Mortals by Rachel Menzies & Ross G. Menzies

Author:Rachel Menzies & Ross G. Menzies [Menzies, Rachel & Menzies, Ross G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

How do the corpses stay so well preserved? Traditionally, they have been embalmed using sour vinegar and tea-leaves. Nowadays, the latest trend in Torajan burial is a good old-fashioned injection of formaldehyde, which has quickly become the gold standard of Indonesian mummification.

The Torajan also carve a tau-tau statue of the deceased, which is designed to capture the personality of the dead as well as their likeness. At Londa, the cliffs are lined with balconies that have been cut into the rock face. The statue is then placed into one such balcony, leaning up against a wooden railing. It will remain eternally, lined up alongside other tau-tau. For the Torajan, even when a loved one has died, their spirit lives on in the tau-tau, watching over its descendants from the rocky wings of the cliff. The cliffs around Torajan are also peppered with wooden coffins, perched on wooden beams suspended upon the rocks. Radiocarbon dating reveals that the oldest of these coffins were built in AD 800. Death is always, literally, hanging over the Torajan people.

Agus, a male guide who introduced Caitlin Doughty to these villagers, has his own tale to tell about the closeness of the Torajan to their dead. ‘When I was a child, we had my grandfather in the home for seven years,’ he said. ‘My brother and I, we slept with him in the same bed. In the morning we put his clothes on and stood him against the wall. At night he came back to bed.’ Can you imagine, as a child, sharing your bed with the disintegrating corpse of your dead grandparent? And yet, for Agus, nothing could be more natural. ‘For us, we are used to it, this kind of thing,’ he said. ‘This life and death.’

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