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Description

Death is a very complicated subject for the Astutocentaurini. Since each person is made of four detachable zooids, their constituent living units almost never die at the same time, and the lifespan of each zooid is limited by the slow loss of their ability to exchange nutrients, oxygen, and nerve impulses with advanced age. To complicate things further, the cranial zooid always dies first, which often leaves the headless body alive to either live out the remainder of its life in constant care or starve to death in a fruitless zombie-like search for a replacement head (essentially any small object that radiates heat).

Such unorthodox physiology has resulted in an unconventional perspective of mortality. Unlike humans, who tend to see life and death as a duality, most Astutocentaurini cultures interpret this cycle as trinary. According to their belief, each person is composed of two interdependent entities, the "self" (the cranial zooid) and the "vessel" (the collective post-cranial zooids). As the name suggests, the self represents the core of a person's consciousness and identity, while the vessel is typically viewed as something along the lines of a mount "ridden" by the former. Due to this, they hold the belief that individuals live one life but experience two deaths: the death of the self ("self-death") and the death of the vessel ("vessel-death"), which can occur either separately or simultaneously depending on the circumstances of the expiration. As mentioned in the first paragraph, however, death of the self typically occurs first when it comes to age-related death, followed much later by death of the vessel. This ideology has many cultural variations, each with its own funerary rights for both the self and the vessel, respectively. In most cases, however, both will typically be buried in the same grave upon passing.

Description

Death is a very complicated subject for the Astutocentaurini. Since each person is made of four detachable zooids, their constituent living units almost never die at the same time, and the lifespan of each zooid is limited by the slow loss of their ability to exchange nutrients, oxygen, and nerve impulses with advanced age. To complicate things further, the cranial zooid always dies first, which often leaves the headless body alive to either live out the remainder of its life in constant care or starve to death in a fruitless zombie-like search for a replacement head (essentially any small object that radiates heat).

Such unorthodox physiology has resulted in an unconventional perspective of mortality. Unlike humans, who tend to see life and death as a duality, most Astutocentaurini cultures interpret this cycle as trinary. According to their belief, each person is composed of two interdependent entities, the "self" (the cranial zooid) and the "vessel" (the collective post-cranial zooids). As the name suggests, the self represents the core of a person's consciousness and identity, while the vessel is typically viewed as something along the lines of a mount "ridden" by the former. Due to this, they hold the belief that individuals live one life but experience two deaths: the death of the self ("self-death") and the death of the vessel ("vessel-death"), which can occur either separately or simultaneously depending on the circumstances of the expiration. As mentioned in the first paragraph, however, death of the self typically occurs first when it comes to age-related death, followed much later by death of the vessel. This ideology has many cultural variations, each with its own funerary rights for both the self and the vessel, respectively. In most cases, however, both will typically be buried in the same grave upon passing.