How do you mourn death?
Do you cry? Do you pull out your hair? Do you pay money to some God to protect their now lost soul?
We’ve all got our ways. And personally, I don’t think any are more correct than the others.
Although now that I say that there is one that I don't really want to have to witness.
Because here in the Micronesian state of Chuuk, right up until a few decades ago when an important person died,
women were expected to eat their corpse.
Or at the very least nibble on it.
In the Micronesian state of Chuuk, they still believe in magic.
And not like that girl in your high school who is trying to make up for her flat personality, but genuinely, in their hearts.
Spirits, possession, curses. The whole thing.
Actually, pretty much everywhere in Micronesia they still believe in magic.
Every major site we went to, every major historical event we asked about, the guide we’d hired told us that it probably happened due to magic.
When we saw the great Pacific ruins of Nan Madol in Pohnpei,
our otherwise well-educated friend told us that he was pretty sure it was built by a race of magical giants.
He’d seen the footprints, he said, although he couldn’t find them now.
In the Menkac ruins of Kosrae,
the property owner asked us if we believed that the structures could have been made by a magician.
My wife had read enough of the archaeology to make him believe she was one of the researchers
who comes through to study his rocks, and he felt that she was enough of an authority
that he was genuinely asking her. He really did want to know if she thought that this was magic.
And I don't say this to shame them for ignorance.
In this society, throughout all history, virtually every answer to every hard question has always been magic.
I focus on this is because if you break down virtually any myth that sustains into the modern day,
you'll to find that there’s a deep and understandable humanity that drives it.
Like, for example, eating corpses here in Chuuk.
It hasn’t been all that long since Chuuk has modernized. Maybe two generations, and even that feels like a stretch.
In fact, it would be wrong to say that they’ve modernized fully even today. Especially in the outer islands.
These are a people with some of the strongest connections to their pre-Western culture of any society I’ve ever witnessed on earth.
And although they don’t practice it exactly the same way today,
very recently they still maintained a death ritual absolutely steeped in magic.
In Chuukese culture, when someone who was important to you died, it was important that women take a part of their pain inside them.
To join them in suffering.
It was a rite of passage, but not for growing up as we often use that term, but for dying. For getting over someone’s death.
If an important chief died, if a child died, if someone of great family value left this world,
the woman closest to them was expected to suffer alongside.
And the way they were expected to suffer was to eat them.
To hang their corpse in the rafters of their home, just above where they slept,
and according to researchers from that period, quote, “consume anything that drips out of them”.
If there was nothing there to drip, they’d be expected to eat a tiny bit of their flesh, usually an appendage like a finger, perhaps a little bit of the cheek.
Nothing much, just enough to them violently ill.
Because if you're from a society that truly believes in magic,
how would you explain the illness you received when you ate a little bit of that corpse?
How would you explain that when you ate part of a dead body, you too started to die? Surely, it was their magic entering you.
Their spirit possessing you. And as disgusting as it sounds, to me, that makes sense to me.
Grief is a weird thing. It prompts us to act in strange ways we otherwise wouldn’t.
Especially when that grief is overwhelming. Unbearable, even.
God forbid you ever have to lose a child, but I bet if you did, one of the most powerful feelings that would wash over you would be the desire to die.
God forbid you ever lose a loving spouse, family member or friend, but as another human who has felt that horror,
I can only imagine that you’d feel the desire to join them in that pain.
When we witness the pain of those we love, as odd as it is from a survival perspective,
we often wish to feel it ourselves. To jump on the flames of our husband’s pyre and burn alongside him.
But however we express that, however we manage our grief, it often tends to follow social lines. Magic or not.
We’re a social creature, and we tend to mourn in the way our societies deems best.
Even those of us who keep pain private, who turn inwards and say nothing,
we tend to do so because that’s what we’ve chosen from what our society deems as ok.
The way they mythologized this in Chuukese society is that the dead needed help learning how to be dead.
Which is something that only their mothers, wives, and daughters could help them with.
Men couldn't be magicians. Only women could. Because they contained the power of existence inside them.
In other Pacific societies, they'd refer to this as mana. Although I suppose it's most easily translated in western terms as fertility.
The keys to life. And, in turn, the knowledge of death.
Because of this, the most terrifying thing that existed in Chuukese society was a woman who died in childbirth.
Her spirit was the most dangerous of all the possible ghosts.
It would haunt the man who killed it, seeking revenge for putting a child inside her that could not be born,
and in turn, he was expected to run and hide in the jungle.
To live out his days away from society until she was not only buried, but her spirit was finally at peace.
One who doesn’t believe in magic could presume that the peace that he was looking for wasn’t just from her,
but also the family members who she’d left behind.
Because grief isn’t just personal. It’s social.
Other parts of their death magic also feel rather explainable when broken down.
The Chuukese don’t bury in a graveyard, for example, they say too many spirits together cause problems.
They bury their dead at home, usually just outside their front door.
They say that this is so that they can help guide their spirits to heaven and keep a watch over them as they go.
But to me, it kinda sounds like a nice way to never let them be forgotten.
Mothers were expected to wear a necklace made from the teeth of the dead,
yet another form of magic that coincidentally just so happens to keep the body part that doesn't decay close to the hearts of those who cared for them most.
Even the rule of never speaking their name after the burial makes sense to this outsider.
Because anyone who's ever met someone who won’t stop grieving knows just how important it can be
for the mental health of those in mourning to finally let things go.
In much of the world, we tend to call our magic religion.
Our burial rites contain all sorts of oddities that I personally find strange to witness, but I rarely question out loud.
Because they’re mine. They're ours.
We dress in black, because black is sad. But we don’t dress in black forever.
Some societies even have a strict amount of time before the black can and eventually has to be removed.
Many aim their graves towards the rising sun, because a great many of us currently believe in a sun god. Although we rarely call him that.
We even go so far as to usually hire a man to speak to that god for us. To let him know that our dead are coming to see him.
We dress them in their finest clothes, and bury them in an expensive coffin.
We say you can’t take it all with you, but it’s hard to attend a monarch’s funeral and not imagine at least some of us are trying.
Virtually every culture on this planet has rules for grief, and most of them go completely unspoken.
And yet we all kind of seem to know what our society expects from us when we're feeling sad from loss.
And what's more, it's kind of weird to see the rules of another.
Yet there is no right way to mourn your child. There is no right way to miss your spouse.
And I bet if you do ever come up against that moment, that you're going to find it is extremely hard not to believe in magic.
This is Rare Earth.
Welcome back guys for another video. My name is Kochi Mori.
Alright, can you say 'This is Rare Earth'
This is Rare Earth.