Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History of Grief: Sky Burials & Victorian Death Photos

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Why did the Victorians dress up their dead relatives for photo shoots?What are the origins of embalming? And why do most of us have such a separated relationship with death?Helping Kate get to the bottom of all of this is the wonderful Brandy Schillace, author of Death's Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Teaches Us About Life and Living.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Voting is open for the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards, so if you enjoy what we're doing, we'd love it if you took a quick follow this link and click on Betwixt the Sheets: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXT.You can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You're here, I'm here, the guests here. Everybody is here and ready to go. But I have to tell you, fair do's. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults

to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Right, I feel safer. I hope you feel safer. Hang on, I've got a note from my producer. Stu, we can't keep nagging these people to vote for us for the listeners choice awards at this year's British podcast awards.

We can't, we're being too aggressive with it. They know how good the podcast is. No, they already know that if they want to vote for Twix for the listeners choice awards at this year's British Podcast Awards, they have to go to wwwwbritishpodcastawards.com forward slash voting. They know that. I don't think we can keep telling them that. It's coming off as too aggressive.

All right. so we're not doing that at the top of this show. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining me, betwixters. You might be wondering what we are doing stood out here on the Himalayas. Perhaps you think that we're here for a hike or to get some outdoor air,

but really, that's only partly true. We are here to pay our respects and witness the unique sky burials of Tibet. Because not everywhere has soft, fertile ground under which they can bury their debt. or wood to build a fire to burn them on. Here, Buddhists leave their loved ones to be offered up to the birds above and the animals that roam on the mountaintops.

I mean, it's all about adapting to your surroundings, right? And when we compare this to our rather shut away and private relationship with death in the West, this custom can seem absolutely bizarre. But I say we have to confront it. We have to confront death. It's something that we're all going to. going to do, why should a sky burial be any stranger than anything else? And in order to get that

conversation going and that ball rolling, I'm not suggesting for one second that you start leaving the remains of your loved ones out on the village green after listening to this, but we do need to have a conversation about how we deal with death. And in order to do that, that's exactly what we're talking about today. What do you look for a man? Oh, money of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning the knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry.

Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. As a saying goes, there are two guarantees in life, death and taxes. But as I alluded to a moment ago, we in the West developed a real cultural separation from death. It's not something we're comfortable with at all, which is unsoundable to a degree because death is, well, it's kind of shit, isn't it? There's no getting away from that. I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's an absolute blast, but I am in no rush to find out. How have we thought about death and grieving historically? How did Queen Victoria trailblaze the grieving process? And what can we learn from other cultural approaches from around the world?

Joining me today is the marvellous Brandy Schillichet, author of Death Summer Coat, What the History of, Death and Dying teaches us about life and living, who is going to help us find out. Black Veils at the ready, Betwixters, let's do this. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the sheets. It's only Brandi Scalotche. How are you doing? I am okay. I'm handling life as well as one can in 2024.

Isn't that? The bar is so low now. That's where people are of just like, well, I'm here. and I'm facing the right way and I'm dressed. That's really about as much as you can expect. I'm in the United States in an election year where one of the candidates is a convicted felon. I'm just saying, like, you know, there's a lot.

It's an interesting time, isn't it? It's an interesting time. Don't you just sometimes think about what historians in the future are going to make of this particular time period? Like, there'll be one of them going, no, no, no, a reality TV star really was the president. That really would happen. Well, I am a historian, and I know what I'm saying.

already, which is, you know, equal parts, disbelief and, you know, dismay. Yeah, that's it. You don't even need to expand on it. Just put it in a book, just dismay and disbelief. Yeah. That will sum this up pretty nicely. But we will segue neatly from Trump's election campaign into the history of death. Yeah.

Which is what you studied. That is amazing. I mean, I speak to all kinds of people about what they're researching. Death. Wow, that is a big one. What made you want to research the history of death and mourning and grief? Well, so I'm a historian, and as a historian, almost everything I study happened in the past, meaning everyone I study is dead already, generally.

So I do the history of science, I do the history of medicine, and the history of death, it makes a lot of sense to figure out why we have the kind of perceptions that we do. On a personal level, a lot of people in my life have died and has been happening. Well, I mean, it's going to happen to everyone. But my family members, unfortunately, have had a poor run, I guess, since my childhood. So I went to funerals from the time I was a very small person and had some formative experiences that way. And also my parents both have suffered. My mother is recovered from cancer.

My father has recovered, sort of, from several massive. of heart attacks. And so death always felt very near growing up where I did, an abandoned coal mining lands in southern Ohio next to a cemetery. There's just lots of reasons. Wow. Okay. It's like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe novel already. I should maybe mention that we lived underground as well. So my house, I know. My house was underground and I live near a cemetery. So you're sort of at the same general level, you know, as your neighbors. Quiet. They were right next door.

Why you were attracted to this particular subject. The interesting point there that as a historian, pretty much everyone you talk about is dead. That is so true. That is basically what historians do. It's something that most of us have in common. In some ways, it's very convenient because the person can't email you to go,

no, no, that's not right at all, the thing that you're saying right there. Well, if they do, it would be quite a shock. Wouldn't it? I'm not sure what I think about our attitudes to death today. I don't know if I'd be right in saying that we're quite removed from it. It's strange because you were just saying that it is something that we're all going to do. It's and we're all going to experience everyone around us is going to experience it.

And yet we seem quite divorced from it. Like it's just not going to happen to us at all. There's a lot of reasons for that. I'm continuing to write about subjects that are somewhat similar in nature, but the book Death Summercoat came out before the pandemic, but then became suddenly profoundly useful again during the pandemic. And so it was interesting to me as someone who had studied and researched this prior to COVID, and then watching everyone suddenly be confronted with death on a grand scale

and being quite unprepared to do so and what that has meant. And for a window of time, people were suddenly, asking a lot of questions and wanting to confront, what do we do? Suddenly, so many people they knew were grieving in some way. And the thing that's even more interesting is how now you don't see much talk about that. So it's not as though it was that long ago. It's not as though people don't still expire from COVID-related illnesses or, you know, we found out it affects your heart, so it has shortened some other lifespans. But we were really keen to stop facing death. And that's interesting, I think, culturally, to be a historian living through this moment was very unusual and interesting.

We're separated from death for good reasons. It's the success of medicine, really. So my period, I studied the 17th, 18th, 19th century. In the 18th century, you were going to encounter death like everywhere. Prior to childhood vaccinations, most of your siblings wouldn't make it. Someone would have 12 children and three of them would become adults, you know. So death was around. and the funeral parlor, that's where we get that terminology.

In the 19th century, that was your parlor. That was actually in your house. So people laid in state not at some facility away from home. They didn't die in hospitals. They died where you could see it happening. And as medicine sort of made it more possible for people to survive childhood, to survive illnesses that used to be fatal that now aren't, insulin so that you didn't die of diabetes as a child,

you know, all of these things. And increasingly, you went to the hospital to try not to die, meaning most death tends to take place in that very sterile environment that's kind of mediated by doctors. We don't live amongst death. We don't walk with death anymore like we used to. It does make sense that we would feel divorced from it. I can't remember who wrote it. Maybe I could pretend that I did, but that's not true. But I do remember reading, somebody said about the Victorians in particular, who are fascinating when it comes to death. And I'm sure you're going to tell us. But they were really concerned about sex and repressed that, but completely okay about death, which you see everywhere. And now today, we see sex everywhere and death nowhere.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Well, you know, okay, so first of all, just a little bit of in defense of these sexy Victorians, they weren't nearly as repressed as they wanted everybody to think. What I love about the Victorians is they did this kind of like, they did kind of like, they did kind of like walk with a little placard being like, I'm scared to talk about sex while like buying dildos on the side, right? Like it was a fair. Well, they invented video pornography, didn't they? It's like they couldn't have been that prudent. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, yes. So vibrators did get invented in this, well, a little bit later than that. But essentially, you know, you had things happening. There was plenty of pornography about, but culture, the idea was you put a sort of culturally appropriate face

on there. So we pretend we don't want to talk about it. We pretend, yeah. So when I said, I do think it was repressed, but it wasn't deeply repressed. It was more like, we won't talk about this in polite society kind of thing. But it's quite a myth about the whole covered table legs thing. They didn't do that. They actually look at some of the architecture, which was quite sumptuous, actually, in the Victorian period. But the death thing, you're absolutely 100% correct, and it's to the point of it being a bit creepy. I don't like to use the word creepy in relationship. It is. I know that you can explain the culture and the context, so it makes more sense. but just from when you come to it and you look at some of their death photographs and some of their morning rituals and you're just like, that's creepy.

Okay. So first of all, we have to talk about Momentumori, which the Victorians did not invent. They just commercialized. So there was a lot of people wanted to face death, face fears of death. And early Momentumori were supposed to be, sometimes they be little caskets or small skeletons or whatever to remind you that you two would die. You know, you should repent. It's like little skull things to remind you. Yeah, it was more like, you know, repent and live your life right because you two are mortal. But the Victorians, so this is it. We've invented photography. And early photographs was daguerre types, which would have been done on silver backing. And it's quite expensive to do these plates, these glass plates.

And today we have iPhones. So it's hard to imagine a time period where you might only have one photograph taken of you in your entire life. And it was when you got married. And so people would, they'd give birth. They'd have these beautiful babies. You didn't take photos of the babies. It was too expensive unless you were quite wealthy. Now, what happens if one of them dies?

There's not a single thing that you have that allows you to remember them exactly as they are. So they began taking photographs after death. And this post-mortem photography, what's unusual about it is they wanted to keep this as a momento of their child. They didn't necessarily want to be reminded that the child had already died when the photo was taken. which means they got very creative about posing people who had passed on as though they were still alive. And this is what we find quite alarming and spooky even.

But I guess if you think about it, if you don't have any other pictures of your child and you want to have this picture to remember them, you kind of want them to look like they were alive in the photo. I get it, but it's also distressing. Yeah, I get that. I get that. Yeah. So some of them, I think I'm not as troubled, you know, by the fact that they pose them as though they were living or sleeping or whatever, but they occasionally tried to make them seem awake, which was done in a variety of ways. Sometimes post, that was actually like early Photoshop, you know, they would sort of go back and alter them that way. Not too bad. Not too bad. Yes, sometimes there was other things done to kind of keep eyes open, et cetera. But the more troubling thing to me, and this is what I think we will have somewhat difficulty accepting, is that it's that. they would pose the dead child with their living children. So you would see your three children sitting

on a bench and one of them would have expired. Probably the most unusual photo I've ever seen is a young woman of maybe 15 standing up with her hand resting on her parents. Her parents are both seated. And I was trying to work out which of her parents had died only to discover that she was the one who had died. They had stood her up. So it's a very, very strange. I understand. understand why it happened and I completely get it. But it also becomes as humans, right, we're this way. It kind of becomes part of the fashion. So people would literally write notes about how they wanted to be posed or what they wanted to be posed with or, you know, and that's true of other death memento. So, you know, we talk about morning jewelry and morning

wear, morning attire. And I love the concept. I really do because, hey, these days, I feel like if someone dies, I'm mourning a loved one right now. I'm at a funeral to go to on Friday. But the world does not wait for you. They just want you, you're like, okay, let's go. You know, oh, are you done? You know, what I love about the Victorians is, let's say your husband died. You would wear black, black crape, a fabric that didn't reflect light for a certain

period of time. Then you would move on to black silk. And from there to black satin, which did reflect light. And then to gray. And so you could walk down the street and see people and have a good. understanding of who they had lost and when and how long ago, which meant you were never alone with your grief and you also understood grief as a process. I personally really miss that because I do feel like we almost suffer a kind of post-traumatic response to death when you're asked to still

perform in the world as though nothing has happened to you. And death is final. And if you lose a loved one, it's much more like having an arm amputated than getting sick and getting better. You know, you're never quite the same afterwards. And we just have this myth that it's such a myth that the diagnostic and statistic manual of mental health, the DSM-5, actually pathologizes grief that lasts too long. If someone has died and you're still grieving months later, it's, you know, it's something's wrong with you. Whereas, goodness. Yeah, you know, like Queen Victoria never stopped grieving her husband. She did not. She ran with it. No. She was. She, like, made wearing widow's weeds fashionable.

And, in fact, an entire trade springs up. Like, there were little catalogs that would come out being like, don't be caught, you know, dead in last year's funeral fashion. Sorry, they didn't quite say it that way. But it was seriously, like, you know, it becomes this incredible status symbol, which not everyone could afford either. And that's where you get the black armbands. If you were poor, sometimes you would only be able to afford a piece of black cloth and stone.

Thinking about the photographs again, because I've looked at a fair few of them. And some of them, you wouldn't know that the person is dead unless you knew that you were looking for a dead person. So the ones that I've seen are generally, they're in online catalogs where the reason that it's there is because they want you to know that that is a dead person actually. But in your research, how do you work out that the person is dead? Like, what is it that you're looking for in this to go, oh, that is? a momentum or a photograph? That is a death photograph. Well, there's a couple things. One is that there was quite a trade in this. And so if you investigate a photograph, there will be indications of who took the photograph. There might be like a watermark or something. So A, there's groups of

people that that's all they do. So if it's one of their photos, chances are good. That makes sense. that. Another is that, again, it's such an expensive thing to do that unless it's a sort of fancy, you know, it's a wedding photograph or a dignitaries photograph, if the photograph exists at all, we're probably going to look close because it's expensive. Now, this changes. This changes dramatically as the period goes on. And by the time they've invented the Browning camera, which is basically like an early Polaroid, everyone's taking photographs. So, you know, so you don't necessarily no. They're also handled differently. Often. They are put in little gilded frames. There's a lot else that goes in to beautifying them and they have a kind of melancholy quality

about them. And then, of course, if you just look very, very closely, you can sometimes see where things have been done, changed, added. Yeah, I know. It opens up a whole like conversation, like, well, what the hell was the process of that? Would you take the body to the photographers and they would stand it up? Would you, would they have it a arranged and then you would go in? Like what on earth was... One of the photographs I had liberty to see... It was a gentleman who has since donated them to a museum,

but he had them in his private collection. And one of the ones I saw, they actually had two photographs that were taken. So the one was of the man in the casket, in the photography studio. And on the back of that was instructions. Brush his mustache this way, set him up this way, do this, do that. And then the photographer would essentially pose the body, which isn't as, it's very confusing to people who aren't that familiar with death. They think, well, but rigor mortis, rigor mortis is not permanent.

So that happens pretty soon after death and then it passes off. So you actually become quite flexible. And a body does not immediately begin to decay. I think that's another thing that well taken care of body that has been taken, you know, not left out in the elements, not left open to insects or whatever, is going to be fine for three or four days. So it's not quite as gruesome and awful as people sort of think. death is remarkably slow about its process at first.

A lot of things happen to a body before you actually go, oh, you know, it's noticeable. This is not to be photographed now. Right, right. So they had time. They had a few days to work these things out. I think because we've got photographic evidence and we've got a lot of physical material evidence at the Victorians have left to us with which to try and understand their attitudes to death. And of course, Queen Victoria was really leading the charge in mourning fashion. But it would stand to reason that throughout most of our history, we've viewed death, not in, you know, let's get the Polaroid out kind of a way, but it would have been something that was much more open, something that was much more withers, something that you would have been much more up close and in person throughout most of our history.

Yeah, I mean, this is where cross-cultural comparisons become really useful. So just as, you know, the way we think about bodies and sexuality and everything, very differently from culture to culture. culture, the way we think about what to do with those bodies before and after death also varies considerably. There's a group of people called the Turajans who, and I should say they live in an area where what I'm about to describe is possible just based on climate, but they make mummies out of their dead. And these mummies are not then put in tombs. They are frequently kept in the house. And so there is a sort of household economy of keeping the dead with you. There's a couple of reasons. I know. There's a few reasons for that. One is that they, they don't spend a lot of money on

their weddings. You know, we are just crazy about weddings in the West. People will bankrupt themselves on very expensive weddings. For them, it's the funeral. That's what you need to have money for. That's your cultural, that's your status. That's what proves to everybody what a wonderful person you were. It's pride for your family, etc. So they put on very lavish funerals, which is really no stranger than throwing a lavish wedding, and in fact, is more permanent if you think about it. Death lasts longer than many marriages. All of them, actually. So they would save money.

And if you didn't have enough money to be buried when you died, you died suddenly, they weren't expecting your death, then they would just hang on to you until such time as they could afford that. And they would sort of pretend you were still alive. So when people would ask, how's your grandmother? You would say, well, she's ill. and you would have the body wrapped in the house, and they would still actually set out food for the ailing person.

So it's almost a way of sort of parking your grief, in a sense, until such time as you're ready to put the funeral on. So even though they have already passed, you still have them with you and among you and around you, and you sort of still talk to them and still treat them like they're with you. And that really makes that line between life and death extremely fuzzy. And I know we all think that's bizarre, and occasionally people will take that.

that I've seen pictures of Terrage and mummies. Does this still happen today? Uh-huh, yeah. Okay. But occasionally people will say things like, zombies of blah, blah, blah. Like, they'll make it super, I don't know, sensational. But to them, that's just, you know,

they think it's weird. We pump people full of chemicals to put them in the ground, too. So, yes, death is very present for other places, other parts of the world for good and bad reasons, right? Good reasons because of how you choose to handle life after death. bad reasons because in some, you know, zones are war-torn or there's famine or whatever, or extensive poverty. I'm thinking of Mumbai, for instance.

You're going to see death around you a lot and you will not be able to, you know, there's no way to like avoid your perceptions of it. I'll be back with Brandy after this short break. About how we deal with death in Western cultures, not all Western cultures at all. have a very open relationship with death it would seem with open caskets in the house and bodies being laid out for a while before the funeral. But in general, our process seems to be somebody dies,

then some people turn up and take the body away and then you all get together in a space, a church, or whatever it is, and you say some nice things and the person is taken away. It's actually quite brief that. So we all get together on one day and then we say some nice things, and then that's kind of, that's that. And there is a sense of, well, what do you do now?

Like, is it okay to grieve? You're not to grieve? It seems, I don't think I'd go as far as to have, you know, a relative mummified and put on the sofa. But, like, I would say that conversely, I'm not sure that our current practices are all that healthy. It seems to be very much like, oh, let's just get it done as quick as possible. No, it's true. So when I lost my grandfather, which is something I talk about in the book, he was, from West Virginia and we held a traditional West Virginia funeral and traditional West

Virginian funerals are very different from some of the things you might have seen. Like we held it in a home and that means we took care of washed and dressed the body. Like there were things that you were intimately involved. I didn't personally. I was a child but you know and then it was held in a home like environment which really changed the feeling of the whole situation and it made it and it was a much longer affair. Well my grandmother died by comparison. years later, it was a more traditional Western funeral. And it's like, you know, it's a one and done kind of thing. And that felt alien to me. I was like, that seems wrong, you know. But the other thing, too, is I told you medicine is a good thing. Medicine's a good reason why we're unfamiliar with

death. And that should be something we shouldn't take for granted. But the friend I just lost, she was an artist named Arabella Poffer. And she was amazing. She was just a brightest light ever. and she was diagnosed with cancer three years ago. And she fought it valiantly, but we always knew that it wasn't curable. We knew it was terminal. And she liked to talk a lot about how, you know, people want to pretend it's not.

Yeah. You know, but she was like, let's use this to live big. And she did. She created more art after the diagnosis. She traveled widely after the diagnosis. She really taught a lot of the rest of us how to live, how to live big, you know,

how to appreciate. every moment. So that's because she accepted the fact. She really accepted and faced her terminal diagnosis. She didn't run from it. She didn't pretend it wasn't happening. And she was very honest with everyone around her at all times. And that, I think, is a beautiful thing that you just don't see enough of. Too often, you know, doctors will want to be, they'll even, I've seen this happen. A friend of mine, her mother had breast cancer and the doctors kept trying to like placate by kind of pretending it wasn't as bad as it was. And it's like, no, no, no. That's an incorrect way of dealing with the finality that we all must face. I'm so sorry that you lost your friend.

She sounds amazing. She is amazing. And what a force. And her art is amazing too. She's just an astonishing person. And I think really has helped me, I've said a lot of these things sort theoretically, but has really, she really lived it, you know, and has been, I think, formative to me as kind of solidifying some of the things that I, if you do research off by yourself, but this is personally. Yeah. Just taking it back to the history, I'm wondering how something like, because you touched on COVID and we can get to that, but something like the First World War and the Second World War, how they would have impacted grieving, because if you're coming out of the Victorian period where it's very open and very immediate to the point where we're having

family photograph sessions with dead bodies. The war, that must have had the impact that you didn't even have a body to grieve, that you couldn't bury a body. How would that or how did that impact our attitudes to death and grieving? How do you grieve when there isn't, when there aren't bodies on that kind of a scale? Closure is something that is difficult for. us all anyway. And I think there is a particularly in war where you are never 100% sure, you know, are they, are they gone? Are they kidnapped? Are they prisoners of war? You know, there's all this kind of, it resonates with you. But I think I'm going to actually talk about something other than that, which I think reflects on it, which is the Pol Pot period in Cambodia,

which I write a bit about that, if you don't know about it, the Khmer Rouge, like they just murdered. It was massive, just went through and just mowed people down and there were massive graves. And it was genocide level, just burying bodies and pits kind of thing. And what's interesting is in Cambodia, the way they handle death is they believe that you need to perform sort of a kind of prayer chant over the bodies of your deceased loved ones to sort of help move the spirit forward. And this is a really integral part of their ritual and their faith and their religion. And so, suddenly the not having a body talk about not having closure, you also feel like you haven't done your duty to them. You haven't helped them move on, much less yourself moving on. And so something

really astonishing happened after the period had ended. They actually altered their own traditions. They essentially decided that anything that was sort of a momento of that person, photograph a piece of clothing, something that belonged to them, could stand in for the body. to provide that closure, and they would perform the prayer chance over that object. And they did this in groups and communal ceremonies, and it was a big communal-oriented healing session of how to move on from this incredibly horrible, like, unimaginable mass grief that resulted of not being able to have this closure. So I think with World Wars, with current wars, with things that are happening,

refugees are fleeing countries and they know loved ones are gone and they can't get back, you know, there's always going to be this sense that you weren't there to make that final closure or make that final connection. But the thing that I think is most important to remember is that you can't actually do grief wrong. We can change the way we grieve. We can change the rituals of how we go about grief. One of the great losses of the modern era is that when we pulled away from organized religions, we left some of the good stuff behind. You know, rituals are important to us as humans. It's a part of storytelling. It's a part of understanding your life. And we can make new ones. You know, we can take the things that worked and we can do something with that. We can have

our own kinds of mini funerals or memorials or build our own rituals around that sense of passage passing through and passing beyond. So I think, on one hand, yeah, it's horrendous when you are unable to have that closure. But that doesn't mean closure isn't possible. Another type of ritual you write about in your book is one that I hadn't heard of for sky burials in Tibet. Can you just explain a bit about that one? Yeah. So, you know, I think we take for granted why we do the things that we do. We tend not to ask questions about the way we do things. There's a joke once where a man asks his wife, why does she cut the end off of a ham before she puts it in the oven?

She says, what my mother did. So he asked the mother, why do you cut the end off of a ham? She goes, well, that's what my grandmother did. So we asked the grandmother, and she said, well, my oven was real small. So we don't always know where these customs come from, right? But yet we take them for granted. We bury bodies because we can, because we can work the soil. Tibet is a cold and frozen area and there aren't trees to burn things with, so you couldn't cremate.

And the ground is frozen almost all the time, so you can't bury anyone. So we're often driven. Our rituals are frequently driven by the environment in which we live. How are you going to get rid of a body if you can't bury it and you can't burn it? Well, you can give it back to nature, and that's kind of what they have done. So in this particular area, there are quite a lot of birds of prey and also carrying birds. So they essentially have decided to offer up the remains to nature to these animals. And they also believe in reincarnation and also in the kind of wheel of life concept of things.

So it's a giving back to the earth from which you came. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is what we say. here it involves actually ritually taking apart a body and ritually sacrificing it to birds. When you say we threw some bodies to the birds, it sounds awful, but what they actually do is so much more gentle than that. They wrap the bodies, there's a ceremony, there's a parade, the family stands at a distance where you're not going to get a good, a real up-close view on any of this. And then a person whose job this is essentially dissects the body and feeds it to, and the Birds know that this is happening. They're aware that this is a tradition. So they come. They don't

leave you in, they don't leave you hanging. And they, you know, they take away what would otherwise, you know, potentially rot and cause all kinds of problems, not to mention the fact that you don't necessarily want to encounter your loved ones lying out in a field somewhere years afterwards. Right. So, but yes, this is called sky burial. It is practiced in Tibet. Also, there's some types of this that have been practiced by other native peoples as well. There's a, a version of it, the Parcy religion, they have the Tower of Silence, and this is another place where they put bodies that animals can then, you know, get to and dispose that for you. So it's actually quite ecologically sound. It's just, we don't understand why we're like, no, no,

we do this. There's a coffin and, you know, you embal. And also embalming, by the way, is relatively new. Do you know why we embalm? Do you know where that started? No, I don't know why we embalm. Okay, so, as I said, most of the time, if you're keeping a body cool and away from, you know, insects and things, you've got time before you have to bury. You don't actually have to embalm it. We do so because it preserves the body longer and that's sometimes nicer for open caskets and things like that. But to be honest, it began after the Civil War in America when they couldn't get bodies hot, it's summer, it's coming from the south, they couldn't get bodies home to be

buried or even recognized by their loved ones in time. So the embalming process was to help preserve the bodies long enough for them to be recognized and buried. And it caught on. And this isn't the first time a strange death practice has caught on. I'm going to tell you one, which is much less gross, I think, but funnier, this is a long time ago. During the bubonic plague era, during the the height of the black death, the ground, the soil became so incredibly thick with microorganisms because there was a lot of decay happening and there was a lot of bacteria, that it would essentially render a body to bones really, really fast. Wow. Yeah. So then they would, because they were running out of space, they would then sometimes dig the bones up to make a new

hole to put a new body in. And so this super decomposey dirt became fashionable. So sometimes wealthy people who were not going to be buried in these holes in the ground would order in the special magic dirt to go in their coffins so that they would decompose quickly because it became fashionable to be rendered into bones fast quickly. And there's a whole lot of reasons for why being bones instead of a rotting body appeals. I think that's part of the draw of cremation as well. But, you know, we do strangely sometimes build popularity contests out of the most unusual things as humans. Strangest things. Yeah.

To be honest, I hadn't even realized that we do still embalm bodies. I wouldn't even, how is that even done? That's just, how does it push through the veins? So it's different depending on where you live. So I'm in the United States, and it's quite ubiquitous here. It's not always done. It is frequently done. But there's also a bit more of a sort of green burial movement where people are going,

maybe we shouldn't put these chemicals in the ground. So, you know, there's been more of that, more of a push for that recently. But the embalming process is quite a fascinating one. They basically are going to flush out your fluids and put in preservatory fluids. And they don't preserve you forever unless they overdo it, which has happened on occasion. But generally speaking, it just preserves you for a bit longer than normal. I was just, I'm thinking the whole time that we've been talking, but I wonder if we're getting a bit better about talking about death and grief. because there are a multitude of ways that you can elect to be disposed of

that you can pick from. You can go for burying in the ground. That's fine, but there's cremation. There's ecological burials, which I've always thought sounded quite good, bury me in a tree stump somewhere. There's people who have their ashes turned into tattoos and diamonds. There seems to be a lot of things that you can get in. Shot into space.

Yes. is possible. Do you think we're getting better at talking about it? Or do you think we're still pretty divorced from it? I think if you'd asked me two years ago or three years ago, I would have said, yes, we're getting better about it. That was the height of when people really were having these discussions of COVID. We crave normal human beings.

Our brains are literally wired this way evolutionarily, right? We want to get back to a kind of like stasis. This is just a common thing. And we therefore have a bit of a two-stasy. steps forward, one step back approach to most things. And so I felt like we were really coming close to making this a true discussion that was had regularly. And now I feel like we've backed off from that, but maybe not as far as we started. So I think that it is a pendulum swing. This is betwixt the sheets. So I would say there for a while, I thought we were really going to talk, have honest conversations

about sex work and how that's work and how people, those are jobs you can have. And we swung that way and then we swung back a bit again. We do that. You know, so I think similarly. Well, it's, there's always backlash to things. And it's partly because there's a very silly quote that has always remained with me from C.S. Lewis's screw tape letters about how, and this is funny because I don't even know what a fish knife is, but he's like, the fish knife you used in your father's house.

That's the best fish knife. Ridiculous, but it sticks with me. How things were when you were growing up is what you think things should be. And so there's always going to be kind of a. backlash. We move forward and people go, no, no, but we're getting too far away from the way things were. But the way things were, we're only that way when you were a kid. And they weren't that way when your parents were a kid or their parents were a kid. So it's best for us to remain open and flexible in our minds. And remember that there is no normal. Normal's like a setting on a

dryer. Like it doesn't really exist. But that's something you have to work against and you're working against your brain's own kind of like desire to kind of flatline everything. So final question, or I could talk to you about this forever. If you were allowed to pick your own funeral and the way people would mourn you out of all of the rituals that you have researched. So you're not hemmed in by, you know, American laws that say you can't feed a body to the birds over here. You can do anything that you like, anything. What would you go for? You know, I'm still actually quite attracted to being buried.

I like the idea that, you know, I could feel. feed mushrooms. I don't know. It's kind of attractive idea to me. Because you know, mushrooms are going to rule the world. They do rule the world now, but eventually that's all that will be left. It's just fungus. So, you know, I welcome my fungal overlords essentially to decompose my body. But I would rather not be buried with chemicals. I think that would be my main thing. The thing is, though, I think cemeteries are beautiful places. I think it's wonderful when you can have a monument, a stone to go and visit for your family and your loved ones. They're not necessary, but it can be nice. It can be a nice way. So I always tell people, I think it's important, I want to be

buried the way that will help. I'm not here anymore. So I want to be buried the way that will be most helpful to the people who are still here. And if that means, you know, throwing my body out at sea or something, that's fine. But I think personally, I like the idea of being, you know, put away in the ground and a nice, nice soft bed forever. I quite like that one as well, although I think I'd be tempted to go for something much more dramatic, like a bog body, if I was allowed to do anything. As long as I could be buried with weird things on me to confuse future historians. Yeah, we love that. My neurologist told me I should dedicate my brain to science, which I think is a kind of strange

compliment coming from a neurologist, I suppose. But yeah, I've never really thought about donating my body to science. There's so many donations these days that it's actually harder to get accepted than it used to be. Really? Yeah. For a long time they didn't have enough. And now there's almost more. I'm very pleased to be an organ donor, though, because I do think I don't need to go to the grave with all my useful pieces if somebody else wants them. My last book was called Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher. And it's a history of organ transplant. And I was quite enamored of that. And I thought, yeah, that would be awesome. Somebody carry on with my, you know, eyeballs or something. Brandi, you have been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you?

You know, there's only one, Brandi, Scilachi in the entire world. So if you look up, my last name is not spelled the way you think. It's S-C-H-I-L-A-C-E. But if you look me up, you'll find my website and all my relevant links, and you'll know that there's only one. Thank you so much. You have been marvelous. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Brandy for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you want us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the dark history of the bearded lady to how nudes changed Britain. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer, with Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the sheet for the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit.

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