The Ainu are indigenous people living in the Ainu mosir which consists of Hokkaidō and areas of northeast Honshū in Japan as well as areas surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia.

When Ainu people are dying, the dying person and their loved ones gather at the hearth to stay close to the fire goddess kamui fuchi (カムイフチ). The men of the village say prayers for the dying, but when those are not successful, the soul of the deceased passes through the fire in the hearth and onto the other world. The body is dressed in embroidered white clothing – women can only be prepared by their maternal family and men prepared by their paternal family.

Anything to be buried with the deceased is broken or cracked so the spirits inside – called ramat – are released as well. The spirits of any burial items can then accompany the dead to the afterlife. Sometimes the decedent’s house is burned to the ground to send that to the afterlife as well. During the preparations for burial, loved ones and neighbors celebrate the decedent’s life. There are epic songs called yukar performed to send the spirit on its way.

After the end of the celebrations, two male family members wrap the body in a woven mat and then suspend it from a pole to carry it to the gravesite. Friends and family follow carrying offerings, and the women wear bead necklaces and men ceremonial swords. The Ainu do not linger around gravesites – once the person is buried, the funeral procession all wash their hands and then return to the village.

Dead ancestors are remembered in prayer.

Currently Lutheran Finland has a historically rich culture of death including mythology, spiritual practices, and rituals.

The earliest known gravesite in Finland dates to around 6550 BCE. Initially, bodies were buried, but in the Bronze Age, bodies started being laid out on the ground, usually on a rocky hill overlooking the water, and large stones were placed on top to form a cairn. Later in this era, cremation became common. Remains were kept close to homes which shows a reverence for the protection ancestors brought to the living. By the time Christianity came to Finland, burial was once again the primary practice.

When the Eastern Orthodox Church came to Finland, death cults were allowed to live alongside their beliefs. The Catholic Church was unable to change the existence of death cults, but the puritanical Lutherans outlawed them in the areas they controlled. They remained robust in areas still controlled by the Orthodox Church, extending even to World War II. The practices that continued included leaving food by graves for the birds who were reincarnated loved ones, believing in elves that were possessors of the souls of the dead, and introducing the dead to new family members via gravesite visits.

Funerals in the east of the country used to be massive festivities. The ceremonies were performed without a priest, and the women of the family performed cleansing and dressing of the body. When the body was placed in the coffin, mourners were to start crying. The coffin was then carried around the home for everyone to see the dead, forests, and waters. It was then brought to the graveyard which was considered holy and important to nature – the greenery of the graveyard was not to be disturbed.

In the western part of the country, funerals were standard Protestant ones and included opening the windows and oven to allow the spirit to leave the house after death.

In the current day, cremation is only seen in 46% of deaths with cremation being more common in urban areas. Funerals are largely standard Lutheran events because they are easy to follow when someone is grieving. If someone is cremated, their ashes are generally buried rather than cast – many also elect to have their ashes scattered in a common grave instead of a private plot. Many people who are buried prefer to have their remains in cemeteries that are close to nature.

Although the Lutheran church has largely dominated Finnish death culture for centuries, alternative death practices are increasing in popularity.

The Akan are a Twi-speaking people who live in most of southern Ghana and west of the Black Volta River. They see a good death as a reason for celebration, as those who experience this become ancestors who join the others underground. A bad death, on the other hand, leads to different, more excluded mortuary practices. Bad deaths include the death of infants or children, stigmatized illness, homicide, a childless adult, untimely deaths, deaths from accidents, corpse loss, suicide, death by childbirth, death of criminals, and death by sorcery. Traditionally, people who die bad deaths are not permitted lavish funeral festivals and rites – rather, their deaths are quietly dealt with, and no public mourning is allowed.

When people die good deaths, rituals are performed by their family members, all led by the head of the family. These rituals are supremely important, and the traditions are so deep-seated that everyone within the Akan tribe knows about them. It is believed that if the rituals are not performed, there will be negative, supernatural effects on the community. To the Akan, death is the beginning of a journey, and funeral rites must be carried out properly for this journey to carry forth positively. They take a significant amount of time and funds to give the dead elaborate ceremonies – this cost may even include billboards advertising the decedent’s passing. The funerary time begins upon death and ends with the celebration of the final rites a year later.

Funerals are a huge social event in Akan culture. During funerals, families show off their cohesion, how well they adhere to traditional rites, and wealth. Each aspect of the rites has cultural significance from the color of the clothing to the dancing to the offering of liquor to the ancestors as a way of absolving the sins of the newly dead.

Some other, newer rites and customs include mandatory fasting by the closest family members during the funeral festivities (though they are expected to have plenty of food for guests), the extended keeping of the body in cold storage until the funeral is planned and ready, the quality and type of music and dance, showing off of the best clothes and jewelry, and nearly outlandish, intricately carved coffins which have been in the international news in recent years. People may also record the services and include editing to make the videos more ‘dramatic’.

The family also gets support from the community during this. There is great social support and gift-giving, both of objects and money. People from all walks of life also end up meeting at funerals, reducing ethnic tension amongst the Akan tribes and promoting unity. In the end, communities are strengthened by the funerary proceedings.

Unlike the Akan, the Eʋe people of Ghana and Togo see death as a dangerous and imbalanced part of life. They refer to this as a state of ‘hotness’, and to cool down, the family and surrounding community must properly send off the dead lest it becomes a pestilence to the living.

Eʋeawó funerals start with the announcing of the death via a town crier who uses a double bell to get everyone’s attention in the early evening between dinner and bed. The crier also announces the time of the wake, funeral, and burial. Most Eʋeawó funerals are held on weekends, taking up all three days: Friday for the wake, Saturday for the burial, and the funeral on Sunday. It is expected that everyone in the community attends the funeral, and they are also expected to sing and dance at the Sunday funeral. Music is hugely important to the Eʋeawó, and their funerary weekends are full of hours of drumming and singing.

The next part, the wake, occurs when the body is removed from the mortuary in a casket and brought to the home for preparation. There is a procession through the town to the main public meeting area. This announces that the dead is home for burial, as it is very important to the Eʋeawó to be buried in their land. The procession then goes to the family home where attendees are fed, and the corpse is dressed in traditional cloth, jewelry, and sandals. Makeup and perfume are also used. During the wake, the dead person is treated as still alive and are regularly propped up and interacted with by the attendees. After this preparation, people will come to pay their respects while musicians keep vigil and keep attendees awake until the dawn burial.

At daybreak, a large drum is brought out to announce to the town that the burial is beginning. The body is returned to the casket and taken back to the town meeting area. The whole community provides prayers and incantations, and shortly thereafter, the casket is lowered into the ground. Afterwards, the pit is filled with things the dead will need in the afterlife: money, cloth, food, and personal items. Lastly, the casket is covered with dirt.

The final event is the funeral. Everyone wears their best clothing, and the whole community joins in with the musicians’ singing and drumming. It is a huge party during which the family of the deceased notes who attended the funeral. The next day, they send delegates out to thank those who did attend.

The information for this section is from Manjari Sharma’s ‘Ritual Lens’, published in the 2023 edition of The Rubin’s magazine Spiral.

When a family member dies, the family is to stop daily life activities for twelve days to perform the death rites. If these are not performed, the dead cannot enter the afterlife and will wander as a ghost looking for closure. To start this process, the living make a ladder of rope and bamboo to carry the body which has been wrapped in perfumed shawls. Priests give loved ones handfuls of things like flowers and rice puffs to throw out of the vehicle carrying the body. This helps restless spirits.

After this, the body is cremated. This makes sure they pass into the afterlife. When the cremation is complete, the mourners go back to the crematorium, or place where a body is cremated, to get the bones from the ashes. On the sixth day of this process, the bones are taken to an ancestral holy ground where priests bless the bones. Finally, the bones are released into a river with the priest helping.

On day ten, cooking occurs. There is a sixteen ball bread called pinda – ten pieces represent the body and reunite the dead and the newly deceased. The other six are used as nourishment for the deceased’s journey. Shortly after that, mourning was complete. In the memory of the dead, the living may feed and care for another person the sex and age of the deceased.

This process lasts for a year while the deceased makes the journey to heaven.

Information for this section was obtained from The Australian Museum.

After indigenous Australians die, their mourners wear special hats called kopi that are built onto their heads after their hair was shorn. These are worn for as little as a week or as much as six months. These caps are made of layers of plaster and end up being up to two inches/five centimeters thick and fifteen pounds/seven kilograms in weight. The taller the hat, the greater the grief. They are usually white, as this is the color of the dead in this society. When mourning is over, the caps are removed from the mourners and placed on the grave.

Sulawesi is an Indonesian island, and in the mountainous southern region reside the Toraja. Torajans believe in Puya, the land of the dead. While they are largely Christian, they also participate in ancestor worship, and the ancestors must be treated carefully and lovingly. For them and many other Indonesian cultures, death is not the end, and the ancestors can help protect the living. There are tight continuing bonds.

Torajans also believe that one’s funeral is the most important time in life, so there is a big gap between death and burial while the family can save plenty of money and many can plan to attend, as the area where Torajans live is very rural and difficult to access. Sometimes, the body is kept in the house for years. The corpses are ‘fed’ and cleaned, and their spirits are believed to hang around. During this time, death happens gradually: at first, the dead is referred to as ‘sleeping’ or ‘sick’, but that changes when the funeral begins. At that time, they are called ‘dead’.

Funerals can last up to twelve days and lead to the slaughtering of up to a hundred buffalo and many pigs. These events can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

People used to be buried at the base of cliffs, but others would steal the items in their coffins. Now people are buried either on cliff faces or in family vaults.

The Torajan also exhume their ancestors regularly. One ritual is called ‘ma’nene’ and includes exhuming and cleaning the bodies before leaving them to dry in the sun and changing their clothes. This occurs every two or three years, and they believe that doing this will improve the harvest. During the process, loved ones will take pictures with the sometimes long-deceased. The rite is over when a ceremonial meal is served.

Japan used to be a place where the living and the dead were close after the clean internment of the body. People cared for those who died before in graves located near where they lived. Giving offerings was a daily occurrence, and they were given for thirty-three years until the dead were transitioned to ancestors. These graves can be very important to the living. Some people will not move away from the town where the graves are located because they are caretakers, and when the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred, something which destroyed swaths of graveyards as it destroyed coastal Japan, people were devastated at the loss of their family plots on top of everything else.

Japan is also known for a belief in lost ghosts who can wreak havoc on the lives of the living. From the book Coffinman by Shinmon Aoki: ‘In Japan, almost all religions are based on the assumption that once a person dies, their soul wanders about lost. This is why we perform various funerary practices, rituals, and rites related to the “soul” such as using just a single stick of incense (producing a single trail of smoke the soul follows) and having funerary tablets (where they can “reside”) and performing services to send good merit (in case they need it).’

Today, there are four main kinds of death rituals in Japan.

In the first, and most expensive, people are removed from their place of death and then have a proper wake, funeral, and special cremation ceremony with their family and friends. After this, they are then either interred immediately in a private plot or held for forty-nine days as the soul crosses into the afterlife per Buddhism. This is growing rarer by the year, both due to cost and social changes in the country where fewer people are having children and families are more spread out.

The second is less expensive – there is no wake or funeral, just the crematorium. Loved ones do not engage in the bone-picking ceremony following the cremation, and the cremains are immediately taken to their place of rest instead of being held.

The third is a prepaid plan wherein the decedent’s ashes are interred with many people in a communal grave; the people buried here generally know each other, so this is not an anonymous option.

The last is cremation then placement in a potter’s field, or place where unclaimed people are buried.

As mentioned in the most expensive option, the Japanese bone-picking ceremony, or kotsuage (骨揚げ), follows a wake and funeral and takes place at the crematorium. Only the people closest to the dead attend this ritual. After the body leaves the furnace and only bones remain, everyone looks at the bones before lining up in pairs to move a single bone fragment from the crematory tray to another one. Everyone stays until the final fragment is moved into an urn which is then passed to the chief mourner who then takes up the mantle of caretaker of the spirit for the requisite thirty-three year period.

For more information about death in Japan, I recommend the book Being Dead Otherwise by Anne Allison and the film Departures.

The Sámi are the indigenous people of the area known as Fennoscandia. This area includes Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian peninsula of Kola. The Sámi call this area Sápmi. As with many indigenous peoples, the Sámi have had a difficult time with the people of Fennoscandia actively working to destroy their culture. Because they are not a materialistic culture, there is not much evidence of their time before the Fennoscandians became involved.

Sámi are known for their appreciation of nature and reindeer herding, the latter which started around 1420 CE. Religiously, they are polytheistic, or they believe in more than one god. They are also animistic and believe that everything in nature has spirits. Everything has the potential for holiness. There is also ancestor worship and the use of shamans called noaidi. These shamans intervene when someone is sick, calling for the kindness of the death god Ruohtta. After a death occurs, the Sámi may make offerings to the goddess of death, Jaemiehaahka, to avoid additional deaths.

When Sámi die, it is not believed that they go somewhere celestial. Instead, they go to a mirror world that is underground. From there, they are known as the saivo, protectors of the land. Their bodies are cremated, and the ashes buried. Gravesites are usually off the beaten path and often near bodies of water. Animal bones, especially antlers, are often set on top of the grave. If a body is missing, the Sámi treat an empty grave as if it were the person’s real burial area.

It is nearly impossible to separate Sámi culture and its religion, and that applies to death rituals as well. They should be allowed to continue practicing their own ways.

This section focuses on the Tibetan afterlife and is based on information from Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche.

After death, the person moves to a middle state called the bardo where it stays for forty-nine days. What happens next depends on the karma of the person who died. The karma pulls someone through bardo to their new birth. When someone first goes to the bardo, they are confused because their mind exists, but their body does not. When someone realizes they are dead, they experience great grief, especially if someone had too much attachment to life. They also watch as their loved ones grieve them less which can be hurtful.

In the second part, the dead experience mental flashes of their new life. Depending on their karma, they may be drawn to one of six realms – these are the human, animal, hungry ghost, hell, demi-god, or god realms. Animal, hungry ghost, and hell are for people who have done wrong in their lives and have negative karma. Human, demi-god, and god are for people with good karma.

For people who have spent their lives meditating, they may experience the body disappearing but appreciate nothingness. If they are meant to spread more love and service, they will be reborn as humans to be beneficial to the world.