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Death ends a life, Not a relationship. - Jack Lemmon Pagan roots of modern funeral practice Perhaps discussing of death and burial process is a welcome subject for most people, but it is an integral part of our life so we are to talk about these subjects. Some of the old practices were lost when indigenous religions encountered militant Christianity and were forced to go underground for survival. But however, parents transmitted their traditions to their children. I think in this way some old traditions were saved. There are a lot of interesting beliefs known from ancient times.
For example, the pagans (and the ancient Celts) considered that year begins on the first day of winter, October 31 with sundown. It is one night when the barriers between the worlds of life and death are uncertain, allowing the ancestors to walk among the living, welcomed and feasted by their kin, bestowing the Other worlds blessings. To my mind, peoples mind is always the same (or almost the same) and funeral help us reach a place of fond memory and deep appreciation for the person whose life is celebrated. Generally, the pagans had no special rites for burial processes. It is said, that firstly, in the very ancient times their graves were very simple and primitive. But with the passing of the time they began expressing brightly their belief in the other world.
When a member of their tribe died, they put many necessary in the other world life things like food, drinks, jugs and pitchers, jewellery and so on. There was also a belief, according to which a dead person is to pay to a conductor for accompaniment to the other world that is why the pagans also put some money. Group burials also took place. Mostly such people are members of the same tribe. They are powdered with red ochre. The burial places like that could contain 20, 30 or even 150 people.
But today the people, who share pagan beliefs and traditions, bury their relatives according to the present regulations. Early Christian, Hebrew and Scandinavian Burial People began bury the dead relatives in moustier culture epoch. The aim of funeral was to move off the dead person and to take trouble about it. People bonded the corpse, covered it with stones, cremated it etc. By the way, such procedures were accompanied by supplying with inventory, sacrificing, mummification and so on. Almost in all times the look of a burial places and a burial process in general depended on the social position of a dead person.
Just let us remember burial mound of chiefs or pyramids of Egyptian pharaohs to understand that completely. It also depended on religious ideas. The burial process sometimes was finished by commemoration. Nowadays cremation and burial in ground is practicing. Jewish rites have their roots in Biblical times and are performed by paid individuals or voluntary communal groups.
The pagan Scandinavians acknowledged a pantheon of gods and spirits, which could be called on in different situations. Talking about a pagan Scandinavian burial practice one can say that cremation was abandoned and the tradition of accompanying a dead person with their goods. From the beginning of the Viking Age Scandinavians had direct contact with Christianity in several ways. The conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity was a gradual process and there was a considerable period of coexistence between pagans and Christians in the Viking world. So, some traditions became the same. Sometimes the dead were interred in boats or ships.
Sometimes people were buried in wooden chambers; others were buried in oval, circular or rectangular pits. But however, many groups, especially in Sweden and further east, adhered to the old custom of cremating the body on a funeral pyre and then burying the fragments of bone, ash and charcoal, often in a simple clay vessel beneath a low mound. A Scandinavian warrior would be buried with his weapons, usually his sword, spear, shield and battleaxe. In many cases, the dead man could be accompanied with his horse or dogs.
Pagan graves, containing so many goods as well as human skeletal remains, are one of our richest sources of information about that time. Death and Burial through the Middle Ages and Renaissance Talking about death in the Middle Ages, one cant help remembering about the Black Death, which took off the life of inconceivable number of people. And of course, in addition to the breakdown of social order mass burials took place at that period of time. There were many poor people, who couldnt afford any medical services. Thus, most of them remained in their houses, either through poverty or in hopes of safety, and fell sick by thousands. Since they received no care and attention, almost all of them died.
Many ended their lives in the streets both at night and during the day; and many others who died in their houses were only known to be dead because the neighbours smelled their decaying bodies. Dead bodies filled every corner. With the aid of porters, if they could get them, they carried the bodies out of the houses and laid them at the door; where every morning quantities of the dead might be seen. Such was the multitude of corpses brought to the churches every day and almost every hour that there was not enough consecrated ground to give them burial, especially since they wanted to bury each person in the family grave, according to the old custom. Although the cemeteries were full they were forced to dig huge trenches, where they buried the bodies by hundreds. As we see, the mass burials really took place.
Of course, nobody could think about any burial rites and traditions in such a terrible and unusual situation. Moreover, many corpses also were burned. It is impossible to say that is was cremation. Mostly people burned the corpses from considerations of killing the virus and because of hygiene. Generally, when citizens of such dying towns buried the plaque victims they used all the possible variants of burying. Some towns were fortunate to have coffins, but in any case most victims were interred in mass graves.
Medical Embalmers and the rise of English Undertakers Embalming techniques had been studied for many years and reached a high level of sophistication during the Civil War, when the transportation of dead soldiers to remote hometowns required reliable methods of preservation. When such procedure was just invented, it was surrounded by some controversies. Some people were sure it was immoral, even ungodly, to artificially preserve the dead by injecting them with chemicals. The lack of unqualified acceptance of embalming prevented it from becoming uniformly widespread, thus, more than twenty years after the war was over, small town Midwestern undertakers like Kenower (see also page 9) could still call it a "new" process. Those who did not desire embalming for their loved ones needed only more short-term methods of preservation. They were proposed ice-preservation.
By the way, the popularity of ice cooling remained strong into the late 1890 s. The gradual rise of embalming as a method of preservation was accompanied by another major development, the invention of the sealed vault, a large container protecting both casket and corpse. Like embalming techniques, the use and efficiency of vaults got a boost during the Civil War, although their raison date was not limited to preserving the bodies of fallen soldiers. Of course, with appearance of new kinds of preventing the dead people appeared also a large number of undertakers: people, who turned death into business. The undertakers were mostly well-to-do people who looked after the quality of his undertaker's offices service. Sometimes they didnt offer only coffins, hearses and embalmment, but also clothes for burial ceremonies.
American Colonial Funeral Undertaking The origins of undertaking should be outlined. In 1963, journalist Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death exposed the American funeral business as a cause for national disgrace. With unceasing wit, Mitford portrayed funeral directions as greedy and heartless, dedicated to manipulating people at their most vulnerable. With lies, feigned sentiment, and cynical marketing techniques, Americas death care industry purportedly had instituted a multi-million dollar burial racket. Instead of offering dignity to the dead, funeral directors had lured Americans into the false values of beautiful memory pictures and spring-cushioned caskets. Death, like good breath, had become a commodity.
Why such condemnation of the funeral business? Instinctive reaction against death takes place. Anthropologists such as J. G. Frazer and Bronislaw Malinowski have shown that humans around the world exhibit an instinctive aversion to corpses and stigmatize those who come into contact with them. But however, somebody has to do it.
What is more, death-handlers have been treated quite differently in different nations and times; it cannot be explained by human nature. It seems a remarkably telling fact about American death that undertaking became an occupation and later even a profession. But the undertakers role always needs improvement and sophistication. The most recent chronicler of the history of death America, Gary Lederman, gave some new and quite interesting ideas. The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, tells us the story from the perspective of a unique protagonist: the dead body. At that time undertakers helped to transfer the body from home to the grave.
Usually they played a subsidiary role in drama of death, particularly in the antebellum period, secondary in importance behind the survivors and the corpse itself. According to the author, such a situation was fortunate and healthy strengthening a vital social relationship between the living and the dead. Coffins, Burial Cases, and Caskets Since the middle of the 19 th century a large selection of burial attributes was proposed. Not only the difference between coffins and caskets was demonstrated (one simpler and less expensive, the other more elaborate and costly), but also the appreciation of different grades and qualities in the materials used: wood, cloth-covered and metallic. Coffins or burial-caskets constructed of metal may be with or without moldings. Generally, making a coffin, we must first of all decide how tall and how wide it would be and then build it on plywood.
It should be said that many kinds of making and adorning of coffins always existed. And today there are coffins for every taste. Range of coffin hardware and casket accessories is being proposed. Somewhen people built coffins as if it was a simple wood box.
Today there are a lot of kinds of burial cases, mostly wooden and metal caskets and coffins. There are also the so called ecco kosher caskets. The caskets-making industry is today well developed. For example, one of Mexico's largest leading casket manufacturers produces over 600 caskets a month with another 600 caskets idling capacity having clients in Mexico, U. S. A. , Manila, Jamaica and Europe.
Every company that works in this sphere aims to use the finest materials and especially the finest wood, saying, We understand how hard can be to lose a loved one. Nowadays such materials as western birch, white pine, mahogany, dark / black walnut, solid birch, solid pine, aromatic cedar are widely used. There could be coffins with a full lid or it may consist of two halves one of which is to be opened during the ceremony in the church. Talking about the full lid, it...
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