Sacred Departures
May 1, 2025 | By Zeki Tan MY ‘25
Fernando Amorsolo, Rice Planting, 1922
Just as baptism in Christianity marks the transformation of individuals from old life to new life, sinful humans apart from Christ to communion with Him, there are also rituals that mark the degeneration of the body from vitality to mortality, its movement from earthly life to afterlife. Burial rites are a tangible, material means to commemorate these transformations in community.
One example of this is evident in the funeral rites of pre-Christian communities in the Philippines and Scandinavia. In both places, boats feature heavily in the rituals, a nod to their robust maritime cultures. In the Philippines, skeletal remains were disinterred and reburied in smaller earthenware jars after the bodies had decomposed. Some jars were topped with a boat carrying two figures: a deceased man accompanied by an individual holding a paddle to transport him into the afterlife. The most famous such jar, dated to the 8th or 9th centuries B.C., was found in the Manunggul Cave on the island of Palawan (pictured below). [1]
Similarly, some Norse communities marked the graves of their dead with stones arranged in the shape of a boat. Wealthier individuals were buried with their prized possessions in literal wooden boats, which were then set on fire. Contrary to the popular conception of deceased individuals being placed on wooden boats and then incinerated with a flaming arrow, these elaborate boat cremations took place on land. [2] When Christianity arrived in Scandinavia, boat burials for rulers and chieftains continued–although the practice of cremation ceased, since the Roman Catholic Church viewed the burning of earthly remains as a disavowal of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.
Setting aside the fascinating emergence of boat-themed burials in disparate cultures that have no evidence of economic or cultural exchanges with each other, it is interesting how both try to represent spatially and temporally the transformations brought about by death. Both cultures did not conceive of death as a single, discrete moment in time, but as a journey. Both cultures also understood the sea as a space where individuals crossed over into the afterlife. The vast expanse of open water, too great to be fully controlled by mortal beings, was seen as an appropriate metaphor for expressing the infinite distance between the living and the dead. Against the desolation of the water, a lone boat carrying the deceased is the only finite, measurable element filling the emptiness, an attempt to construct meaning out of the void.
Another way of thinking about this making sense of death and the afterlife is through Yasmina Reza’s play “Art”. Serge, one of the characters, buys an expensive white painting, and a dispute with his friends Marc and Yvan about the ostentatious purchase leads to Marc vandalizing the painting by drawing, in blue ink, a solitary man skiing. In Marc’s eyes, the lone skier moves through the white space and then disappears (“Elle représente un homme qui traverse un espace et qui disparaît.”) The blankness of the white canvas is interrupted by the skier, transforming the infinite, all-encompassing emptiness into something comprehensible: a snow-covered mountain being blanketed in more snow (“Sous les nuages blancs, la neige tombe.”) [3]
The rituals are important because they help us understand and cope with the death of those around us. Imagining them as solitary travelers on a long journey is an aesthetic choice making meaning out of the totalizing darkness of the void and therefore disarming its power over the grieving.
[1] Alice G. Guillermo. “Manunggul Jar.” 2020. https://epa.culturalcenter.gov.ph/3/82/2227/
[2] Alan Yuhas. “Archaeologists Find Rare Viking-Age Boat Burials in Sweden.” May 11, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/world/europe/viking-burial-sweden.html
[3] Yasmina Reza. “Art.” 1994.