Suddenly, self-immolation is everywhere. Yesterday, in Oslo, a man set himself on fire outside the Anders Breivik trial. He follows at least forty Tibetans who have set themselves aflame to protest Chinese rule in the past year. There have also been a series of self-immolations in the Middle East and North Africa. In January, five young Moroccan men auto-cremated (the more accurate term; “self-immolation” technically means any form of self-destruction) following a fifty-two-year-old pensioner in Jordan and an elderly woman in Bahrain. The young men belonged to a group called Unemployed Graduates that had been occupying the Ministry of Higher Education building. They followed upon the action of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vender, whose self-immolation—inspired by the chronic poverty and corruption of his country—helped incite the Arab Spring.
But not all the recent self-immolations are in support of revolution or protest movements. Kamran Khan, a thirteen-year-old honor student in Islamabad, Pakistan, burned himself to death in March, apparently out of embarrassment at not being able to afford a new school uniform. Then there are the forestry students at university in Bhubaneswar, India, who reportedly are threatening to self-immolate if the state forestry department doesn’t reform its recruiting policies.
What happened to sit-ins and hunger strikes? When did dousing oneself in flammables and lighting a match become the preëminent act of defiance?
Some time ago, actually. Contrary to common belief, the practice does not originate in the Vietnam era and is not confined to Asia (where, thanks to Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions, posthumous cremation is far more common than in the West). Rather, it is a millennia-old practice in both the West and the East, where it has long commanded mass sympathy and outrage unmatched by other forms of suicide. The sociologist Emile Durkheim separated suicides into four types: the egoistic, the altruistic, the anomic (moral confusion), and the fatalistic. Perhaps self-immolation captivates so thoroughly because it wins on all counts. It is the ultimate act of both despair and defiance, a symbol at once of resignation and heroic self-sacrifice.
In Greco-Roman mythology, Heracles and Dido are said to have burned themselves to death, the former out of insanity, the latter out of despair and pride (such pride, indeed, that she was willing to see Carthage destroyed just to spite Aeneas). Croesus may have done the same after losing to the Persians. However, from the historian Eusebios, we know with greater certainty of a more interesting instance of auto-cremation in antiquity: around 300 A.D., Christians sentenced to be burned alive following a case of suspected arson at the imperial palace in Nicomedia threw themselves into the flames—presumably, to express their objections to Roman policy and not to the emperor’s architectural taste. In the sixth century, with Rome sacked and Christianity the official religion of its successor state, Byzantium, a group of heretics known as the Montanists took up the practice, gathering in churches and setting them on fire in protest of changes to the liturgy.
A similar phenomenon appeared in seventeenth-century Russia. Followers of the ascetic Kapiton were at the vanguard of a revolt against government-ordered reforms to the Orthodox Church. Most of the Old Believers, as they were known, simply refused to follow the new rules and spat at the mention of the Tsar. The Kapitonists took it further. They saw the Tsar as the embodiment of the Antichrist and his meddling in their worship—part of a larger trend toward state centralization that would culminate with Peter the Great—as a sign of end times. The only solution, of course, was to submit themselves to an en-masse second baptism, this time by fire. In the sixteen-eighties and nineties, thousands of Kapitonists locked themselves in churches and then burned them down.
Self-immolation also has more secular and mundane origins. In India, widows were known to throw themselves onto the funeral pyres of their dead husbands, at least until 1829, when the practice, known as sati, (which may have been coercive as often as it was voluntary) was banned.
The recent Tibetan self-immolations remind us that the practice’s longest history is in China, where, beginning in the fourth century A.D., Buddhist monks took to sitting in pyres to propitiate ganying, the force that binds the corporeal and ethereal. “I have been weary of this physical frame for many a long day,” the monk Daodu said before melting to death. His forebear Fayu started the trend of swallowing incense chips beforehand, perhaps to lubricate his soul’s passage, perhaps to improve the odor of the proceedings. Soon enough, self-burnings became public performances. Officials attended. Crowds wept in admiration. And as the orders took on political power, so did self-immolation. Monks burned themselves to protest declining patronage from the ruling classes or to lament invasions. As the Qing dynasty disintegrated, on the eve of the First World War, there was a wave of self-immolations in protest of the decline of… well, of the world, so it seemed.
In the midst of another war, a half century later, the tradition was resurrected by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who offered to burn himself in a Saigon intersection as “a donation to the struggle.” The struggle was not, as is commonly thought, the American intervention in Vietnam—it was only 1963—but rather the persecution of Buddhists by the Catholic (and U.S.-backed) Diem regime. Quang Duc has since become the most famous self-immolater in history, only partly thanks to the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s début album. His fellow-monks and nuns saw to his fame, alerting the international media to the event beforehand, lying down below fire engines to prevent them from arriving at the scene, and distributing texts, translated into English, of Quang Duc’s final words, according to the Oxford historian of self-immolation Michael Biggs.
In the U.S., Quang Duc’s most famous echoer (“imitator” seems unequal to so fearless an act), though not his only one, was Norman Morrison, a Quaker from Pennsylvania, who doused himself in kerosene and lit a match outside Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s Pentagon office in 1965. A stamp was issued in Morrison’s honor in North Vietnam. In Eastern Europe, a more famous echoer is Jan Palach, the Prague student who in 1968 auto-cremated in Wenceslas Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Outbreaks of protest self-immolations followed for decades, from Czechoslovakia to Korea, France to Kurdistan, Iran to Switzerland. Usually self-immolation is a way for the weak to protest against the powerful. But sometimes it’s the opposite. In the course of six weeks in 1990, according to Biggs, about two hundred Indian university students from high castes set themselves on fire to protest the government’s decision to open up spots to Untouchables.
Why? What motivated them? I put the question to any number of historians of self-immolation, but the best answer came from a scholar based in Washington, D.C., Timothy Dickinson. “Fire is the most dreaded of all forms of death,” he said, so “the sight of someone setting themselves on fire is simultaneously an assertion of intolerability and, frankly, of moral superiority. You say, ‘I would never have the guts to do that. It’s not that he’s trying to tell me something, but that he’s commanding me.’ This isn’t insanity. It’s a terrible act of reason.”
In January, 2010, after years of grinding destitution and harassment by police, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself aflame, not so much out of protest as—returning us to Dido—existential despair. But while his suicide was intensely personal, it was interpreted as an act of public defiance. He became a symbol of the Arab world’s governmental perfidy and a rallying cry for its restive youth. He has also, it seems, become the inspiration to a new generation of self-immolaters.
Photograph of the Buddhist nun Thich Nu Thanh Quang’s self-immolation in South Vietnam, in 1966, courtesy of A.P. Photo.
An earlier version of this article included an incorrect summary of the historical events at Nicomedia, as well as various spelling errors.
