Culture and religion often dictates the practice, rites and customs of a particular society or community. One very telling of how different cultures and religions around the world are rites and rituals the community often performs in terms of burying their dead.

For most of the world’s religions, the methods usually used are cremation, where the body is burned and reduced to ashes; water burial, where the body is prepared and placed in a floating vehicle and sent out to sea, and lastly; underground burial, the common way of burying the dead.

But for Zoroastrians, the above methods are not options for them. Zoroastrianism beliefs basically embraces a supreme being who has created everything in the world, thus you, I, the animals and all the other living entities of the Earth are sacred and must not be tainted by unholy, dirty ones.

The devil is Death’s advocate thus something dirty, soiled and sullied and not fit to be near any of the supreme creator’s sacred creations. To go around this belief, the Zoroastrians instituted the existing burial ritual; a practice where their dead are neither cremated, buried nor sent out to sea but rather laid out under the sun, in an open-air high tower called, Tower of Silence where bodies of the dead are left to the elements including the birds and other foraging animals.