonment of the law; others regard the concentrators as an equally objectionable innovation; a vulture breeding programme has been discussed for years.

This is worth stating plainly because it is an unusual kind of religious problem. Nothing about the doctrine has changed and no one has argued against it. A veterinary drug removed a bird, and a rite that had worked for something like a thousand years stopped working. Zoroastrians in Iran had already largely moved to burial in concrete-lined graves during the twentieth century, on the reasoning that concrete keeps the corpse from touching the earth, and that solution is now discussed in India too.