Death Rites & Funerary Customs

Well, a couple weeks ago, Allec wrote an Ancestor Elevation Ritual, but that's all I have.

The difficult thing is that death rituals were variable in the Lore. Some post-death legends mention that the spirits of the dead would roam the earth - either as part of the slua or as part of the Trooping Fairies. Some were simply vengeful dead (that's the slua again); some had become part of the legions of faeries; and some went to the House of Donn, an island off the ...west?? - of Ireland. And similarly, the accounts of funeral/burial rites were varied, citing both burial and cremation as legitimate methods of disposing of the body. You have to keep in mind the varying traditions based on the five regions of Ireland at the time - not to mention sub-regions of those regions, where the significance of certain spirits and customs are always off enough that it really makes a difference to the traditional practice of the area.

If you have time, read Celtic Heritage by the Rees team - they make mentions of various customs and I believe they were the ones to mention the House of Donn (as well as the discrepancy in legends of Donn - is he a Tuatha De? is he a Milesian? did you really expect actual answers?!?). If it wasn't them, it was a brief mention in the "Otherworld" section of Mac Cana's Celtic Mythology.

I mean, this is an area that I expect to be diving into very shortly - but as I haven't yet, this is all I have. Sorry I can't be more helpful!

Since Manannan is generally accepted as psychopomp, there's certainly reason to call on him in a ritual. When a friend of mine died a few years ago, I asked him to guide her to the Otherworld safely. We might also look at Samhain traditions and extrapolate that way, since it deals with the dead.

So, thinking about practical applications (MY FAVORITE PHRASE).

• Burial and cremation both appear in historical sources, but I lean towards cremation being more common or, at least, having greater importance, given the number of human ashes discovered in all the passage tombs. 
  
• On the other hand, burial puts the corpse in a liminal position between the realms of land and sea, and those in-between places -- which include the peat bogs, both land and water and where offerings were left -- were places outside the normal world, often part of the Otherworld. Because of the importance of one's relationship to the land that a lot (not all, not assuming that, just many) of us hold, burial would be a way to give back after a lifetime of being supported by the land. Environmentally-friendly methods of burial would be An Important Thing.
• Back to water/sea/mist being the transition between our world and the Otherworld. In her guise as the Washer at the Ford, the Morrígan washes either the clothes, armor, or actual corpses, depending on the story, of those who will die; this can be translated into preparation and cleansing of the body for the transition from life to death, or death to the afterlife.
• I have much less familiarity with Don and Manannán Mac Lir, so I'm gonna leave that to those with greater knowledge than I.
• You've got the alleged belief in reincarnation; all the shapeshifting into a shit-ton of things supports this idea, as do the multitude of stories about warriors who continue talking after getting beheaded. Planting trees over the burial plot would a) honor the local land, b) reflect this belief in reincarnation, c) get into the themes of shapeshifting.
• There's a lot of keening and wailing. SO MUCH WAILING. And coincidentally related to my pseudonym, imagine that.
  
• Music, feasting, stories -- all of these are integral. There's no curtailing of emotion: you wail with grief, you drink and laugh to celebrate the deceased's life. Hospitality and kinship are of utmost importance, so you laugh until you cry and cry until you can laugh while eating the host of the funeral wake out of house and home.
  

In pre-Christian (and Christian, for at least a while) Ireland honor was your social currency, the land on which you lived and bled and died was integral to your identity, and your community and hospitality were of greatest importance. Basically, it would come down to:

• Cleansing and anointing of the body, though with what and in which way I'm not sure yet
  

• Wakes with partying, hospitality, and community, hell yeah
  
• The all-important telling of stories (ALL THE STORIES) plus music and creative shit
• Unabashed expression of emotion
• Cremation or burial; however, given the environmental effects of cremation, ecological burials would be much more in line.
  

So that's what I've got for the Irish polytheist side of things. Still going through the myths and archaeology to see what else I can find, but I like to think that this is a good start.  If I've got misinformation or misinterpretations going on here, please correct me.

Edit: Morpheus Ravenna pointed out that when it comes to burial and cremation, archaeologically, we’re looking at a mix of time periods and cultures. Things weren’t kept in neat layers like sandstone, after all, and as I think more about it, there are obviously going to be huge generalizations being made here simply because of the nature of tribal cultures. This is very much a first rough draft.