The Nomadic Alternative – Page 179

living memory; Gipsies smash all a dead person's belongings.

Mourning is virtually unknown, except for squalls of grief if death occurs within a camp, but these pass quickly. Funeral ceremonies rather take the form of a happy celebration of life. C.J. Popp-Serboianu has this to say of Gipsy funerals in Rumania. "They do not believe in the resurrection or the life to come. If they die in the mountains, and providing the authorities do not force them to bury their dead in a cemetery, they put them in the ground by a large tree. Eau-de-Vie flows freely at funerals and they return to their tents joyfully as if nothing had happened." Funeral practices belong to the same order of thought as necrophilia and cannibalism, and result from unsatisfied lives.

Senilicide is an ugly word and disregard of the dead, to many , an ugly idea. But there is another way of seeing the matter, contained in a verse of the New Testament, "Let the dead bury their dead."

The dead have not gone. They have arrived. If they have kept each of life's appointments on time, they will have achieved without forethought the trance-like ideal of the wandering Sufi dervish "to become a dead man walking", free from all worldly cares. Burial in this case becomes irrelevant except for reasons of hygiene. In the next chapter I touch upon why wanderers journey as a technique to recreate the Golden Age. Hesiod explicitly says that the men of the Golden Race died with 'hands and feet unfailing', passing on as though sleep had come over them. The soft-bodied Uttarakurus were taken up by sharp-beaked birds when their time came. And the peaceful Hyperboreans flung themselves into lakes when they were tired of life. WHY WAS THE SEPULCHRE EMPTY?