Death Priests

Butoh beside the river: "The Dance of Utter Darkness"

Charon, the ferryman conveyed souls across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead.

Deschutes River Canyon, July 18, 2024

Gargoyles standing sentry, death priests atop ancient, wooden posts and stones dotting a rocky ridge in warm, newborn light. A cool breeze. Wordless masters of the dark arts. Bald-headed necromancers, undertakers, groundskeepers. Dark-winged Boatmen ready to escort the deceased at the edge of my beloved river, Deschutes, across that river called Styx.

I would never have guessed beforehand; Turkey Vultures casting this unfolding morning within an aura of the sacred. Mystery and magic. Palpable majesty.

I don’t normally think of vultures in some exquisite, ‘morning magician’ sort of way, but there you have it; the painting they offered these increasingly cloudy eyes was a quiet, confident masterpiece. Neither poets nor painters, not philosophers or musicians. No artist of any medium or common imagining had authored all this richness and wonder before me, this silent shiva, this ritual meal of condolences.

Vultures.

I am a fan of their butoh arts, have revered and awed them since my youth, the effortless seeming ceremony, the soaring, aerial swoops and circling sky dances. The silent ritual. Never rushed or cheapened by false hopes and too much talk. Their business is death. Their services are essential. Their actions say what they cannot, do not. Theirs is noble and holy work.

They look patiently upon this awakening world as I watch them from a respectful distance, unwilling to disturb their solemn observances, and yet unable to look away.

A few of them, one at a time, unfold their immense wings and fly to other posts. Others, perhaps more sage, remain, studying me as I humbly walk the gravel road below them, sentries and high priests, morticians, shamans, guides.

I thank them for their sacred work, thank them for the painting they have created. They say nothing.

They remain. Immoveable. Timeless. Stoic. Zenlike. Considered.

When I near the place their attentions seemed focused, I study the landscape below and finally understand who they have gathered to tend to; a mule deer, or what remains of her, deflated and dismembered, probably hit by a pickup barreling along at fifty on a road posted for twenty. This departed soul is far enough beyond the base of the bank below that she seems certain to have hobbled, crawled perhaps for another twenty or thirty feet before surrendering to her wounds after impact, after tumbling down that rocky embankment I now stand above. The air is sad and in momentary, upwelling wisps of breeze, swirls of the thick, sweet stench of death.

Hers had not been a painless departure.

I wonder if suffering has a taste, an aftertaste, if these high priests of death can know important details of the deceased whom they are attending by the flavors atop the surcease, telltale seasonings, trauma versus sickness, versus decrepitude and old age. Do they notice these things? Do they speak of them among themselves? Do the blow flys and maggots who clean up even further after these sacred, death priest ministrations sense dying’s cause?

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I set out with a cup of coffee on a lonely road at dawn… A mile, then two. A curve, north to east. Ahead a wall of basalt, layer stacked upon layer, eon atop eon, and in the shadowed distance between us, silhouettes and a sense of solemnity.

I eased off the gas and rolled to a stop, turned off the engine and stepped into the road.

The silhouettes remained frozen, paid my arrival no apparent attention …for a time.

Their world, it seemed was at prayer.

I stood in an open doorway to this massive cathedral, light pouring in through smoke-stained air, distant wildfires, scented haze, priests in dark, burnished robes. I did not know, had never met the departed but felt keenly the space her departure had created. I stood there within a flood of senses… listening, smelling, feeling the day’s building warmth on my face, tracing the scene’s lines with my eyes.

…and then, in an alcove just to my left, the solitary wail of a single crow.