sought their Nirvana through an act of self-immolation by fire, and it is said that every year among the lamaresais of Tien-tai, in the province of Tai-chow, some half-a-dozen bonzes thus devote themselves to death. These unfortunate persons believe that their voluntary destruction crowns the monastery with honours and blessing, they are aware that they will be worshipped after their suicide, and they suppose that they will become the divinities of the district and possess the power to protect the whole neighbourhood, to grant fair weather and lucky seasons, a bounteous harvest and all prosperity. Such public incinerations are conducted with great ceremony, and take place upon a major festival which is bound to attract crowds of pilgrims and reverent suppliants to the spot.[25] It is said that among the Eskimo of Bering Strait a sorcerer has been known to burn himself alive, fully believing that thus he will return to life as a shaman with much greater powers and a far fuller knowledge of magic than he had hitherto enjoyed.[26] It may be remembered that even such low motives as vanity and a craving for mere notoriety have proved an incentive sufficiently powerful to induce men to seek a dramatic, if painful death by fire. Thus the charlatan Peregrinus after a career of the most braggart ostentation courted undying fame by self-immolation upon a pyre at the Olympic festival, which extraordinary performance attracted throngs not only of sensible persons who despised and mocked him but of encomiasts and apologists who regarded him as at the least a hero, if not something nearly approaching to deity.[27] It can hardly be argued that higher motives inspired Empedocles if the account preserved by Diogenes Laertius[28] to which Horace[29] makes reference be true, namely that hoping by a sudden disappearance he might be accounted a god, the philosopher flung himself into the crater of Mount Aetna, but that the suicide was revealed owing to the fact that the volcano almost immediately after threw up one of his sandals, and thus betrayed the manner of his death.
Josephus states that the Jews used not to bury the bodies of those who had destroyed themselves until after sunset. In Scotland it is still thought that the body of a suicide will not fall to dust until the time when he should have died in the order of nature,[30] and it is very generally held that a such
