Word: pyre
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Confronted with the dead body, men have asked themselves at various times: "Shall we lay it in a boat that is set adrift? . . . Shall we expose it to wild animals? Burn it on a pyre? Push it into a pit naked to rot with other bodies? Boil it until the flesh falls off the bones, and throw the flesh away and treasure the bones?" Primitive peoples discovered that, by devouring a dead body, they did not acquire its spirit; with that insight, as myths tell it, the original oneness of spirit and body, heaven and hell, was torn asunder...
...suicide of his scheming henchman Goebbels, the defection of those who fattened on the blood he had spilled, the last-minute marriage with his blowzy mistress Eva Braun, the suicide pact they made together, and the final dispatch of their bodies to Valhalla in the flames of a funeral pyre wrote a tawdry Wagnerian finish to the evil story...
...consecrated ground, a strange funeral ceremony took place. Beside the heaped-up wood of a funeral pyre, a Christian read prayers. Then a Hindu lit the dry wood, and the flames leapt up around the body of Denis Doyle, who had died confident that he-and all men -would be happier without a body...
Siva, the many-ratured and versatile god of destruction, is doing a land-office business in Jodhpur these days. Ever since the Hindu widow Sugan Kunwar Singh flung herself sacrificially-and illegally-into the flames of her husband's funeral pyre last October (TIME, Nov. 1), Jodhpur has been on a religious binge. Self-styled holy men from miles around have swarmed into town to cash in on the popular fervor. Hawkers in the city's crowded bazaar are peddling ballads and poems extolling the virtues of suttee, the accepted name for the widow's sacrifice...
Jodhpur's cops, under the agitated command of Police Superintendent Sobhagmal Surana, have been on constant guard at the city's cremation grounds to prevent further acts of suttee. The priest who had charge of the original Singh funeral is in jail awaiting trial for making a pyre built for two. But every day and night, crowds of worshipers throng the death site with offerings that range from coconuts to gold plate, and from all sides the halt, the near hopeless and the blind hobble into the city, seeking miracles and willing to pay the holy men generously...