Excarnation, evisceration, and exhumation in medieval and post-medieval Europe.
In China, there generally is no evidence of the Zoroastrian exposure for animals or vultures to consume the flesh ("
excarnation" is the word used by the author) followed by burial of urns containing the bones.
Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, concludes that the Reformation and the movements leading up to it resulted in an "
excarnation" of spirituality.
AF: What can we do today about
excarnation? On the one hand we bring back the body--as you suggest in Carnal Hermeneutics--and on the other, we lose it again, in digital virtuality.
Royle employs archaeological and anthropological terms to articulate the idea of the ray: 'Like a dream of
excarnation without any possible fossilisation, dream as impossible fossil, there is a naked cape and it is alive.
Complementing this approach from radical orthodoxy's robust commitment to materialism, Justin Klassen extends Taylor's largely poetic response to "
excarnation." Attentive to the secular pluralism of the Canadian context, Charles Colorado seeks to cast Taylor's profound theological debts as nonetheless somehow entailing weak ontological commitments, while Ruth Abbey adds sociological data to support Taylor's "conjuring [of] possibilities" and questions whether "fragilization" is really cotemporaneous with the age of authenticity.
If indeed Luther and other reformers were complicit in the "
excarnation" or disenchantment of our contemporary western world (Taylor), and if a pivotal role in that disenchantment was the uncoupling of soteriology (understandings of salvation) and the authority of scripture alone from an account of moral formation whereby humans cooperated with God toward the telos or goal of human flourishing (Gregory), then can Luther's understanding of the relationship between the sacred and profane and between salvation through "the Word" and ongoing Christian growth now again be understood and employed not as marks of robust Lutheran identity but as resources for renewed reform of the church as a whole, which is nowhere more needed than in our so-called secular age?
Kirklees should revive the tradition of disposal of the dead by '
excarnation', as was practiced by the ancient Zoarastrian religion and their successors, the Parsees of India.
(1997): "The ritual framework of
excarnation by exposure as the mortuary practice of the early and middle Iron Ages of central southern Britain".
These are buildings used for a process known as
excarnation or sky burial -- the removal of flesh from corpses by vultures and other birds.
The distinction between anthropogenic and spontaneous mummies rests on a methodological bias which can more readily detect human intervention in the decomposition process such as evisceration, excerebration, and
excarnation. Clearly, these measures lend themselves to the identification of intentionality and we must use caution in speculating beyond the available data.