Of all the death professionals in the world, rogyapa is the job I do not envy. A rogyapa interviewed by the BBC said, “I have performed many sky burials. But I still need some whiskey to do it.”
Nearby, the vultures have already begun to gather. They are Himalayan griffon vultures, bigger than you’d imagine, with nine-foot wingspans. The vultures tighten ranks, emitting guttural screeches as men hold them back with long rods. They huddle in groupings so tight that they become a giant ball of feathers.
The rogyapa pounds the defleshed bones with a mallet, crushing them together with tsama, barley flour mixed with yak butter or milk. The rogyapa may strategically lay the bones and cartilage out first, and hold back the best pieces of flesh. He doesn’t want the vultures to have their fill of the best cuts of meat and lose interest, flying off before the entirety of the body is consumed.
The signal is given, the rods are retracted, and the vultures descend with violence. They shriek like beasts as they consume the carrion, but they are, at the same time, glorious sky-dancers, soaring upward and taking the body for its burial in the sky. It is a virtuous gift to give your body this way—returning the body back to nature, where it can be of use.
The citizens of the developed world are hopelessly drawn to this visceral, bloody disposition. Tibet struggles with what this increased thanotourism (thano being the Greek prefix for “death”) means for their rituals. In 2005 the government issued a rule that banned sightseeing, photography, and video recording at the sky burial sites. But tour guides have still flooded the area, bringing four-wheel-drive vehicles full of tourists from eastern China. Even though the dead person’s family is not present for the vulture portion of the ritual, two dozen Chinese tourists will be, iPhones poised at the ready. They aim to capture death without the tidy edges, like the boxed urns of cremated remains given to them back home.
There is a story of a Western tourist trying to get around the no-photography rule by hiding behind a rock and using a long-range telephoto lens, not realizing that his presence scared off the vultures who usually waited on that ridge. After being frightened off, they didn’t show up to consume the corpse, which was considered a bad omen for the ritual.
I spent the first thirty years of my life devouring animals. So why, when I die, should they not have their turn with me? Am I not an animal?
Tibet is the one place I wanted to go on my travels, but could not bring myself to do it. It is difficult to accept that, barring true societal change, I will never have this option for my corpse. What’s more, I may never even witness this ritual in my lifetime. If I were the Westerner with the telephoto lens who scared off the vultures, I’d have to leave myself out for the birds as well.
EPILOGUE
On a crisp fall day in Vienna, Austria, I received a private tour of the crypt below Michaelerkirche (St. Michael’s Church). Bernard, the young Austrian man who led me down the steep stone staircase, had perfect English delivered in an inexplicably deep Southern accent.
“Aye’ve been told my ax-sent is straynge be-fore,” he drawled, like a Confederate general.
Bernard explained that during the Middle Ages, when the members of the Hapsburg court attended St. Michael’s, there was a cemetery located directly outside, in the courtyard. But, as so often happened in larger European cities, the cemetery became overcrowded, “lay-urd with de-cay-ing bodies”—so overcrowded, in fact, that the neighbors (that is to say, the Emperor) complained of the stench. The cemetery was closed and a crypt constructed deep beneath St. Michael’s in the seventeenth century.
Many of the thousands of bodies buried in the crypt were laid to rest on beds of woodchips inside wooden coffins. The woodchips soaked up the fluids from decomposition. The dryness that followed this fluid absorption, in combination with drafts of cool air flowing through the crypt, caused a spontaneous natural mummification of the bodies.
Bernard shone a flashlight onto a man’s body, holding the beam on the spot where the lace bottom of his baroque-era wig clung to his taut grey skin. Down the row, past the typical stacks of bones and skulls found in charnel houses, the body of a woman was so well preserved that her nose still protruded outward from her face, some three hundred years after her death. Her delicate, articulated fingers lay crossed over her chest.
The church currently makes four of these crypt mummies available for public viewing. The questions visitors pose to Bernard should be obvious: “How did this mummification occur?” Or, “How did the church manage to beat the recent invasion of wooden coffin–devouring beetles from New Zealand?” (Answer: by installing air conditioning).
But what visitors, especially young visitors, really want to know is, “Are the bodies real?”
The question is posed as if the stacked bones and skulls, the rows of coffins, the rare mummies, could all be part of a spooky haunted-crypt attraction instead of the very history of the city in which they live.
At almost any location in any major city on Earth, you are likely standing on thousands of bodies. These bodies represent a history that exists, often unknown, beneath our feet. While a new Crossrail station was being dug in London in 2015, 3,500 bodies were excavated from a sixteenth-and seventeenth-century cemetery under Liverpool Street, including a burial pit from the Great Plague of 1665. To cremate bodies we burn fossil fuel, thus named because it is made of decomposed dead organisms. Plants grow from the decayed matter of former plants. The pages of this book are made from the pulp of raw wood from a tree felled in its prime. All that surrounds us comes from death, every part of every city, and every part of every person.
That autumn day in Vienna, my private tour of the crypt wasn’t private because I possess an exclusive all-access corpse card. The tour was private because I was the only person who showed up.
Outside, in the courtyard that was once an overcrowded cemetery, groups of schoolchildren swarmed. They waited impatiently to be herded into the Hofburg Palace to confront the relics of the past, jewels and golden scepters and cloaks. In the church just across the courtyard, down some steep stone steps, there were bodies that could teach the children more than any scepter. Hard evidence that all who came before them have died. All will die someday. We avoid the death that surrounds us at our own peril.