All funerals are sad and creepy, but they’re way better than feeding the corpse to a bunch of hungry eagles.
Sky burials are often practiced in the mountains of Tibet, both for religious and practical reasons. Basically, the corpse is placed on a mountain top and sliced open in various places, to attract the birds of prey circling above. They’d probably feast on it anyway, but an invitation like that doesn’t hurt.
Most Tibetans are Buddhists and believe in rebirth. Once a person dies, their body is considered nothing more than an empty vessels that needs to disposed of. Since the ground is often as hard as rock and wood and fire are precious resources, feeding nature’s creatures is a practical choice. I know it looks grotesque, but to Buddhists this is a last sign of generosity by the deceased, offering his body as nourishment for other living creatures.
=O
The Mongolian herders also “bury” this way. They view the Sky as God – they view wolves as the only animal able to leap into the sky and as such they view wolves as the souls of their ancestors. they taken their dead unbound on a wagon up into the mountains on a rocky (there is no other type) trail – where ever the corpse falls off – it is left — the wolves come along to devour it. From the interesting allegorical book “Wolf Totem”
@Dianne Wyss: The mongolian herders stopped doing this after the communism came to mongolia in 1940s.