Goodbye, cruel world

For some cultures and for more than a few cults, suicide isn't the taboo we consider it to be.

The debate surrounding assisted suicides may be new but the idea of euthanasia, mercy killing or assisted suicide has been accepted in various cultures for centuries. Throughout antiquity there existed large support for voluntary death, with physicians providing long-suffering patients with the poisons they needed. This changed after the Middle Ages and with the rise of Christianity, and from then on, no organised religion supports the idea of euthanasia or assisted suicide.

But what of other religions beyond the reach of the Abrahamic religions? The Mayan worshipped a suicide goddess called Ixtab (the rope woman), who was believed to accompany all suicides to heaven. The Inuits of the northern territories have reported cases of assisted suicide as late as 1939. In Inuit culture, those seeking death would ask for assistance from their families thrice, with family members attempting to dissuade them each time. At the third request, however, help was obligatory and the death occurred ritualistically, at a specific place and time, by either hanging or stabbing. Oddly, the Inuit were more popularly known as a people who abandoned their old once they became ‘burdensome’ but this is less likely to be true, as Inuit cultural bears a taboo against ‘sacrificing’ those who are the keepers of knowledge in the oral tradition.

Perhaps the best known case of an assisted suicide prior to the start of the great debate was that of Sigmund Freud, possibly the most influential figure in the world of human psychology. In September 1939, Freud, suffering from immense pain from cancer of the mouth and jaw, asked a friend and fellow doctor to help him die. He was given doses of morphine for two days until his death. In the last few decades, the process has become legal in a number of Scandinavian countries, as well as in New Zealand. The most recent champion of assisted suicide has been writer Terry Pratchet who suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Seppuku or Hara-kiri

Japan has an ancient culture of suicide, one that stemmed largely from seppuku or hara-kiri, a method of ritual suicide by means of ‘cutting the belly’ or disembowelment. The first recorded act of seppuku was in 1180, and it grew to become a part of bushido — the samurai honour code -  as a way for captured samurai to avoid being tortured before death or even at times to ‘restore’ their honour (which had been lost due to their defeat and capture).  By 1500, seppuku became an alternate to execution offered only to privileged samurai who were found guilty of disloyalty to the emperor. Eventually, judicial seppuku was abolished in 1873, but records of voluntary seppuku exist as late as 1970, when writer and filmmaker Yukio Mishima committed seppuku after a failed coup d’etat. Today, internet-based ‘suicide clubs’ are considered a major social problem in Japan.

Jigai

Never say the ancient Japanese did not provide gender equality. Wives of the samurai committed jigai when under threat of captivity or rape, after the deaths of their husbands in battle. Unlike seppuku, jigai was simply a cutting of the jugular for a quick death. In order to be ‘dignified’, even in death, women who committed jigai would tie their knees together so that they would not be found having flailed about as they bled out.

Kamikaze pilots

During the Pacific campaign of World War II, Japanese pilots manned suicide missions against the American, following the bushido code once again and preferring death to dishonour. Meaning ‘divine wind’, the better known kamikaze attacks of WWII were aerial, but the Japanese had a number of ‘special attack’ units in place, including suicide boats named ‘Sea Quake’; midget suicide submarines named ‘Sea Dragon’; suicide divers called ‘Crouching Dragons’ who would plant a mine underwater into the hull of an enemy ship but never make it back alive; and manned torpedoes called ‘Returning to the Heavens’, which were crafted to allow pilots to escape. It is unknown whether they would successfully have escaped alive, but there is no record of any of the pilots (all aged between 18 and 20) having ever attempted an escape.

We won’t be taken alive

But the Japanese weren’t the only nation to commit suicide in battle  —  history is full of incidents where defeated communities have chosen to commit mass suicide rather than become captive. In approximately 102 BC the women of a defeated Teutonic army chose to commit mass suicide rather than be captured by the Romans. In 73 AD, 960 members of a Jewish community at Masada first killed their wives and children and then themselves rather than be captured.

Closer to home, the Rajputs had a tradition called Jauhar in which, when defeat seemed imminent, the Rajput women would self-immolate while their men marched to seek death on the battlefield. The latter practice is known as Saka. There are several recorded incidents of Jauhar.

Similar to this was the Balinese practice of Puputan, or fight until death. In the Badung Puputan of 1906, when faced with an overwhelming Dutch force, over a thousand Balinese men women and children sought death from Dutch fire. When the Dutch ran out of bullets the Balinese killed each other in a symbolic act of defiance.

More recently, nearly 1000 inhabitants of the German town of Demmin committed mass suicide when faced with the advancing Red Army on May 1st 1945.

Sati

Meanwhile back in the subcontinent, widows were immolating themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands in a tradition the Mughals tried very hard to abolish in India. Akbar insisted officials delay sati until the widow had dealt with her immediate grief and could make an informed decision, Shah Jehan forbade it for widows with children and Aurangzeb straight out banned the ritual. However, it is the British who had the greatest success in quashing the practice. Still, a famous case of sati in 1987 caused considerable uproar in India. The practice was not limited to the subcontinent and in Bali, Indonesia, sati was known as masatya, and was practiced by aristocracy until it was banned under Dutch colonial rule in 1905.

Heaven’s Gate

Say what you will about the Scientologists, they still haven’t convinced members to kill themselves for a better life. The same couldn’t be said about members of the Heaven’s Gate cult who believed that suicide would simply free them from the ‘vehicles’ of their bodies and allow them to travel to a better, genderless life aboard a spaceship in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. In the best known case of cult suicide in recent years, 39 members of Heaven’s Gate committed suicide on a ranch in Santa Fe, California in March 1997. The two survivors of the mass cult suicide both killed themselves within the next year.

The Order of the Solar Temple

Between 1994 and 1997, 74 members of the Order of the Solar Temple died in a series of mass suicides. Each left letters behind, explaining that their death would result in a move to the Sirius solar system.

Jonestown

In 1978 in Guyana, 918 people, mostly American citizens, died from what was labeled ‘revolutionary suicide’ by the cult’s leader Jim Jones. The cult had been stocking up on arsenic while running rehearsals for a mass suicide. When the time came, the poison was mixed into a vat of Flavour Aid or Kool Aid, and although a few members changed their minds and survived, most did not. Parent poisoned their children — even infants and toddlers were not spared. Leader Jim Jones was found with his head on a pillow, a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his temple.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine May 22^nd, 2011.