DAN CRUICKSHANK: I'm on a journey to explore the architecture of death.
A temple to immortalise the soul of a pharaoh.
A cemetery where death is a sensual experience.
(PEOPLE CHANTING IN HINDI)
A city where you come to die.
And pyramids for human sacrifice!
I'm crossing the river Nile at Luxor,
moving from the land of the living on the east bank,
where life is proclaimed each morning with the rising sun,
to the land of the dead on the west bank,
where the sun sets and where the dead were commemorated,
were sustained, by awe-inspiring architecture,
architecture intended to last for eternity.
I've come here to see a woman who's always intrigued me,
a woman who died nearly three and a half thousand years ago.
Her name is Hatshepsut.
Now, for nearly 20 years she ruled Egypt as a man,
as a pharaoh.
This is Hatshepsut's tomb.
A strangely neglected and crumbling place
never open to the public.
Golly, this is a challenge. The shaft stinks of ammonia.
Bats, I suppose.
And I mustn't touch the sides
in case I bring the whole thing down.
This flaking limestone.
This shaft's been descending rather steeply for
over 200 metres.
And now I have to get on my hands and knees to get below
this sort of lintel here, all cut from the limestone.
I've never been in a tomb like this in Egypt before.
It's rough, it's treacherous.
Ah! At last, what I've been looking for.
The burial chamber.
It's very rough,
no sign of plaster or paintings.
There's no body of Hatshepsut down here.
But never mind, I can look for her somewhere else.
This is Hatshepsut's magnificent mortuary temple
created to house her spirit and soul.
Mortuary temples were machines for rebirth,
where the living made offerings to the dead
to sustain them in the underworld.
Temples were called the Houses of the Millions of Years.
This temple is architecturally stunning.
It seems in its symmetry and its powerful simplicity,
to represent Ma'at, that is the Egyptian idea of truth and order.
Ma'at prevailing over chaos,
chaos represented by the rough, rude cliff face behind,
an incredible piece of work.
And imagine in the past, all you would have seen approaching from afar,
these rows of statues of Osiris,
the god of the underworld.
The images on these walls proclaim that Hatshepsut
not only had a pharaoh as a father and as a husband
but that she was a child of a god, Amun-Ra.
The story is that Amun-Ra crept into the bed chamber
of Hatshepsut's mother, Ahmose.
She, the mother, woke up,
smelt incense, a sign of the presence of a god,
and laughed in pleasure.
And here it says that the god did with her as he liked.
And here you see the mother pregnant, lovely image, her little tummy,
gave birth to Hatshepsut.
So Hatshepsut had a divine origin,
and that gave her the right to rule as a pharaoh of Egypt.
These walls record what Hatshepsut regarded
as her greatest worldly achievement.
A trade mission to the exotic land of Punt.
No one quite knows where Punt was, probably wasn't Somalia or Ethiopia,
but certainly it was strange enough for the Egyptians to record
Punt's everyday architecture.
Here you see it, the village,
little huts on sticks, approached with ladders,
palm trees everywhere.
But what she really wanted was incense,
incense to nourish the gods, the food of the gods.
And here we see Egyptians carrying incense trees, myrrh trees.
Whole trees in baskets, with the roots being carried
onto ships to be brought back here.
What she wanted was to plant these trees at this temple
to please her divine father, Amun-Ra.
The building was once rich in images of Hatshepsut.
She would have been a striking presence.
The queen was always depicted as a man with a ceremonial beard.
But most of these images were aggressively erased
by her rival for power, Tuthmosis III.
This is Hatshepsut's chapel within her mortuary temple.
Here priests would have come to make offerings
to sustain her soul in the underworld.
And here you see ranks and ranks of priests
making offerings, marching forward,
carrying fowls and fruits, I think, and liquids,
all going towards,
I suppose, where her image would have been, now gone.
What does survive is this rather wonderful thing,
this false door,
that allowed her spirit and soul to travel between this world and the next,
to enter her temple and leave it for the underworld.
What is striking though is that
all the images of Hatshepsut and her cartouche, her name,
they've been removed, brutally cut away.
That's a frightful fate.
So she's been, I suppose, consigned to oblivion,
her name removed from memory.
The intention is that that would give her a second, permanent death.
The route through the building ends by taking me into the mountain itself.
This is the sacred epicentre of the temple.
Only the highest in the land could enter here.
It's the sanctuary of Amun-Ra
who was Hatshepsut's divine father,
the great god of Thebes.
The sanctuary is cut into the mountainside,
the mountain that defines the Valley of the Kings,
the tombs lying just over there.
Now, I'm going into the inner parts of the sanctuary.
They get smaller, darker, more intimate, more holy.
Only the high priest and the pharaoh, I guess, could penetrate this far.
And now here is something which I've dreamed of finding.
Incredible, here is an image of Hatshepsut
not destroyed by Tuthmosis.
Hatshepsut, of course, in the image of a powerful man.
I know it's her because her cartouche, her name, survives.
Here it is.
It doesn't say Hatshepsut, but it's her birth name.
Ma'at, Ka, Re. There it is.
Her fantastic image.
Hatshepsut wanted to obtain immortality through architecture, through art.
And despite all the attacks upon her,
her temple, and this image of her, and her name here survives.
So she's not consigned to memory, obliterated,
she lives.
I can utter her name, Hatshepsut,
and wonderful to see her.
And if her soul is still alive
then it must need nourishment, offerings.
After all these centuries, it must be starving.
So I want to give her
what she gave her divine father, Amun-Ra.
Magical myrrh from the land of Punt.
Here it is.
Incense that feeds the soul,
that purifies.
I hope this reaches her in the other world.
This is Guatemala.
Once the land of the Maya,
an ancient civilisation whose influence can still be felt in this land.
I'm arriving on a day when the souls of the dead
are said to return to Earth to commune with the living.
The Day of the Dead.
(PEOPLE SINGING)
Once a year, the tiny village of San Jose
gathers in its church to venerate three skulls.
Some say they belong to Catholic missionaries,
others that they're the remains of Mayan chiefs or holy men.
The festival is a strange marriage of Catholicism,
imposed by the Spanish conquistadors, and indigenous Mayan beliefs.
(BELL CLANGING)
The Catholic Church doesn't recognise
the festival of the Day of the Dead, at least officially.
So this is a most intriguing church service.
It's held on All Saints' Day,
so I suppose one can say it's celebrating that.
But I'm not sure.
And the skull itself is a very powerful Mayan symbol.
Mayans would keep the skulls of their ancestors,
and once a year present them, venerate them really,
paint between the eyes with a cross of paint.
And on these skulls, they'd paint the name of the dead person.
And they'd collect the skulls of vanquished enemies.
The skull's a very ancient, important,
sort of relic image in this part of the world.
After the service, there's a procession
in which one of the skulls is taken from house to house.
(BELLS RINGING)
(PEOPLE PRAYING IN SPANISH)
All of it? Ooh, gracias.
This is extremely interesting.
Over there is the offering altar,
but around the skull
are bowls of food, and even a bottle of beer.
They're there to attract the souls of the dead ancestors
to nourish them.
So on that offering table we have Christian ritual and ritual objects
of the Day of the Dead combined.
(PEOPLE PRAYING IN SPANISH)
Throughout the village, people are waiting for their ancestors to return.
CRUICKSHANK: Hola.
Old friends, living and dead, are meeting again this night.
(SPEAKING IN SPANISH)
In most societies death is feared,
but here it seems that death is not so alarming because
you continue to have a relationship with the dead, the dead with the living.
The atmosphere surrounding the procession
is not morbid but joyful,
because here the spirit of the Maya is very much alive.
But tomorrow
I'm going to explore the darker side of the Mayan cult of death.
Deep in the rainforest
lie the remains of the great lost Maya city of Yaxhá,
discovered by the explorer Teobert Maler.
He was a headstrong cantankerous fellow,
but with a love of the Maya.
He described arriving here in 1904.
He'd been travelling for some time and his men were rather sort of restless
and he also was clearly a bit fed up,
because he said that they didn't want to work
and could only think of guzzling.
But what Maler found silenced their grumbling.
Yaxhá was constructed about 1,200 years ago
and the temples are very precisely built,
even though the Maya didn't have metal tools or the wheel.
These step pyramids served as platforms for temples,
staircases to the gods.
This was a vast city,
but now only the elite buildings survive above ground level.
The palaces, the temples.
The more humble buildings, well, they're lost,
buried in the rainforest.
The Maya was a very sophisticated civilisation,
with a written language. There was, um, mathematics.
They were great astronomers, they charted the movements
of the planets and stars to create a very accurate calendar.
All of this civilisation, all these ideas,
are here locked in the buildings.
The ancient Maya saw the world of the living and of the dead
as one and the same.
Everywhere there are monuments to communicate
between this life and the next.
In front of me are the fragmentary remains of an altar,
and around altars such as this, a ritual took place
that we would find absolutely extraordinary.
Here, the king and queen came to spill their own blood.
The queen would take a bit of chord with thorns
and run it through her tongue, and the blood would explode out.
She'd throw it on the image of the god standing on the altar here.
And the king would take his penis
and run a spine through it,
and the blood from that he'd throw on the images of the gods.
For Mayans, blood was the most precious substance,
it contained the sacred life essence they called "k'awil".
And only blood could nourish, could appease, the gods.
But it wasn't just their own blood that was spilled.
On the top of pyramids like this, Yaxhá's tallest,
they performed human sacrifice.
The victim would have been brought up the staircase
on the front of the pyramid,
lead to the altar.
And the altar would have had a convex top.
So the victim would have been stretched over it,
on their back, with their chest sticking up.
They'd have been held down by four men
and a fifth man, with a great stone knife,
would insert the knife into the stomach just below the chest,
ripped open the wound
and thrust a hand into the chest cavity
and pulled out the still living heart.
The heart pumping gushes of precious, sacred blood.
Then
the corpse, the victim, would have been held up,
and they'd have been painted blue, the colour of sacrifice.
And this body would have been thrown down the stairs
to the base of the pyramid,
and there the victim would have been skinned.
And the skin,
this awful dripping garment,
would've been wrapped on and around the officiating priest.
And he'd have danced in a solemn manner, down there,
with the people who'd gathered to watch the sacrifice.
The Maya are a problem, a paradox.
They believed in utter desolation
yet they built to last for eternity.
They were a very sophisticated civilisation,
yet steeped in blood and murder.
What is one to make of them?
I suppose the obvious point is that, for them,
life was not held cheap, it was the most precious of things.
And blood had to be given to the gods to allow the gods to do their job,
which was to ensure that creation would go on,
that the sun would rise each day.
And so really, out of love the Maya killed.
The Maya took life to ensure that life would continue.
I've come to Genoa on the Italian Riviera,
the largest port in all Italy.
Genoa is an ancient trading city
that through the centuries survived many tribulations.
But in the early 19th century, it faced a potentially catastrophic threat.
A threat that came not from the living, but from the dead.
This is Staglieno Cemetery, a vast city of the dead,
with monuments, chapels,
streets and triumphal gateway.
It saved the city from disaster.
Genoa was blighted by disease
caused by ill-buried rotting bodies
crowded into church vaults and graveyards.
So Staglieno was opened on January 1st, 1851.
And this city of the dead, like cities of the living,
had its own social hierarchies.
Your status in life would determine your position in death.
The rotunda's the main chapel in the cemetery
and it's a splendid piece of architecture.
It's inspired by the ancient Pantheon in Rome,
the temple of all the gods.
And therefore it's rather appropriate
that the great of Genoa are commemorated in this building.
Wealth and fame secured you the best locations here.
But the middle class of Genoa also loved this cemetery.
They brought their dead here,
and they honoured them with spectacular monuments
that were intended to grant immortality.
In these arcades, middle-class families
created elaborate shrines to honour their dead.
And to make their memorials truly impressive
the families commissioned the best artists in Italy.
Walking here, you feel that you're meeting these long dead people,
getting to know them and their mourners,
to share in the mourner's grief.
This young lady is a widow,
and she's leaving the tomb of her husband.
A cross around her neck, bible in her hand.
On her face, the expression of pure sorrow. Most beautiful.
Over the decades, Staglieno's collection of sculpture grew
to make it one of the most awe-inspiring and imitated cemeteries in the world.
And one statue, more than any other,
came to define the values and aspirations of Staglieno.
This is one of the most famous monuments in the cemetery.
It shows Caterina Campodonico.
And she was a hawker at local fairs and feasts.
And during her lifetime,
she paid for this spectacular monument to be made using her savings,
her meagre savings for this spectacular object.
And it shows how she made her money,
she sold nuts and bread at these fairs.
And these objects, these tools of her trade,
are proudly shown, she's not ashamed of how she made her money.
And I love the face.
She's staring defiantly in the face of death.
This statue gives her a foothold on eternity,
and also shows that in death,
she at last gained some middle-class respectability.
Artists grew in ambition,
introducing increasingly inventive ways of approaching death.
The cemetery became more famous for the quality of its art
than the people buried there.
Ah, here's a very charming, solid middle-class couple,
wealthy tradespeople I should think.
Very realistically rendered, lovely.
But above them an extraordinary scene's being enacted.
Here there's a skeleton on its back.
It's death, the Grim Reaper.
Here's his scythe,
and flames are bursting through the rib cage here,
he's being struck by a bolt of lightning.
All of this is being orchestrated by this very charming angel,
the personification of eternal life promised by Christ.
So here we see the values of this couple.
They achieved immortality through commissioning art.
And through their Christian belief, Death itself is being destroyed.
By the turn of the 19th century,
old Christian certainties about resurrection
and the afterlife began to be questioned.
The symbolism became more outlandish.
Artists explored their darkest fantasies,
producing statues that were disturbing, sensuous, erotic.
This is one of the most strangely, darkly
thrilling tombs in the entire cemetery.
It was made for a local rich businessman,
but most of the imagery here
has very little to do with him in particular.
It's more elemental, more primal.
It's to do with the dance of death.
And here you see the image above me.
Life is represented by this beautiful young woman
and she's writhing in the grip of death,
the skeleton, his bony hand around her wrist.
She's turning away but she's tiring of the struggle.
It's futile, inevitable. Death will come, Death will claim her.
In this tomb, there is no promise of eternal life.
Death is triumphant.
The less well-off also have their place in the cemetery.
All Genoese citizens have a right to be buried in Staglieno.
But if you can't afford an elaborate tomb
then you can't expect to remain in the ground for too long.
The people here are buried on a 10-year lease.
When the lease runs out,
their bones will be removed from the ground
and their tombstones destroyed.
Well, I see you're digging a grave and I can see in the grave
bits of coffin there, and here's a bit of a headstone.
So clearly someone's been buried here before.
(SPEAKING IN ITALIAN)
So you expect to be dug up after 10 years?
In Staglieno, the mysteries of death remain.
But in these picturesque surroundings,
the beauty of the art makes death seem more noble,
more familiar.
An almost blissful experience.
This is the most sacred site in India.
Varanasi on the River Ganges.
Hindus believe that India is the spiritual centre,
the navel of the world.
And that Varanasi is the centre of the centre, the holy of holies.
This is a very, very ancient city.
They say it's where creation started
and where the world, in time, will end.
More than a million pilgrims come to Varanasi every year
to bathe at dawn and to pray.
They congregate on the ghats,
the stone terraces that lead down to the sacred water,
and believe this ritual bathing will purify them
and wash away their sins.
Bodies of the dead are brought here for cremation,
for this is the city of the Hindu god Shiva,
known as the Conqueror of Death.
And the Ganges is the watery body of the great goddess Ganga.
The river of heaven that carries souls to eternity.
Varanasi has been a place of pilgrimage for thousands of years.
And the narrow alleyways are full of wonderful sights.
A journey through this city
is a journey to the sacred heart of Hindu India.
(BLOWING CONCH)
All these people are progressing to and from
the great Shiva temple over there.
One of the most important Shiva temples of the whole of India.
This is a sacred terrain, here's a sacred cow.
Get a blessing from her.
And little temples each side.
Um, and more cows here.
You really do get the sense this is a great holy city.
Despite their pain and suffering, many very ill people
make their way to Varanasi, or are brought here by their families,
because Hindus believe if you die here,
you are granted the great gift of moksha by Shiva.
Moksha is the release from eternal and often painful
birth, death and rebirth on the Earth.
And while the families wait for the end,
many of them stay in dying houses, such as this one.
The Mukti Bhawan is one of the two major dying houses in Varanasi
that accommodate families while they await the death of a relative.
Thousands have come here to die.
This is not a place for the sick.
It's only for families to bring relatives
who are very close to death.
As a non-family member, I'm incredibly privileged
to have been allowed inside this dying house.
I'm going to meet a gentleman who very kindly has invited me
to his mother's dying room.
Thank you.
-Hello. -Please, be seated.
-Thank you, thank you. -Please.
Thank you very much for inviting me here on this very,
I suppose, in the West one would say sombre occasion,
but maybe not the case.
Um, can you tell me, how is your mother now?
Is she comfortable?
(SPEAKING IN HINDI)
Can you tell me why you have brought her to the dying house?
What is the purpose of being here?
And what do you think... What is going to happen?
During my visit, the family conduct the most important ritual
to prepare for the death of their relative.
This calf, sacred in India,
has been brought in to help the dying woman
on her journey to heaven.
(RELATIVES TALKING IN HINDI)
The calf and the woman are anointed,
and this ritual is to ensure that the calf will guide
and safeguard her soul on its way to God.
(CHANTING IN SANSKRIT)
The mood is relaxed, people are even laughing,
because the family believe that at this moment,
the god Shiva has entered the room to promise moksha to the woman,
that her soul will be released after she dies.
Thank you.
MAN: Thank you. Lot of thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
The family have just given me some prasad, a sweet,
so that I can get the sweetness of the whole event that I've been witnessing.
Sacred sweet.
Very generous.
Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you.
WOMAN: No mention.
I hope all goes very well for your mother.
Thank you very much, and thank you.
I feel incredibly honoured to have been allowed in to see
that ceremony, to have met the mother.
The Hindus believe that the nearly-dead and the newly-dead
are spiritually very powerful.
They're a bridge between this world and the next.
I really felt that there, and when they told me
that is was auspicious for me to be there,
I was a lucky man.
Many lives have led me here, he said,
to Varanasi at this moment and I sort of feel it.
(PEOPLE CHANTING IN HINDI)
Death is big business in Varanasi.
It's inspired, indeed funded, much of the architecture,
and, of course, is a way of life.
There are lots of shops that specialise in selling
articles needed for funerals, for cremations.
Here's one. I'll just see what's available.
-Hello, hello. -Yes.
Now, I see you sell... Oh, even now the body is coming, I see.
(PEOPLE CHANTING IN HINDI)
They said that was an old, holy man, important man.
Yeah, very, very old man died. They have much decoration on his body.
-Ah. -End of life.
-You die, end of life. -Yes.
But tell me the sort of things that you sell
which were used in that particular...
Yeah, we sell so much things for body.
So first of all the body's wrapped in a white shroud like this. That's this.
Yeah, in the beginning, they're wrapped in white.
White in beginning, and after that we give this on the top of that.
So this sparkling cloth, this beautiful...
VENDOR: This to put on the top of the body.
-To beautify the body before it's burnt? -Yeah.
What else do you have here? You've got some...
We have stuff to put on the fire, on the body. Sandalwood.
Yes, I thought it was. So this is expensive wood, isn't it?
Yeah, expensive wood. Just put it...
Fine water buffalos.
They put this wood, like the symbolic, on the top of the body
-to have a good smell in his body fire. -It smells lovely.
I'll close the top 'cause I know the smell must be caught in there.
(PEOPLE CHANTING IN HINDI)
Many, many people following that particular body.
Another family come with dead body.
I love the way the bodies are so beautiful,
-and the whole atmosphere. -Yeah, yeah.
-It's quite joyful, isn't it? -Yeah, this is most holy place.
This is why family, they are coming, very happy way.
They feel very lucky to come into this place.
Mountains of wood are stored near the river
to feed the cremation pyres.
Around 40,000 people are burned here every year.
Most didn't die in Varanasi.
But just to be cremated here is a blessing.
Cremations take place at two ghats on the river.
This is the most popular one. Manikarnika.
A specific caste of funeral attendants, called Doms, oversee all the cremations.
It's all so public and open.
It's an extraordinary feeling being here.
In the West, of course, we associate death
almost like something embarrassing,
something to be denied, not to be confronted.
But here it's the opposite, of course.
This public ceremony as people come and gather
and say their farewells in a joyous way
is altogether extraordinary, uplifting.
And another body is arriving.
You hear people chanting
and bells ringing, carried by the family members.
The great last journey.
(BELLS RINGING)
Holy Ganges water being poured over it.
And in a moment now it will be taken to its logs,
its pyre of logs, and it'll be cremated.
The soul liberated, the soul sent on its way.
And because it's happening here, of course, in Varanasi,
the soul won't have to be reborn. It will return to God.
Unity with the Almighty.
So this is a glorious moment
and you see the people, they're not sombre in particular.
People watching, chatting, laughing. Terrific celebration, this.
A public celebration of death.
This last stage in the journey of the dead
may be shocking to Western eyes,
but to Hindus it is a joyful moment of the release of the soul.
Varanasi's an astonishing explosion of emotion
within a thrilling architectural setting
that's transformed my perception of death.
Before coming here, I saw death as something mysterious,
terrifying, almost divine aberration.
But having wandered round, it's all now very different.
Here death is a thing of visual, sensuous beauty.
It is a journey of liberation, a journey to be embraced.