The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  Human burial rites extend back to prehistoric times. Though there are clearly sanitary reasons for sticking a corpse in the ground (as one anthropologist has written, “The smell of decaying flesh might alone be impetus to bury the body”), the elaborate customs surrounding the practice indicate that deeper meanings are involved.

  Funeral of St. Edward the Confessor, January 1066.

  Throughout much of human history, it has been common for people to bury their dead in two distinct stages. The first is what French sociologist Robert Hertz famously called the “wet” phase. During this period, the rotting corpse is divested of its flesh and transformed into a skeleton by any of several means—temporary earth burial, exposure to scavengers, partial cremation, and so on. The denuded bones are then transferred to a communal grave or charnel house. Hertz labeled this the “dry” phase. This practice continues today in parts of the world, particularly in Southeast Asia, where—according to anthropologists Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington—“the dead are allowed to decompose in large jars, of the type otherwise used to ferment rice wine, and a crowded noisy funeral held when the body is reduced to bone.”

  Different interpretations have been given to this custom. Hertz himself believed that the two phases help effect the soul’s transition from its former identity as a living member of society to its new status in the afterworld. British archaeologist Timothy Taylor, on the other hand, suggests that the practice of “double burial” stemmed from the archaic belief that the “unquiet soul” of the newly deceased posed a threat to the living and must be prevented from reinhabiting its body, a requirement that lasted “only so long as the flesh lay on the bones.” Once “the bones were white, then it was deemed that the person had finally left this life and was no longer a danger to the living. Thus it was that for most of recent human history (roughly the last 35,000 years) funerary rights were twofold: the primary rites zoned off the freshly dead [while] the secondary rites, occurring after weeks or months, firmly and finally incorporated the deceased into the realm of the ancestors.”

  As Taylor explains, archaeological digs in England have revealed a significant shift in burial practices that occurred between the end of the Neolithic period and the start of the Bronze Age. In the earlier era, the bones of the dead—picked clean by birds of prey—were buried “all jumbled together in a long, mounded-up communal tomb or barrow.” Sometime over the next thousand years, certain individuals—generally wealthy and powerful men—began to be buried intact under their own small, separate mounds. Surrounded by their possessions—daggers, cloak pins, drinking vessels—they were interred in the fetal position, a fact strongly suggesting “that they believed they would be reborn from their swollen earth mounds into some other world, like babies emerging from the womb.”

  Other positions have been used through-out the ages: extended, crouched, flexed, sitting, standing, or reclining. In Christian nations, bodies are traditionally buried supine with the head pointing west so that the dead will be able to view Christ’s coming at the Eschaton. The only position generally avoided is upside down, though even this is not unheard of. In eighteenth-century England, for example, a small number of people—convinced that the world would be flipped over on Judgment Day—had their corpses placed head down in the grave so that they would be standing upright when the big day arrived. (Jonathan Swift mocks this belief in Gulliver’s Travels. The Lilliputians, we are told, “bury their dead with their heads directly downward, because they hold an opinion that in eleven thousand moons they are to rise again; in which period the earth, which they conceive to be flat, will turn upside down and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready, standing on their feet.”)

  Besides being positioned in particular ways, the dead are generally treated to a ritual washing and dressing before burial. This is both a final act of love and, in many cases, a way of ensuring that the departed will look their best when they reach their final destination. And—refuting the notion that “you can’t take it with you”—it has been common through the millennia to bury corpses with various tools, utensils, food, clothing, jewelry, and other “grave goods” that will come in handy in the afterlife.

  Though they don’t exactly qualify as grave goods, amputated limbs have sometimes been accorded official burials in the belief that they will be reunited with their original owners in the hereafter. “In early America,” writes Kenneth V. Iserson, “some grave markers even commemorated buried body parts. A Washington Village, New Hampshire, cemetery contains a marker with the inscription, ‘Here lies the leg of Captain Samuel Jones which was amputated July, 1807.’ Similarly, the Newport, Rhode Island, cemetery has a marker placed by Mr. Tripp to ‘His Wife’s Arm, Amputated February 20th, 1786.’” This practice has occasionally proved controversial. In July 1899, for example, the New York World reported that a bitter dispute had erupted at the Erste Neu-Sandetzer Lodge on Houston Street after one of its members, Lewis Lowensohn, decided to hold funeral rites for his amputated left leg. “How can he get the society to bury his leg?” protested fellow member Isaac Schmidt. “Suppose he gets well and falls down in front of a trolley car and gets an arm cut off. Will he get his arm buried free, too? He holds only one membership. That entitles him to be buried, but not by piecemeal. He must be buried all at once.”

  If having a single person buried “piecemeal” in multiple graves represents one end of the inhumation spectrum, then mass burial—a single grave containing multiple occupants—is the opposite. This practice, which extends back to the charnel repositories of ancient times, has existed throughout the ages as the preferred way of disposing of social pariahs, from plague casualties and paupers to the victims of wartime atrocities, who have been dumped into ditches like so much human landfill.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  For those wishing to dig deeper into the rich field of worldwide sepulchral rites, the following books are must-reads: Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (Free Press, 1960); Peter Metcalf and Robert Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Timothy Taylor, The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death (Beacon Press, 2002).

  Ritual Burials:

  So Easy Even a Caveman

  Could Do It

  No one knows for certain precisely when people first began to dispose of their dead in a ritualistic fashion. For years, conventional scientific wisdom had it that the earliest humans to conduct ceremonial burials were the Cro-Magnons of the Upper Paleolithic period, those prehistoric hunter-gatherers whose anatomical features—high forehead, upright posture, and slender skeletons—were indistinguishable from those of modern human beings.

  DEATH FUN FACT

  Did you know that the word mausoleum— which has come to mean any grand, stately tomb—derives from the name of a provincial ruler in the ancient Persian empire? When Mausolos died in 353 B.C., to honor his memory, his wife, Artemisia, decided to erect a magnificent shrine at what is now Bodrum, Turkey. (According to legend, she also mixed his cremated ashes with wine and imbibed them— anticipating by a few millennia the behavior of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who claimed that he blended his father’s cremains with a little cocaine and snorted them.)

  Hundreds of craftsmen, including some of the greatest sculptors of the age, labored on the shrine. When it was completed three years later, it was of such unparalleled splendor that it became known as one of the Seven Wonders of the World (along with the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Jupiter at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse at Alexandria). The great tomb remained intact until the fifteenth century, when it was severely damaged by a series of earthquakes. Nowadays, only the foundation of the mausoleum of Mausolos remains on the original site.

  Indeed, along with their other cultural accomplishments—cave painting, sophisticated toolmaking, the earliest glimmerings of religion—it was their habit of performing e
laborate burials that defined the Cro-Magnons as our direct evolutionary forebears, true Homo sapiens as opposed to the hulking, thick-skulled Neanderthals they eventually displaced. Archaeologists have uncovered Cro-Magnon burial sites containing the fossilized remains of carefully posed corpses ornamented with red ochre, dressed in elaborate tunics, adorned with shell and ivory jewelry, and accompanied by ritualistic grave goods including weapons, tools, and food—clear proof that these early humans followed complex rituals when interring their dead.

  In the early 1960s, however, the world of paleoanthropology was shaken up when a pair of archaeologists made a sensational discovery. Excavating a cave in a remote mountain region of Iraq, these scientists uncovered the fossilized corpse of an adult Neanderthal male who appeared to have been interred in a reverential manner, his body strewn with wreaths of multicolored flowers. Since then, other evidence has turned up suggesting that Neanderthals engaged in the deliberate, ceremonial disposal of their dead: bodies arranged in special positions, placed under triangular stones, or accompanied by flint implements.

  While some scientists dismiss the significance of these findings (arguing, for example, that the flower pollen found in the Shanidar Cave in Iraq came from burrowing rodents), the growing consensus seems to be that those supposedly knuckle-dragging cavemen, the Neanderthals, were responsible for humankind’s first ritualistic burials.

  DEATH DEFINITION: Tumulus

  WHILE THE WORD TUMULUS SOUNDS LIKE THE NAME OF A MIDDLE EASTERN APPETIZER THAT GOES WELL with pita bread, it actually refers to a kind of grave. Also known as a barrow, a tumulus (from the Latin word for “bulge” or “swelling”) is one of humankind’s oldest types of tombs, dating at least as far back as 4000 B.C. Essentially, it is a mound of earth or stones raised over one or more graves.

  The Wacky World of

  Funeral Customs

  Like all other aspects of human culture—from clothing to cuisine, sexual mores to social etiquette—burial rituals differ dramatically throughout the world.

  Among the Ashanti of Ghana, for example, a dying person was traditionally given a final drink of water so that his soul would be refreshed as it ascended the steep hill leading to the afterworld. When death occured, the corpse received a sponge bath, a sip of rum, and a little bag of gold dust tied to his loincloth. A handkerchief was placed between his hands, so that he would be able to wipe away the sweat as he made his final journey. Various provisions—a fowl, eggs, and mashed yams—were placed beside the body. After a raucous wake and the presentation of further gifts to the deceased—a shroud, palm wine, some slaughtered sheep—the corpse was carried to the graveyard in a procession that periodically paused so that the coffin could be touched to the ground in homage to the earth goddess.

  During a Mongolian’s final days, he or she is attended by a lama who occasionally plucks out one of the dying person’s eyebrow hairs to open an escape route for the soon-to-be-departing soul. Once dead, the body is placed in a squatting position and a blue scarf is tied around its head in such a way that the ends cover the face. Disposal of the body can follow one of three methods. The corpse may be buried in a grave designated by the lama, who selects the appropriate site through a complex ritual involving a white staff, a new rug, and the skin of a black goat. Alternatively, the deceased may be cremated after having his brow anointed with butter and touched seventy-two times with a willow leaf. Or—simplest of all—the body might be abandoned in the wilderness to be stripped of its flesh by scavengers.

  The Jivaro tribespeople of the Andes take a different approach. Believing that every death is the work of a malign supernatural force, they break into violent demonstrations—cursing, shaking their fists, and swearing vengeance on the unknown demonic killer—whenever anyone, even a very old person, dies. After dressing the deceased in his best clothes and providing him with all the plantains and manioc beer he’ll need for the journey to the afterlife, the mourners begin a nightlong wake, the primary feature of which is a ritual dice-throwing game played with canoe-shaped dice. The following morning, the corpse is buried, often within his own house—a form of body disposal that, as mortuary scholars Robert Habenstein and William Lamers note with nice understatement, “necessitates the abandonment of the place as living quarters.” Often, the corpse is armed with a spear “so that he can defend himself against other souls, human or animal, that may come to trouble him in his sleep.”

  A major concern for the peasants of rural Romania is to ensure that the malevolent spirits of the dead do not return to trouble the survivors. When someone dies, the windows and doors of the house are immediately thrown open to afford the departing soul easy exit. The feet of the corpse are tied together with a kerchief, and a long spiral candle is laid on his chest to light the way to the world beyond. For the next three days, a constant watch is kept over the body “lest it should turn into an evil power which threatens the living.” When the body is finally borne to the graveyard, the procession makes a dozen stops along the way so that family members can place small towels on the ground—“symbols of the toll gates through which the soul of the dead must pass in the afterlife.” The ceremonies conclude with a funeral feast at which mourners receive ring-shaped loaves of bread.

  These customs might seem wildly exotic to us. But then, adorning a cadaver with Nature-Glo mortuary makeup before placing it in a $6,000 Beautyrama Adjustable Soft Foam Bed Casket and displaying it in an air-conditioned “slumber room” with piped-in Muzak can seem equally strange to outsiders. Certainly British-born Jessica Mitford thought so. To her, the average U.S. funeral—with its elaborate corpse preparation, prolonged viewing, and extravagant expenditure—was not just bizarre but grotesque: a high-priced pagan ritual dedicated to the great American gods of commerce and vulgarity.

  RECOMMENDED READING

  Robert W. Habenstein and William M. Lamers’s exhaustive, lavishly illustrated, 850-page Funeral Customs the World Over (Buflin Press, 1963) is a standard, if somewhat dryly academic, work on the subject. Less comprehensive, though more fun to read, is Ann Warren Turner’s “young adult” book, Houses for the Dead: Burial Customs Through the Ages (David McKay, 1976), each chapter of which re-creates, in novelistic fashion, a typical funeral in a particular time and place.

  The Mohawks of New York made a large round hole in which the body was placed upright or upon its haunches, after which it was covered with timber, to support the earth which they lay over, and thereby kept the body from being pressed. They then raised the earth in a round hill over it. They always dressed the corpse in all its finery, and put wampum and other things into the grave with it; and the relations suffered not grass nor any weed to grow upon the grave, and frequently visited it and made lamentation.

  —History of the Indian Tribes

  of the United States (1853)

  God Is in the Details:

  Religion and Burial

  Since the religions of the world share little beyond a mutual hatred of one another’s belief systems, it comes as no surprise that they take different approaches to the treatment and disposal of the dead. Here’s a brief summary of the burial customs followed by the major religions.

  ROMAN CATHOLIC

  Prior to death, the moribund person is anointed by a priest who recites a sacramental formula while applying consecrated oil to the forehead and hands of the soon-to-be deceased. (Until relatively recently, this rite was reserved for the final hour of life and was known as “extreme unction.” It is now performed at an earlier stage, when someone is dangerously ill but not yet at death’s doorway, and is known as the Anointing of the Sick.) This ritual is followed by a final communion, the viaticum.

  The funeral rites themselves consist of three parts. The first is the vigil or wake, formerly conducted at the home of the deceased but now typically held at the funeral parlor. During this period, the embalmed body is laid out in an open casket for viewing by relatives and friends. Prayers are conducted and eulogies delivered by loved ones.

&nbs
p; Next comes the funeral mass, which generally occurs several days after the death (to allow sufficient time for the wake). It begins with a procession to the church, where the casket is met at the door by a white-robed priest and carried to the head of the aisle. The prescribed funeral mass includes an opening prayer with readings from the Bible, a homily, the liturgy of the Eucharist, communion, and a concluding rite of commendation.

  The funeral ends at the cemetery with the brief Rite of Committal, consisting of a blessing of the grave, a reading of scripture, and several prayers. Generally, the family dos not remain at the gravesite for the burial itself but leaves at the end of the ritual.

  PROTESTANT

  Since—according to one informed estimate—there are over eight thousand denominations within Protestantism, it’s impossible to talk about a single Protestant way of death. Indeed, as theologian Merle R. Jordan writes, beyond the “usual practice of a funeral service and a committal service,” there are no customs or rites common to all branches of Protestantism.

  Generally speaking, a visitation at the funeral home is followed by a relatively brief church service of fifteen to twenty minutes conducted by the minister in accordance with his denomination’s book of worship. Typically, the ritual consists of Bible readings, a funeral sermon, a eulogy, and the recitation of poetry and prose, interspersed with organ music and hymns. The casket normally stands at the head of the aisle; if it is open, the mourners file by at the end of the service (some denominations, like Presbyterians, insist on keeping the casket closed “so that attention in the service be directed to God”). A brief committal service is then held at the gravesite.