http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressionism_%28film%29
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2.) Tower of Silence:
Zoroastrian tradition considers a dead body - in addition to cut hair and nail-parings - to be nasu, unclean, i.e. potential pollutants. Specifically, the corpse demon (Avestan: nasu.daeva) was believed to rush into the body and contaminate everything it came into contact with, hence the Vendidad (an ecclesiastical code "given against the demons") has rules for disposing of the dead as "safely" as possible.
To preclude the pollution of earth or fire ([...]Zam and Atar respectively), the bodies of the dead are placed atop a tower - a tower of silence - and so exposed to the sun and to birds of prey. Thus, "putrefaction with all its concomitant evils" "is most effectually prevented."
The towers, which are fairly uniform in their construction, have an almost flat roof, with the perimeter being slightly higher than the center. The roof is divided into three concentric rings: The bodies of men are arranged around the outer ring, women in the second circle, and children in the innermost ring. Once the bones have been bleached by the sun and wind, which can take as long as a year, they are collected in an ossuary pit at the center of the tower, where - assisted by lime - they gradually disintegrate and the remaining material - with run-off rainwater - runs through multiple coal and sand filters before being eventually washed out to sea. The ritual precinct may only be entered by a special class of pallbearers, called nasellars, a contraction of nasa.salar, caretaker (-salar) of potential pollutants (nasa-).
In India:
In Parsi Zoroastrian tradition, exposure of the dead is additionally considered to be an individual's final act of charity, providing the birds with what would otherwise be destroyed.
Due to the dying off of the necessary birds of prey Parsi communities in India are currently evaluating captive breeding of vultures and the use of "solar concentrators" (which are essentially large mirrors) to accelerate decomposition.
In addition, the anjumans (the predominantly conservative local Zoroastrian associations) frequently prohibit the use (of the Tower of Silences) by the offspring of a "mixed marriage", that is where one parent is a Parsi and the other is not.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_silence
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3.) Songlines:
By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, indigenous peoples could navigate vast distances (often travelling through the deserts of Australia's interiority). The continent of Australia is a system-reticulum of songlines, some of which are of a few kilometres, whilst others traverse hundreds of kilometres through disparate terrain and lands of many different indigenous peoples ~ peoples who may speak markedly different languages and champion significantly different cultural traditions.
An interesting feature of the paths is that, as they span the lands of several different language groups, different parts of the song are said to be in those different languages. Thus the whole song can only be fully understood by a person speaking all the relevant languages.
"...the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as 'Dreaming-tracks' or 'Songlines'; to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.
Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic being who wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path- birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes- and so singing the world into existence."
Indigenous Australian peoples conceive of all things beginning with The Dreaming or Altjeringa (also called the Dreamtime), a sacred 'once upon a time' time out of time in which ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings formed The Creation.
The term was made popular by anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, after an Aboriginal man had told him "white man got no Dreaming", which Stanner subsequently entitled one of his books. However, many argue it is an inadequate translation of the concept – from the Arrernte word, "Altyerre" – a concept largely unrelated to the European notion of dreams. Even Stanner preferred the term "everywhen", while T.G.H. Strehlow favoured "Eternal, Uncreated".
During the creation period, the ancestral beings made journeys and performed deeds; they fought, loved, hunted, behaved badly or well, rather like the Greek gods, and where they camped or hurled spears or gave birth, tell-tale marks were left in the earth. While creating this topography, they were morphing constantly from animal to human and back to animal, again rather like the Greeks.
They made separate countries, but interlaced them (related them) with their story tracks. They created frameworks for kin relations. Many different ancestors created a country, by travelling across it and meeting each other. In that way, a particular country is shared by all creatures who live there, their essences arising from the Dreaming, and returning to it. Some Dreamings crossed many countries, interacting with local ones as they went, and connecting places far from each other. Thus the pulse of life spreads, blood-like, through the body of the continent – node/pathway, node/pathway – as far as, and sometimes into, the sea.
At the end of that epoch, exhausted by their work, they sank back into the ground at sacred sites, where their power remains in condensed forms.
It is not quite right, however, to say that the creation period is in the past, because it is a past that is eternal and therefore also present. Ancestors sink back into, but also emerge from and pass through, sites. In other words, an ancestor's journey, or story, became a place, and that place holds past, present and future simultaneously.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_%28story%29
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