Let’s talk about defleshing – or, as it’s known in anthropology, excarnation. Excarnation is fairly common in a variety of earth cultures – embalming isn’t a practice that all cultures develop, but many want some way to keep part of their dead ancestors around. (We’ve discussed why this is so important to Kyolites in the last post.) This is often done by allowing the flesh to decompose. Many cultures bury their dead, digging their bones up after a set period. Other cultures practice sky burial, in which the corpses are placed in a high location (such as a mountain, tower, or tree), where the flesh can decompose and also be eaten by scavengers such as vultures or corvids. Among modern bone collectors, this is still a way that many deflesh their bones: burial and open-air defleshing are common methods. Dermestids (skin beetles) are also used for defleshing, and are one of few methods which can work on the skeletons of birds, fish and small mammals. Turns out that beetles are just better at defleshing than we are.
But part of the reason that the Kyolites practiced excarnation was to avoid the flesh being soiled. (As discussed in the last post, allowing the flesh to rot after death would taint the life force, potentially creating malicious undead spirits.) Allowing the flesh to decompose would defeat the point. So instead, Kyolites used what is referred to in the modern day as maceration. They stripped off most of the flesh using knives. The remaining flesh and skeleton was put in a cauldron filled with boiling water, as well as the ashes of marsh-dwelling seaweeds, which provided alkalinity. The bones were removed after a few days in this solution.
Maceration as a religious process of excarnation is fairly unusual. Some Hawaiian cultures used underground ovens to deflesh bones in a similar process. In medieval europe, some high-status individuals were excarnated in the “Mos Teutonicus”, where the corpse was boiled in wine so that their bones could be transported to their homes. Lye maceration or maceration using other agents to dissolve the flesh is, as far as I can tell, a modern invention practiced primarily by enthusiasts of bone collecting.
However, it’s entirely possible that the Kyolites would have developed maceration early on. Since before the bronze age, the inhabitants of Kyol had been practicing water cremation in geothermal springs. Probably at some point a Kyolite attempted to cremate a corpse in a spring that wasn’t acidic enough to dissolve the bones. Given that the Kyolites already placed importance on the bones as part of the soul, it would be logical to collect these bones using a net, dry them, and take them back to the house. This process would become popularized and would be used by many people living in the area of suitable geothermal springs, until eventually another method of excarnation, the use of boiling and seaweed ash, would be discovered and popularized. This method was cheaper and simpler than transporting a body to geothermal springs, and so more families were able to maintain ossuaries after this method had been developed.
The process of maceration was complicated and unpleasant. The body gave off an unpleasant odor and left behind a brownish liquid (viewed by the Kyolites as the leftover impurities of the blood). Because of this, sorcerers were in charge of maceration. Nobody other than a sorcerer could enter the tent in which excarnation took place.
Even sorcerers had to be prepared properly. Incense partially blocked the harmful fumes. Decorated bone masks shielded them from the negative psychic influences of the impure spirits. Incantations at various stages of the process helped shield the sorcerer from negative influences and purify the corpse. (Like many other parts of these rituals and beliefs, the specific rituals varied widely by region.)
With that, I have a complete overview of death-related! I may go into further detail on some of these later, but we need to get a good overview of broader Kyolite society first.