Excarnation: Food For Vultures

Unlocking the mysteries of Chacolithic ossuaries
www.bib-arch.org...

Rami Arav argues that the site of Rogem Hiri in the Golan was a special type of Chalcolithic Age sanctuary, built specifically for the purpose of ritual excarnation—that is, exposing the bodies of the dead to vultures in order to divest them of their flesh.

odom-groh.blogspot.com...

Thought this was interesting and remembered the Tibetan burial practice of sky burials.

Sky burial, or ritual dissection, is a funerary practice in Tibet, wherein a human corpse was incised in certain locations and placed on a mountaintop, exposing it to the elements (mahabhuta) and animals – especially to predatory birds.

en.wikipedia.org...

I had not realized that it was a practice that went back to one of the most ancient of places,Göbekli Tepe.
knol.google.com...#

Vultures also feature in the iconography of the Neolithic sites of Çatalhöyük and Jericho; it is believed that in the early Neolithic culture of Anatolia and the Near East the deceased were deliberately exposed in order to be excarnated by vultures and other birds of prey. (The head of the deceased was sometimes removed and preserved—possibly a sign of ancestor worship.) This, then, would represent an early form of sky burial.

Biblical texts,

Revelations,
And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, "Come, gather together for the great supper of God,


Ezekiel,
"Son of man, this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Call out to every kind of bird and all the wild animals: 'Assemble and come together from all around to the sacrifice I am preparing for you, the great sacrifice on the mountains of Israel. There you will eat flesh and drink blood.

Fred Wolf:Tibet & the Jews -Tibetans a lost tribe of Israel?

Lost tribes?

youtu.be...



How much of a family we really are.

Reminded me of the book by Andrew Collins,

The Appearance of Feathers


Another important reference to the appearance of Watchers comes from the so-called Secrets of the Book of Enoch, also known as 2 Enoch, a kind of sequel to the original work written in Greek and dating to the first century AD.



The passage refers to the unexpected arrival of two Watchers as Enoch rests on his bed:

And there appeared to me two men very tall, such as I have never seen on earth. And their faces shone like the sun, and their eyes were like burning lamps; and fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the appearance of feathers:... [purple], their wings were brighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow. They stood at the head of my bed and called me by my name.

White skin (often ruddied ’as red as a rose’), tall stature and facial radiances ’like the sun’ all recur frequently in connection with the appearance of angels and Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea literature.



Yet what was this reference to their dress having ’the appearance of feathers’? Might it relate in some way to the ’cloak’ worn by the Watcher named Belial who appears in the Amram story, which was said to have been ’many-coloured yet very dark’, precisely the effect one might expect from a coat of black feathers, like those belonging to crows or vultures perhaps?

In spite of the fact that Christian art has invariably portrayed angels with wings, this tradition goes back no further than the third or fourth century AD. Before this time true angels (Cherubim and Seraphim did have multiple sets of wings) appeared in the likeness of ’men’, a situation that often prompted textual translators to add wings on to existing descriptions of angels. This has almost certainly been the case in the above account taken from 2 Enoch, which was re-copied many times during the early years of Christianity.

With this observation in mind, I felt that the statement concerning the Watchers dress having ’the appearance of feathers’ was very revealing indeed. It also seemed like an over-sight on the part of the scribe who conveyed this story into written form, for having added wings to the description of the two ’men’, why bother saying they wore garments of feathers?



Surely this confusion between wings and feather coats could have been edited to give the Watchers a more appropriate angelic appearance.

www.bibliotecapleyades.net...

Yahweh, the sky god.

Defleshing the Dead: What is Excarnation and Where Does it Occur?

Tomb of the Eagles

Isbister Tomb in South Ronaldsay in Orkney, Scotland, contains human bones representing 340 people. The skeletons were disarticulated and incomplete, the bones bleached and weathered, making it very probable that the bodies had been laid out once on mortuary platforms, exposed to the elements and birds of prey, before ultimate interment. Isbister is also known as the 'Tomb of the Eagles', as they found the talons and bones of sea eagles in with the human bones.

Zoroaster and Excarnation

Another example of excarnation where it is recorded that birds and elements had parts to play is in the Zoroastrian tradition, a tradition based on the teachings of prophet Zoroaster (aka Zarathustra, in Avestan) and probably founded some time before the 6th century BC in Iran.

The Vultures at Çatalhöyük

Crouched Burial, Boscombe Down, suggests that when this individual was buried, the body had already decomposed to some extent, probably from having been exposed. Image Credit - Wessex Archaeology.
Crouched Burial, Boscombe Down, suggests that when this individual was buried, the body had already decomposed to some extent, probably from having been exposed. Image Credit - Wessex Archaeology.
Lastly and more recently pictures of vultures hovering above headless corpses and piles of human skulls and bones under what appears to be structures of reed and matting have been found at Çatalhöyük. This evidence for the archaeologist is a bright red flashing light connected to death and ritual, and gives direct connotation and evidence to the dead being excarnated here.

heritage-key.com...

Didn't know it was that common.

Why did they retrieve the bones?

In this book,
Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology

books.google.com... ei=o3bSToSCObCJ2AWFppyhDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=shamans%20dress%20wing&f=false

A skeleton figure sewn onto a shaman's cloak signifying the shaman's ancestor, near it are sewn hawk wings, none but the shaman can fly or be represented by wings.

The soul

"And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul (nephesh, psuche) that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. For the life (nephesh, psuche) of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls (nephesh, psuche): for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul (nephesh, psuche). Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, No soul (nephesh, psuche) of you shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you eat blood" (Lev. 17:10-12). ["Souls" can eat. The "soul" is in the blood.]

"For it is the life (nephesh, psuche) of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life (nephesh) thereof: therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life (nephesh, psuche) of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off. And every soul (nephesh, psuche) that eateth that which died of itself, or that which was torn with beasts, whether it be one of your own country, or a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even" (Lev. 17:14, 15).

The bird a connection between earth and sky or heaven.
The human and the divine, the soul ascends to the heavens or spirit world, the bones return to dust.

Shamanism: an expanded view of reality

The Shaman takes power from the differentiated reality and brings it back after a ritualistic dismemberment where his flesh is distributed among the spirits of sickness,

books.google.com... =o3bSToSCObCJ2AWFppyhDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=shamans%20dress%20wing&f=false

The dancing wu li masters: an overview of the new physics,

books.google.com... hl=en&ei=tovSTvuDFMmQ2QXcrMm8Dw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=undifferentiated%20reality&f=false

Undifferentiated reality,

As I have recently come to understand it, there is no difference between the physical and the metaphysical.

The shamans alternate reality, rings a bell,

When given the Rorschach test, the shaman refuse to admit defeat, or say I don't know when viewing the blurry images, seemingly a person out of his senses or place, the real and unreal are not differences in kind, but in degree, the shaman is the "technician of the sacred", his mystical journey is subject to will.

Beautiful,

I may have strayed off my own topic, but that is the way it flowed through my mind.

books.google.com... =o3bSToSCObCJ2AWFppyhDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=shamans%20dress%20wing&f=false

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

"Spiritus Mundi" is Latin, meaning "spirit" or "soul of the world." According to the Norton Anthology of English Literature , the phrase refers to "the spirit or soul of the universe, with which all individual souls are connected through the 'Great Memory,' which Yeats held to be a universal subconscious in which the human race preserves its past memories."

Past memories, if only we could access them.

reply to post by Stormdancer777


Good topic! Starred and flagged. Some of my favorite websites and tidbits on excarnations is how you can use the burial practice and importation of vultures to determine who had boats and which excarnating groups were related. There are several groups who practiced excarnations that did not use the vultures. But first...focus on those that did use the vultures.

KFAR HAHORESH

The plaster covered with a brick red ochre wash extended over the entire cranium...

FROM BEHIND THE MASK: Plastered Skulls from Ain Ghazal

Nearly all the excarnated painted and plastered skulls have red ochre hair painted over the cranium--thus "red heads." Two exceptions to the plastered skulls that did not have red ochre hair painted on the cranium were at Tell Ramad and Nahal Hemar.

TELL RAMAD

The first group from level I, ca 6200 BC, included the skulls of five females, two males and one boy 13 or 14 years old....in the Ramad I cache, the foreheads or top of the head bore a large red spot; the eyes lobes were made of grayish plaster with the iris and pupil standing out in pure white (Contenson 1967:20)

FROM BEHIND THE MASK: Plastered Skulls from Ain Ghazal

Which suggests that unlike all the other excarnations, which involve worship of the Vulture Goddess, that the skulls resembling the red dot on the forehead might have been Hindu as it is Hindu upper castes also place the red dot on their foreheads. So it might be an intermarriage between someone who worshipped the Vulture Goddess and Hindus.

NAHAL HEMAR

The PPNB cave site ca. 7000-6000 BC, located at the south end of the Dead Sea, ... Six of the Nahal Hemar skulls were smeared with a black substance analyzed by A. Nissembaum as a mixture of bitumen and collagen (Nissenbaum 1997). Homo 8, the skull of a 50 years old man, and the best preserved specimen, was covered with a 1mm thick layer of tar, starting above the forehead and extending over the back of the head, leaving the face free. Above, evenly spaced horizontal stripes made of the black mix overlapped with diagonal lines to form a net pattern over the back of the cranium (Yakar, Hershkowitz 1988: 59-60)

FROM BEHIND THE MASK: Plastered Skulls from Ain Ghazal

And that suggests intermarriages between the standard "red heads" or red ochre hair-painted craniums and Africans. It's almost like they tried to make an afro out of tar for the plastered, painted skull.

At first when digging around in excarnations, I thought they might have all come from the Palestine and Levant. That turned out to be wrong. Since the burial practice involves clearly VULTURES they import holy vultures for their burial practice denoting origin--where they come from.

Obviously the Palestine, Levant, South Egypt and Cyprus excarnating "red heads" are all related and the Cyprus vulture is one of the vultures imported for their burial practice. Each place that imported the Cyprus vulture meant that they originated from Cyprus and moved to the mainland. BUT....the group that colonized Spain that excarnated their dead did not import the holy Cyprus vulture. Instead they imported the Black Vulture of Thassos. It's a highly unusual import, since the Black Vulture of Thassos did not exist anywhere else in Europe. That means that the excarnating "red heads" that colonized Spain, France, England, Ireland and Scotland had an original origin from the former Thassos-Kavala coast and imported the holy Black Vulture of Thassos for their burial practice. So they didn't come from Cyprus, Levant, Palestine, nor south Egypt.

Under the Holy Roman Empire, the burial practice of excarnation was outlawed since the burial practice itself involved the pagan religion of Vulture Goddess worship. Vultures that had been imported into Spain from the Thassos-Kavala region went extinct and an organization in Spain sought to re-import the Vulture back into Spain called the Black Vulture Conservation Society. The original link that was on the net changed. Apparently the Black Vulture Conservation Foundation in Lloseta, Spain that was trying to re-import the Black Vulture of Thassos back into Spain has merged with a second conservation society called Foundation for Conservation of Bearded Vultures (FCBV) and their new organization's website is "under construction." The new site for the new .org is Vultures Conservation Foundation .

(continued)

THE EXCARNATION OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

One famous person to be excarnated hundreds of years after the Holy Roman Empire outlawed the burial practice in Spain was Christopher Columbus! Which is highly interesting and suggestive that Columbus CHOSE the outlawed burial practice of excarnation because he might have gotten maps to American from the group who used to have the burial practice. Since these ancient excarnating "red heads" clearly had boats and did a massive expansion from 7500 BCE into Cyprus (an island), Levant, Palestine and south Egypt and a second group from Thassos-Kavala expanded into Spain, France, England and Ireland by 7000 B.C.E., that meant that they had ships for 8500-9000 years before Columbus was born. And any group of them might have made it to America. Columbus clearly got a map to America from somewhere and his choice of burial practice of excarnation (outlawed) pretty much says who he got the map from.

After Christopher Columbus' death body underwent excarnation - that is the flesh was removed so that only his bones remained. In his will, Columbus requested his remains to be taken to the Caribbean island of La Espanola.

from Columbus' Bones Moved Over Centuries

Of course, to make the tie from excarnating ancient mariner "red heads" to America, there would need to be Native American tribes who either:
1. Have an oral history of such a meeting.
2. Have either their diet or copy some custom of them.
3. Use their rare burial practice-- adopted it.

And there is at least one tribe that did paint their black hair with vermillon paint to give themselves "red hair" (highly unusual), which is the Choctaw tribe of the Southeastern United States. According to diaries by missionaries, Choctaws thought that "red hair" was "prettier" than black hair so they used the vermillon paint for cosmetic value to give themselves red hair. And it turns out that the Choctaws also practiced excarnation until they were forced to quit the excarnation burial practice by missionaries.

Choctaw Excarnation Burial Practice

Among the honored officials of the Choctaws were men - and possibly women - who were known as bonepickers. These undertakers were tattooed in a distinctive manner, and allowed their fingernails to grow long for their revolting occupation. When the body had remained upon the scaffold the specified time, a bone-picker was summoned, and all the relatives and friends were invited for the last rites.

These mourners surrounded the scaffold, wailing and weeping, while the grisly undertaker ascended the platform, and with his long finger nails thoroughly cleaned the bones of the putrefied flesh.

The bones were then passed down to the waiting relatives, the skull was painted with vermilion, and they were carefully placed in a coffin curiously constructed of such materials as bark and cane. The flesh was left on the platform, which was set on fire; or was carried away and buried.

Choctaw Bone Pickers, Burial Customs and Superstitions

The differences between Choctaws and the European groups is that Europeans used vultures to deflesh their dead and the Choctaws had specificed humans to deflesh the corpses. But it is highly interesting that Choctaws were very similar to Levant and Palestine excarnating red heads. Levant and Palestine would paint the cranium with red ochre paint and Choctaws would paint the cranium with vermillion paint. In that aspect the two excarnating burial practices are identical.


Choctaws were considered one of the "fair-skinned" Native American tribes. It's highly possible that there might have been pre-Columbus group of ancient mariners who excarnated their dead with red hair that might have mixed with the Choctaws in America. But who knows how long ago? Could it have been shortly after 7000 B.C.E.? 6000 B.C.E.? Or would have it been around 3000 B.C.E.? It's such a big gap in time that a lot more research would be needed.

Howdy Mapmistress


You may wish to go to a primary source as I believe Christopher Columbus was defleshed manually and not by bird.

Choctaws were considered one of the "fair-skinned" Native American tribes. It's highly possible that there might have been pre-Columbus group of ancient mariners who excarnated their dead with red hair that might have mixed with the Choctaws in America.

Are we now? You might want to look at the Choctaw myths dealing with the sacred mound of Nanih Waiya

The Choctaw allowed the bodies to decompose above ground then removed what flesh was left. The use of ochre is common among many people; perhaps you should point out that this is not an isolated cultural trait but a common on and not useful for making 'connections'

Cyprus vulture is one of the vultures imported for their burial practice

Which vulture are you assigning to this roll? Gyps fulvus, Sarcogyps calvus, Aegypius monachus or some other