Soul
Strange
as it seems, it is in their cremation ceremonies that the Balinese
have their greatest fun. A cremation is an occasion for gathering
and not for mourning, since it represents the accomplishment of
their most sacred duty: the ceremonial burning of the corpses of
the dead to liberate their souls so that they can thus attain the
higher world –be free for reincarnation into better beings.
At cremation ceremonies hundreds of people in a wild stampede carry
the beautiful towers, sixty feet high, solidly built of wood and
bamboo and decorated with tinsel and expensive silks, in which the
bodies are transported to the cremation grounds. There the corpses
are placed in great cows (hewn out of tree-trunks to serve as coffins
and covered with precious materials) , and cows, towers, offerings,
and ornaments are set on fire, hundreds and even thousands of dollars
burned in one afternoon in a mad splurge of extravagance by a people
who value the necessities of life in fractions of pennies.
To the Balinese, the material body is only the shell, the container
of the soul. This soul live in every part of the body, even in the
hair and nails, but it is concentrated in the head which is near-holy
to them. A Balinese observes the rank of his head in relation to
the rest of his body, and for this reason no one would stand on
his head or take any position that would place his feet on a higher
level. It is an offence even to pat a small child on the head and
there is no worse insult than " I'll beat your head! "
One's soul wanders away during sleep (dreams arc its travels and
adventures), without becoming, however, entirely detached from the
body, and it is considered dangerous to awaken a person too suddenly.
Children are never beaten, so as not to shock their tender and still
undeveloped souls.
Madness, epilepsy, and idiocy are the results of a bewitched soul,
but ordinary sickness is due to a weakened, polluted soul rather
than to mere physical causes. ‘Life vanishes when the soul,
escapes from the body through the 'mouth, and death occurs when
it refuses to return’. The relatives of a dying man who has
lost consciousness go to the temple of the dead and, through a medium,
beg the deities for the release and return of his soul. By force
of habit, the soul lingers near the body when death comes; and.
remains floating in space or lives in a tree near by until, liberated
by the obliteration of the corpse by the elements by earth, by fire,
and by water, to destroy the last unclean tie that binds the souls
of the dead to this earth. By cremation the soul is released to
fly to the heavens for judgment and return to be reborn into the
dead man's grandchildren. Failure to liberate the soul by neglecting
to perform the cremation or by incomplete or improper rites would
force the soul to turn into a ghost that would haunt the careless
descendants.
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