The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1893-12-10
BURIED WHILE ALIVE.
A Cruel Rite That Was Resorted To
in India-In Underground Cells.

The annals of eastern nations furnish
which has been resorted to from
variety of motives and under very
different circumstances. The practice
may be employed for the purpose of
extinguishing life or maintaining life
for a prolonged period without food or
drink. There is, therefore, fatal and
non-fatal kind of living inhumation.
The common description of burial alive
| Gamadh) is leper burial, which used
to be very frequently resorted to in
India, often at the request or urgent
entreaty of the victims of this loath-
some dis ease. A pit was dug, by the
relatives of the leper or by other
llepers, and the unfortunate cast into
LIT and smothered with earth. In some
cases the wreck was burned to death
before being thrown into the pit.
Opium water was frequently drunk by
1executioners and executed on such oc-
lcasions. This cruel rite fingered in
Kishmir and some parts of RaJputana
till within very recent years. Indeed,
lit is questionable whether it is even
now altogether extinct. Lepers have
been known in the extremity of their
distress and misery to commit suicide
by jumping into pits.
stituted mode of suttee, or voluntary
sacrifice of life, by widows who have
been cast by sympathizing and oblig-
ling request, into the same graves as
| their diseased husbands. Homicidal
burial alive has been used as a means
lof punishment of crime, torture, re-
venge or murder, and the burial has
been in such cases either complete or
incomplete. The non-fatal form of liv-
ling burial has always excited more
Interest than the fatal, which, how
ever, supplies material for a strange
and large chapter in the history of
human crime. The phenomenon of
Ihibernation yields some sort of coun-
tenance to the idea that the animal
organism is capable, under certain
circumstances = namely, conservation,
lof body, heat, perfect inaction, and
preservation from all external stimuli
l-of living for weeks, if not months,
without food or drink; and records of
prolonged fasting, with or without
lsleep. are forthcoming with the reg
ularity of the announcements of gigan-
tic gooseberries, sea-Serpents and
Ieight-legged calves.
The alleged proceedings of Indian
fakirs and Persian dervishes are cited
in support of the possibility of human
lhibernation in under ground cells The
proceedings of these gentry must, how
They certainly achieve some very ex-
ltraordinary feats of endurance and self
labnegation. Their efforts to set at
defiance the laws and inclinations of
the body, and by contemplation, fast
ling and neglect of the ordinary usages
and requirements of life to mortify
the flesh and become absorbed into
the divine SOUL which is. according
to the tenets of pedantism, the spring
land essence of existence, surpass
physiological possibility and necessar-
lily engender imposture, which may be
conscious or unconscious, or both
This element of imposture, involuntary
or designed, enters into all their pro
lceedings, and is seldom either dill
gently looked for or detected. The
Hove of the marvellous is strongly de-
veloped among orientals, and fakir
lstories must be taken with liberal
lgrain of salt. Tales of prolonged liV-
ing burials are common enough in