The history and purpose of the "Towers of Silence"

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Even now, you can see these towers, in which corpses were piled in order for birds to gnaw them.

The religion of the ancient Iranians is called Zoroastrianism, later it was called Parsism among the Iranians who moved to India due to the threat of religious persecution in Iran itself, where Islam began to spread at that time.

The ancestors of the ancient Iranians were the semi-nomadic cattle-breeding tribes of the Aryans. In the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. they, moving from the north, settled the territory of the Iranian highlands. The Aryans worshiped two groups of deities: the Ahuras, who personified the ethical categories of justice and order, and the devas, closely associated with nature.

Zoroastrians have an unusual way of getting rid of the dead. They do not bury them or cremate them. Instead, they leave the bodies of the dead atop tall towers known as dakhma or towers of silence, where they are open to being eaten by birds of prey such as vultures, vultures, and crows. The practice of burial is based on the belief that the dead are "unclean", not only physically due to decay, but because they are poisoned by demons and evil spirits that rush into the body as soon as the soul leaves it. Thus, burial in the ground and cremation are seen as pollution of nature and fire, both elements that the Zoroastrians must protect.

This belief in protecting the purity of nature has led some scholars to proclaim Zoroastrianism as "the world's first ecological religion."

In Zoroastrian practice, such a burial of the dead, known as dahmenashini, was first described in the middle of the 5th century BC. e. Herodotus, but special towers were used for these purposes much later at the beginning of the 9th century.

After the scavengers gnawed flesh from the bones, whitened by the sun and wind, they would congregate in a crypt pit in the center of the tower, where lime was added to allow the bones to gradually decay. The whole process took almost a year.

An ancient custom persisted among the Zoroastrians in Iran, however, dakhma were recognized as hazardous to the environment and were banned in the 1970s. Such a tradition is still practiced in India by the Parsi people, who make up the majority of the Zoroastrian population in the world. Rapid urbanization, however, is putting pressure on the Parsi, and this strange ritual and the right to use the Towers of Silence is highly controversial even among the Parsi community. But the biggest threat to the dahmenashini does not come from health authorities or public outcry, but from the lack of vultures and vultures.

The number of vultures, which play an important role in the decay of corpses, has been steadily declining in Hindustan since the 1990s. In 2008, their numbers fell by about 99 percent, leaving scientists with confusion until it was discovered that the drug currently administered to cattle was fatal to vultures when they feed on carrion. The drug has been banned by the Indian government, but the vulture population has yet to recover.

Due to the lack of vultures, powerful solar concentrators were installed on some towers of silence in India to quickly dehydrate corpses. But solar concentrators have a side effect of scaring off other scavengers like crows due to the horrendous heat generated by the concentrators during the day, and they also don't work on cloudy days. So a job that only took a few hours for a flock of vultures now takes weeks, and these slowly decaying bodies make the air unbearable. close because of the smell.

The very name "The Tower of Silence" was coined in 1832 by Robert Murphy, a translator for the British colonial government in India.

The Zooastrians considered cutting hair, cutting nails and burying dead bodies unclean.

In particular, they believed that demons could enter the bodies of the dead, which would subsequently desecrate and infect everything and everyone who came into contact with them. In the Wendidad (a set of laws aimed at repelling evil forces and demons) there are special rules for disposing of corpses without harming others.

The indispensable testament of the Zoroastrians is that in no case should the four elements - earth, fire, air and water - be defiled with dead bodies. Therefore, vultures have become the best way for them to eliminate corpses.

Dakhma is a rounded tower without a roof, the center of which forms a pool. A stone staircase leads to a platform that runs along the entire inner surface of the wall. Three channels (pavi) divide the platform into a series of boxes. On the first bed were the bodies of men, on the second - women, on the third - children. After the vultures gnawed at the corpses, the remaining bones were piled up in an ossuary (a building for storing skeletonized remains). There the bones gradually collapsed, and their remnants were carried away by the rainwater into the sea.

Only special persons - "nasasalars" (or gravediggers), who placed bodies on platforms, could take part in the ritual.

The first mention of such burials dates back to the time of Herodotus, and the ceremony itself was kept in the strictest confidence.

Later, the Magu (or priests, clergy) began to practice public burial rites, until eventually the bodies were embalmed with wax and buried in trenches.

Archaeologists have found ossuaries dating back to the 5th-4th century BC, as well as burial mounds containing wax-embalmed bodies. According to one of the legends, the grave of Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism, is located in Balkh (modern Afghanistan). Presumably, such first rituals and burials appeared in the Sassanid era (3-7 centuries AD), and the first written evidence of the "towers of death" was made in the 16th century.

There is one legend according to which, already in our time, many dead bodies suddenly appeared near the dakhma, which local residents from neighboring settlements could not identify.

Not a single deceased person fit the description of missing people in India.

The corpses were not gnawed by animals, there were no larvae or flies on them. The amazing thing about this terrifying find was that the pit, located in the middle of the dakhma, was filled with blood for several meters, and there was more of this blood than the bodies lying outside could contain. The stench in this nasty place was so unbearable that already on the approaches to the dakhma many began to feel sick.

The investigation was suddenly interrupted when a local resident accidentally kicked a small bone into the pit. Then from the bottom of the pit, a powerful explosion of gas began to erupt, emanating from the decomposing blood, and spread throughout the area.

Everyone who was at the epicenter of the explosion was immediately taken to a hospital and quarantined to prevent the spread of the infection.

The patients developed fever and delirium. They furiously shouted that “they were stained with the blood of Ahriman” (the personification of evil in Zoroastrianism), despite the fact that they had nothing to do with this religion and did not even know anything about the Dakhmas. The state of delirium spilled over into insanity, and many of the sick began to attack the hospital staff until they were pacified. In the end, severe fever killed several witnesses to the ill-fated burial.

When the investigators later returned to that place, dressed in protective suits, they found the following picture: all the bodies disappeared without a trace, and the pit with blood was empty.

The rite associated with death and burial is rather unusual and has always been strictly observed. A person who died in winter is assigned a special room, quite spacious and fenced off from living rooms, according to the instructions of the Avesta. The corpse can stay there for several days or even months until the birds arrive, the plants bloom, the hidden waters flow and the wind dries up the earth. Then the devotees of Ahura Mazda will expose the body to the sun. In the room where the deceased was, fire should constantly burn - a symbol of the supreme deity, but it was supposed to be fenced off from the deceased with a vine so that the demons did not touch the fire.

At the bedside of the dying man, two clergymen were to be inseparably present. One of them read a prayer, turning his face to the sun, and the other prepared the sacred liquid (haomu) or pomegranate juice, which he poured for the dying from a special vessel. When dying, there must be a dog - a symbol of the destruction of all "unclean". According to custom, if a dog ate a piece of bread placed on the chest of a dying person, the relatives were informed of the death of their loved one.

Wherever a Parsi dies, he remains there until the nassesalars come for him, with their hands buried up to their shoulders in old bags. Having put the deceased in an iron closed coffin (one for all), he is taken to dakhma. Even if the person referred to the dakhma would even come to life (which often happens), he will no longer come out into the light of God: the nassesalars in this case kill him. He who once was defiled by touching dead bodies and visited the tower, it is no longer possible for him to return to the world of the living: he would defile the whole society. Relatives follow the coffin from afar and stop 90 steps from the tower. Before the burial, the ceremony with the dog for fidelity was performed once again, right in front of the tower.

Then the nassesalars bring the body inside and, taking it out of the coffin, put it on the place assigned to the corpse, depending on gender or age. Everyone was stripped naked, their clothes were burned. The body was fixed so that animals or birds, having torn apart the corpse, could not carry away and scatter the remains in the water, on the ground or under trees.

Friends and relatives were strictly forbidden to visit the towers of silence. From dawn to dusk, black clouds of well-fed vultures hover over this place. They say that these birds-orderlies deal with their next "prey" in 20-30 minutes.

Currently, this rite is prohibited by Iranian law, therefore, representatives of the Zoroastrian religion avoid desecrating the land through burial in cement, which completely prevents contact with the ground.

In India, the towers of silence have survived to this day and were used for their intended purpose in the last century. They can be found in Mumbai and Surat. The largest one is more than 250 years old.