What do the eldar do with their dead?

[Lord Squidar]

Just curious, what do they do? Do they have tombs or preserve or mummify the dead? The focus seems to be one spirit stones which we all know about of course.

These thoughts came about after imagining a funeral procession of some slain autarch.

[Gorbad Ironclaw]

Isn't there a good chance that there will not be anything to bury from an Autarch? I think they are meant to be sort of an Exarch equivalent so they might just be living suits of armour, with no physical body.

Aside from that, I don't think the body is actually that important to the Eldars. They know that the spirit/soul/conciousness of the deceased is in the spirit stone and at that point the body is essentially just a shell. Revering the dead body to me belongs to someone who don't have direct contact to the deceased soul, and the Eldars do. Besides, story dead bodies on a space ship with a finite internal volume seems like a bad idea in the long run, so my guess would be that most bodies are either jettisoned or burned. Alternatively there might be Eldar graveyard planets, but that suggests a sentimental attachment to the corpse I just don't think the Eldars have.

[archanfel]

on death there soulds are stored in spirit stones and are use for all those spirit stone upgrades

[Lord Squidar]

@Gorbad Ironclaw - I felt the same way, just wasn't sure about it. I think being burned seems likely, there are lots of eldar rituals and symbology to do with fire...

@archanfel - yeah I know mate, put that in my original message. I think the eldar go to extremes to get those stones back, was asking about the actual body.

[RunepriestRidcully]

What is it in like the infinity circuit? For some reason I imagine it's like the Elysian fields of greek mythology. Can they communicate with this within the circuit without summoning them into a wraith construct?

[sean_rea]

interesting post. i have read many of the books and apart from stuff about the infinity circuit and the soul stones i have never ( as far as i can remember ) read about whats done with the actual bodies. another thing , in one of the books , i think ti was path of the seer there is a few sections that talk about fate lines merging and becoming one as the eldar one certain aspect paths become one with the pheonix lords. was wondering what happened to there souls and their bodies as well. lol though i might be talking out my backside on this wonder if anyone can help me fill in the blanks on this

[Shamana]

These thoughts came about after imagining a funeral procession of some slain autarch.

A cremation sounds like a good end for a warrior; in life, they followed the way of Khaine, so letting their body be destroyed into ashes is a fitting end. For other eldar, a simple burial (so they can be returned to the earth and, in time, feed it with their flesh) could work well enough.

[chromedog]

interesting post. i have read many of the books and apart from stuff about the infinity circuit and the soul stones i have never ( as far as i can remember ) read about whats done with the actual bodies. another thing , in one of the books , i think ti was path of the seer there is a few sections that talk about fate lines merging and becoming one as the eldar one certain aspect paths become one with the pheonix lords. was wondering what happened to there souls and their bodies as well. lol though i might be talking out my backside on this wonder if anyone can help me fill in the blanks on this

When they join with a phoenix lord, their souls are merged with the gestalt consciousness of the PL (the first consciousness is dominant, but it has access to ALL of the memories and experiences of the new one). There are several pieces where warriors find a "wounded" Karandras and they are drawn into him/her to 'repair' the damage when they touch him and all that they were goes into him. Through the rents in Karandras' armour, they could see that this PL at least has NO physical body inside the armour, just a swirling mass of "stars".

[clansman]

I remember reading somewhere farseers, when they get really old, start to turn to crystal and theres a garden of them joined to the infinity circuit on their craftworld. Maybe other old eldar just crystalise into the circuit too?

[Lord Squidar]

Ah forgot about the crystal seers, yeah thats one type of ending. So to summarise:

1: absorded into a pheonix lord
2: turned to crystal
3: blown to smithereens (no body but soul stone is still intact)
4: scarificed to the avatar (no body either)
5: or just plain cremated or buried somewhere

seems reasonable. Perhaps there are not eldar tombs since the body is just a rotting husk, but you can visit your dead relatives in the infinity circuit. Nice =) thanks all!

[Hendarion]

Isn't there a good chance that there will not be anything to bury from an Autarch? I think they are meant to be sort of an Exarch equivalent so they might just be living suits of armour, with no physical body.

Exarchs and Autarchs both still have living bodies. You can see that already from models modelled without helmets.

[Shamana]

I think crystallization is for psykers only, especially farseers. Also, what is this about autarchs being "exarchs" and lost on the path? This hasn't been mentioned anywhere, and I think there is at least one case of an autarch changing his path (Bel-Annath from IA 11 later became a seer).

[Askil the Undecided]

Autarchs are not exarchs they are just experienced aspect warriors who have walked many of the paths and possess the mental strangth of merge their aspect personas to utilise multiple disciplines.

[Vivie84]

I have always wondered if the Eldar worked really hard to get back any dead of their race. As an Eldar is effectively immortal if you can retrieve the spirit stone. Often the nature of the Eldar race makes me think they dont really even belong in 40k the "army" game. As if you killed 1000 Eldar you'd effectively done a massacre on the race.

[Gorbad Ironclaw]

If that's the scale you want to measure it on then we should also remove Imperial Space Marines from the game, as loosing even a handful or two could be seen as a major disaster for a Chapter and 1000 would wipe them out completely.

Anyway, it's not like there are that few Eldars. They are a dying race in the sense that they are no longer as powerful as they used to be and while much/most of the population was indeed killed by Slaanesh it was a population of untold billions and billions. So as a total number there is still quite a few Eldars left. Just not nearly as many as there used to be and they are firmly in the twilight years of their civilization.

[Hendarion]

I have always wondered if the Eldar worked really hard to get back any dead of their race. As an Eldar is effectively immortal if you can retrieve the spirit stone. Often the nature of the Eldar race makes me think they dont really even belong in 40k the "army" game. As if you killed 1000 Eldar you'd effectively done a massacre on the race.

If you'd kill 1000 humans you also did a massacre There are still billions of Eldar between the stars, but not billions of billions they used to be. The comparison with Space Marines isn't that bad actually, because there probably aren't less Eldar (each Craftworld is the home of millions to billions) in total than there are Space Marines (a thousand Chapters with a thousand brothers each). So the Eldar most likely even outnumber Space Marines by multiple decimal powers.