Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume. 33, Number 10. 8 July, 1970
Over their dead bodies
Over their dead bodies
Marriages and funerals come in for special treatment. Marriages take place in a Registrar's office and are blessed thereafter by the Exclusives at a special meeting for the occasion. At this meeting, the virtues of chastity are enumerated and the code of conduct for a good life set out. (At one Assembly a speaker told the newly-weds that "life isn't just a bed of roses, you know.") There is usually a "reception" for all at the house of the bride's parents, but no liquor is consumed of course. When a person dies, a special meeting is held. The deceased's body lies in its casket with the Lid off in the centre of the room. At the end of such a meeting, the casket is wheeled to the back of the room and all the Exclusives file past it gazing at the body before the lid is replaced and the coffin placed in the hearse. I have seen five such dead bodies, either withered victims of old age or of the ravages of cancer, and I have seen two-year olds held up to behold the corpses. It is not a pleasant sight. At the cemetery, a further prayer is held over the coffin. Exclusives are not cremated. Cremation is regarded as a fatuous attempt to destroy the body completely—soul, spirit and all—and thus depart from the world unseen by God.