New Guinea Mummies

[Bollygum]

A couple of years ago I took a trip to PNG to see some of their mummy traditions. It took us into the highlands above Lae. The tradition sounds macabre, but it is actually anything but. It has almost died out due to missionaries in the 1960s who thought that it was terrible and worked to have it banned. The principle zealot who worked against it actually changed his mind before he died and said that it was a good tradition. The villagers smoke their dead and then transport them to a cleft in the mountain side that is overlooking the village. They place them their so that they can see the village, and the village can see them. It provides a link with the recently dead. The bodies do not last for more than 50 years as the PNG climate is not like Egypt when it comes to preserving mummified bodies.

Tending the dead.

How the bodies are smoked. This old man wants to revive the tradition. I believe that he died recently and is now among the bodies in the cleft.

 

[Kodiak Qc]

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Weird but most interesting… thanks Steve!

 

[Bollygum]

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Weird but most interesting… thanks Steve!

I didn't know what to expect as the only thing I had seen on it had represented it as being quite macabre, and it wasn't at all. We, in the west, tend to hide death. I remember, when I was a kid, never even being invited to my grandfathers funeral. What was I meant to think - he's not dead, he just doesn't like me anymore? Now that was weird.
I think this was quite touching and really a lot better than our more recent traditions.

 

[DSP121]

Saw new kinda photography over here.

 

[PINNACLE]

Very interesting and not macabre when presented like that. Fascinating photos as well.

 

[pukkagen]

Thanks fella for sharing.

 

[Bollygum]

Very interesting and not macabre when presented like that. Fascinating photos as well.

It's good that I could show it as a good custom and not a horror story. The first missionaries may have got a bad impression as some of the poorer villages didn't have nice clefts in the mountains. So they put the dead bodies in trees where they were open to the weather. It must have been like something out of Apocalypse Now with dripping bodies staring down out of the trees.