Deysachni Funerary Customs

There are numerous Funerary Customs found throughout Deysachin, which vary across culture and time. Rituals include mummification, bog burial, sky burial, cremation, devourment, and repurposement. Many of these customs relate to honoring the dead, or utilizing the power which is said to lie within a corpse.

History

The oldest known burial in Deysachin is that of the Su'am Body, dated to ~5001 TT, which seems to have put into a primative form of bog burial. Lacking any contemporary flourishes and having no other contemporary examples, it is possible that the burial held little ritual significance, and was either an accidental submersion or an attempt to hide the body for whatever reason. The next oldest bog body is more than two thousand years younger, and the oldest mummified body another thousand.

It is thought that bog burial is the oldest still-practiced funerary tradition, with the rituals surrounding it being purely functional with the purpose of keeping corpses within the earth. It is then posited that, as early Deysachni cultures spread out from the south, they retained the same beliefs of the ritual significance of bog burial despite lacking the bogs, and, seeing how bog bodies were perserved, turned to the similar practice of mummification, which repurposement and devourment would later stem from. Cremation and sky burial are harder to trace, and it is unclear if they developed independantly of the bog-mummy traditions or as seperate branches.

Rituals

Bog Burial

Bog burial, practiced commonly in the Great Southern Bogland, and to a lesser extent in the Odlh Swamp, involves the deceased being intentionally sunken into a wetland, most commonly a swamp. Bog burial rituals are strikingly different to those practiced across the rest of deysachin, with little significance placed upon the body itself as a connection to death but instead the water-medium. In this sense, the imprisonement of the body within the wet earth is a physical depiction of the passage of the soul into another world. Graves often have large stakes, refered to as "pins", driven into the earth atop the corpse, to stop it from floating upward. These pins are typically designed in complex manners specific to the culture, and inscribed with prayers for the well being of the deceased. In many bod-burying cultures, the idea that the body would float back up is connected with a real fear that the deceased, dishonored by an improper burial, would rise as a vengeful undead.