Building Religions 29: Handling the Dead

Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are.
—Octavio Paz

When considering what rituals are found in the world you're creating, you may find those surrounding death to offer the most helpful snapshot of a culture. By describing how a community treats death, you are also providing your audience with insights into an entire worldview: the relationship of humans and gods, the purpose of life, the nature of the afterlife (if there is one), and so on; even questions about the handling of the dead can help illuminate ideas about family, social status, or religious purity. Today's post, then, is aimed at covering some of these issues, with the goal of inspiring authors to consider a broader range of possibilities in their representation of death.

Specifically, I want to deal with funerary rites in their most general sense, namely the customs surrounding the relationship between the living and the dead, and to begin, I'll start by offering a little perspective. For the dominant Christian-oriented cultures of North America, two ways of treating the dead are relatively modern. First is the funeral industry, or of a profession whose purpose it is to deal with the handling of bodies, their preservation, and disposal. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the task of preparing bodies for burial was left primarily to the families of the deceased, particularly the women of the family. That changed with the American Civil War, which left so many dead far away from their families that preservation for the purpose of sending corpses to their homes became a matter of vital interest. A side-effect of this need was the shift from the domestic sphere to the commercial, and from the hands of women to men.

Notice, though, that this was a transformation that arose because of specific historical events. Without the combination of mass deaths and the distance between the dead and their relatives, it might not have happened. Without a Christian belief in the Final Resurrection, the idea that bodies had to be preserved at all might not have arisen at all. That belief, by the way, was strong enough that it wasn't until 1876 that the second innovation occurred in America: cremation. While it had been practiced by other cultures around the world, the idea that the burial of an intact body was necessary was so deeply ingrained in Christian thought that cremation was simply unthinkable, and there was considerable resistance to the practice for decades afterwards—notably because early crematoria in America and Europe were associated with Freemasonry, Theosophy, and atheism. In other words, cremation was interpreted as an attack on Christian values and as a symptom of modern rejection of religion in general.

Here you have two practices—embalming and cremation—that, while they have similarities to other well-known ones, only took hold in a culture in the midst of other large-scale historical changes. If you're building a world and choose to examine funerary rites, ask yourself, "Has it always been this way? If not, why not?"

In order to think about those questions, maybe it's worth thinking about what funerals accomplish for a community. Here are some basic ideas from scholars of religion:

Separation: A funeral marks the removal of the corpse from the community of the living. On the one hand, it can serve to preserve the memory of the deceased through speeches, monuments, or the creation/inclusion of grave goods. It fixes that person's status in time, providing a final statement about her place in the community. On the other hand, it acts as a reminder for the one who has died that she is truly dead, and urges her to move on from the place where she lived.

Mourning: Rites of mourning help those involved to move through the period of separation, and allow them to reintegrate with the rest of society. I've mentioned in other posts that humanity is uncomfortable with the blurring of the categories by which they define the world, so you can think of mourning as a way to negotiate the question "Is he still married?" or "Who is her father?" By allowing a socially-recognized space to develop, others around the person connected to the death can gradually recognize whatever new status the survivor takes on afterwards.

Decay: Connected to the matter of categories is the fact of decay. A decaying corpse is, for some reason, far more unsettling to human beings than one that is either preserved or reduced to bones. One of the things that funerary rites do is circumvent our encounter with decay. We hide bodies in tombs, burn them to ash and bone, or eat them when they are fresh so as to help them avoid the process of rotting. In some cultures, people might put the corpse out of sight until it has become bones, and then return them to a place closer to the family. In others, they might speed along the process. Whatever a culture chooses, it seems that no one wants to see a body rot.

Divination: It's far from universal, but there are traditions in which the recently dead are considered still to be in touch with the living, and can communicate their wishes. A body might be left displayed during part of the funeral rite in order to allow it to "speak," or those connected to it might perform rituals to answer any final questions they may have. Taken further, this can lead to necromantic practices, which work on the same assumption that the dead are both able to communicate and have some sort of insight to transmit to the living.

Support: In cultures in which the dead are assumed to carry on an afterlife, they may require support from the living. This could take the form of meals shared at the gravesite or left on the table on certain sacred days, or it could involve providing grave goods, sacrificed servants, or tokens of wealth. Regardless, the idea is that the living remain obligated to the dead in the same way that they would be to the people with whom they were still connected in life.

Based on these four ideas, you can ask several questions about your setting. First, what are the practices that surround the disposal of the body itself, and why? Second, what are the expectations of the living with regard to the dead? Third, what is the status of the dead: do they continue to exist in an otherworldly realm, and if so, do they need the intervention of the living to provide for them?

Next time, I'll consider questions about death itself, both its mythic origins and its possible divine embodiments.