CREMATION AMONG THE TOLKOTINS OF OREGON.
Thanks to the efforts of the British authorities in India, imperfect cremation is a thing of the past there.
Cicero already relates that the widows of the Hindoos allow themselves to be cinerated with the remains of their husbands. Self-cremation of Indian widows does not occur nowadays; the barbaric custom has been put down by the English.
It was not before 1831 that the English government in Hindostan attempted to abolish the practice of burning widows; and up to that time, as Max Mueller observes, “women were burned wholesale, even in the immediate neighborhood of Calcutta.” But the custom was probably not exterminated before late in the sixties—1868 or 69.
Cremation was practiced on the isle of Ceylon as late as 1841.
The people of Burmah cremate their rich dead, and inhume the poor or consign them to a stream. Persons of rank are embalmed before incineration, and placed on exhibition in a convent or temple for six weeks. At the funeral, the body is borne in a coffin on the shoulders of men, who are preceded by female mourners chanting an epicede. The corpse is followed by the relatives. When the slowly moving train arrives at the pyre, which is commonly six or eight feet high, the remains are placed upon it; the wood of the funeral pile is generally laid crosswise, to bring about a stronger draught of air. The pyre is set on fire by the attending priests, who pray before it until the body is destroyed; then the bones are collected and interred. According to Mr. W. Eassie, when a Buddhist priest of rank dies in Burmah, the body is embalmed in honey, laid in state for a time, and then sometimes blown up with gunpowder, together with its hearse.
Miss Feudge asserts that the inhabitants of Pegu and Laos also cremate their dead.
In Siam, cremation has undoubtedly existed since primeval times. It is a universal custom, practiced both by the common people and the aristocracy; even the kings are incinerated. Crawfurd states that in Siam the ashes are sometimes interred in the grounds surrounding the temples, and a small pyramidal mound erected over them.
When one of the Dayakkese inhabitants of Borneo dies, the body is deposited in a coffin, and remains in the house till the son, the father, or the nearest of kin can procure or purchase a slave, who is beheaded at the time that the corpse is burned, in order that he may become the servant of the deceased in the next world. The ashes of the departed are then placed in an earthen urn, which is adorned with various figures; and the head of the slave is desiccated, and prepared in a peculiar manner with camphor and drugs, and placed near it. It is said that this practice induces the Dayakkese to buy a slave guilty of some capital crime, at fivefold his value, in order that they may be able to put him to death on such occasions.
Cremation is an established and time-honored usage in Japan, now the oldest empire in the world. Here all incineration establishments are under government control, and are to be found not only in all the chief cities, but also in the provinces. The Japanese government, with shrewd appreciation of the advantages of sanitary laws, has of late years carefully fostered the practice. Since the earliest times, cremation is universal among the Japanese.