NECROPOLIS
Copyright © 2014, by Dennis Cordell 

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. 

Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-0-692-39406-9 

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Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis 

A stroll through a cemetery can be an exhaustive and lugubrious task for the bereaved. The dead are interpreted as a personal loss for survivors. However, the dead are not truly lost, but simply no longer alive. Nor are those lamented in any way obsolete. Their presence in a necropolitan domain serves as an expressive realm for the dead to offer a stranger, who did not know the deceased in life, an archive which can stimulate the imagination of the living. A cemetery is usually very quiet and curiously calm, a place in which death itself becomes an abstraction. The dead communicate in a taciturnity which is contrary to the din of the living. Even during burials, the only sound is a hushed requiem. A stroll which allows the observer to study the graves of unknown individuals creates a narrative which gives the mind a chance to reflect on all the myths that cemeteries, and their inhabitants, have to offer. Some of these myths seem empyrean, others seem, at times, infernal. Only the dead know the truth of such myths, for the living can never grasp any empirical accuracy of the dead with certainty. To the portrait and street photographer, navigating through groups of living individuals often becomes tiring. A quiet retreat, without another living being, can be a solution for the artist who seeks contemplation without the tumult and distractions that corporeality presents. Places of spiritual pilgrimage may offer a wealth of imaginative, even serene, vision but even contemplative, living, subjects can become exhausting, especially if the photographer is carrying heavy equipment. The maxim silence is golden becomes a sought-after locus for the image maker. One solution in finding a place of solitude, such as a desert or mountain wilderness, is complicated by a need for transportation. 

Fortunately, there is often no need for long stays in such a place, a few hours of quiet, alone with the camera, will suffice. If more time is required an individual may return on a subsequent day. Such a perfect, quiet, and serene setting is found in a cemetery. A cemetery is full of people, but they are very quiet and very still. In a necropolis there is no need to worry about capturing what the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson described as the decisive moment. The moments in a cemetery seem endless with each moment no more decisive than another. Each instant reminisces the myths associated with the realm of the dead and affords time to contemplate the tombstones which serve as a Derridaean, biographical, archive. Just as Virgil’s Aeneas buried his dead in places that were destined to become sites of Roman triumph, these markers, or tombstones, assure that the inhabitants of the site, although deceased, are not homeless or forgotten. Grave sites serve as the foundation muniments of the archive, with their markers suggesting what the inhabitants of the cemetery did before they came there. The viewer may also opine about how they themselves will eventually arrive in such a quiet setting. 

Death has inspired some of the world’s most imposing and monumental architecture. Two of the seven wonders of the ancient world were tombs––the great pyramids of Egypt and the mausoleum of Halicarnassus. The Egyptian pyramids which housed the dead, have endured and are perhaps the most famous tombs of all time. Their sheer scale captures the power, wealth, and energy which was available to those who created them. For the ancient Egyptians, the house inhabited while living was just a hostel, while the true home was the grave. The word tomb derives from ancient Greek and was first employed by Homer to describe a tumulus or mound raised over a body. Subsequently, tomb has come to mean anything that is the final resting place of a corpse or cremated human remains. As a consequence, the word tomb is often employed synonymously with a funerary memorial, funerary monument, mausoleum, cenotaph (an empty tomb), gravestone (a tomb marker), and the grave. All perform some of the functions of a tomb. More literally however, a tomb is a structure built above ground to house the remains of the dead. Many such structures are freestanding, and some exist within other buildings, most notably churches. Tombs often incorporate architectural features and sculpture into the design to include identifying inscriptions and images while others use extravagant decor and furnishings on the interior as well as the exterior. Tombs come in a myriad of shapes, forms, and sizes including pyramids, obelisks, mounds, rotunda, rock-cut tombs, house tombs, and temple tombs. These tombs may house the remains of a single person or several. Some types of tombs are characteristic of specific peoples and places. Funerary architecture possesses an eclectic nature often acquired from past societies to lend prestige to the present. Pyramid tombs may be associated with Egypt, but pyramids were also adopted in ancient Rome (Caius Cestius), in eighteenth-century England (the Earl of Buckinghamshire at Bickling, Norfolk), and in nineteenth-century America (the monument to Confederate soldiers in Richmond, Virginia) to house human remains and thus perform the function of a tomb. 

The earliest impact of man upon the natural landscape was through funerary structures. The barrows and tumuli of the Neolithic period in Europe or of the Mycenaean period in Greece were large tombs that basically consisted of a stone chamber covered by a massive mound of earth. The Sutton Hoo burial ground in East Anglia, England, provides evidence for attitudes toward death immediately before the conversion of an English community to Christianity in the seventh century C.E. Founded about 600 C.E., and lasting a hundred years, Sutton Hoo contained only about twenty burials spread over nine acres. This contrasts with the folk cemeteries of the pagan period (fifth–sixth centuries C.E.), which typically featured large numbers of cremations contained in pots as well as inhumations laid in graves with sets of weapons and jewelry. Sutton Hoo was a royal burial ground reserved for the elite, consisting of visible mounds on the left bank of the River Deben opposite Woodbridge in Suffolk, England. One mound contains the richest grave ever discovered on British soil. In this mound was a ship ninety feet long buried in a trench with a wooden chamber amid other ships containing over two hundred objects of gold, silver, bronze, and iron. Inhumed in the ship was Raedwald, an early king of East Anglia who had briefly converted to Christianity, reverted to paganism, and died around 624 or 625 C.E. Sutton Hoo was a pagan monument in which burial rites relatively new to England are drawn from a common pagan heritage and enacted in defiance of pressure from Christian Europe. The major burials are political statements in which the person honored is equipped as an ambassador of the people, both at the funeral and in the afterlife. Although such tombs may function as symbols of power, they can not be isolated completely from the more personal world of emotion and sentiment. 

The Taj Mahal (abode of the chosen one) in Agra, India, was built during the 1600s by Shah Jahan for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, and could be construed as a beautiful token of love inspired by grief. However, its wider political and physical impact can not be ignored. This tomb and its beautiful gardens represent heaven on earth, uniting this life with the afterlife. The calligraphy on the gate of this tomb reads “O Soul, thou art at rest. Return to the Lord at peace with Him, and He at peace with you.” Muslim tradition forbids elaborate decoration of graves. Hence, the bodies of Mumtaz and Shah Jahan were put in a plain crypt beneath the inner chamber with their faces turned right and towards Mecca. Mumtaz Mahal’s cenotaph is placed at the precise centre of the inner chamber on a rectangular marble base. The ninety-nine names of God are found as calligraphic inscriptions on the sides of the actual tomb of Mumtaz Mahal while the tomb of Shah Jahan bears a calligraphic inscription that reads “He travelled from this world to the banquet-hall of Eternity.” 

More modest tombs are less symbols of power and religious piety but are instead personal statements of affection and familial duty. Such tombs are symbolic of the human urge to remember, while serving as consolation for the bereaved. A tomb may be commissioned from love and affection, but its design, decor, and size are choices that also convey statements about the beliefs, wealth, status, and identity of both the deceased and the survivors. When death strikes in society certain events and rituals must be undertaken. The decaying of the corpse and beliefs about death make the presence of the dead person among the living unacceptable. Almost all societies have employed different practices for disposing of and commemorating the dead. A notable form of such disposal is the cemetery. The term cemetery derives from the Greek (koimeterion) and Latin (coemeterium), words for sleeping place. The concept is closely related to a burial ground, graveyard, churchyard, or necropolis although the boundary between these designations is not clear-cut. A burial ground and a graveyard consist of one or several graves with the term burial ground more often employed than the term graveyard to designate unplanned or unconsecrated places for burial. A churchyard is a consecrated graveyard owned by the church and attached to church buildings. A necropolis is a large graveyard. The most evident mutual function of all such places of interment has been to provide a means for getting rid of a dead body. 

Tibetan Buddhists conceive death as something explained in terms of, what is called in Tibetan, the bar do. A bar do is simply an intermediate state between one life and another. The awareness, that is thought of as the soul in Western parlance, leaves the body for about seven weeks before reentering a new sentient incarnation. For a Buddhist, there is not an actual death. The awareness of each sentient being simply migrates from vehicle to vehicle until it eventually gains enlightenment and ceases migration. There is no map. No north, south, east or west. Just continuity, like the turning of a wheel. As the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei observed: 

Of your bones, now buried white cloud,
 this much remains forever:
streams cascading empty toward
human realms. 

Different cultures perceive death in different ways. There are many viewpoints concerning the migration of sentient awareness as it leaves one medium in search of another. At times the cemetery may seem like a garden of the dead, and possibly as a cure for life. At other times, however, the migration of awareness can, at least for the survivors, be a haunting experience. 

A funeral is a ceremony for celebrating, respecting, sanctifying, or remembering the life of a person who has died. Funerary customs comprise a complex network of beliefs and practices used by a culture to remember the dead, from the interment itself to various monuments, as well as prayers and rituals undertaken in the deceased’s honor. These customs vary widely among cultures, as well as religious affiliations within the cultures. The word funeral comes from the Latin funus, which had a variety of meanings, including the corpse and the funerary rites themselves. Funerary art is produced in connection with burials, including the many kinds of tombs, and objects specially made for the burial of a corpse. Funeral rites are as old as human culture itself, dating to at least 300,000 years ago. For example, in the Shanidar Cave in Iraq, or in the Pontnewydd Cave in Wales as well as other sites across Europe and the Near East, archaeologists have discovered Neanderthal skeletons covered with a layer of flower pollen. This deliberate burial and reverence given to the dead may imply that Neanderthals had religious beliefs relating to burial. 

At a visitation––also called a viewing, wake or calling hours––the body of the decedent is placed on display in the coffin. The viewing often takes place one or two evenings before the funeral. Formerly, it was common practice to place the coffin in the decedent’s home or that of a relative for viewing. This practice continues in many areas of Ireland and Scotland with the body dressed in the decedent’s best clothes. In recent times there has been more variation in how the deceased is dressed, with some people choosing, while still living, to be dressed in clothing more reflective of how they dressed in life. Often the body will be adorned with jewelry, such as watches, necklaces, or brooches, which may be taken off and given to the family of the deceased or remain in the casket after burial. Jewelry will most likely be removed before cremation. The body may or may not be embalmed, depending upon such factors as the amount of time since the death occurred, religious practices, or requirements of the place of burial. The most commonly prescribed aspects of a funeral often include that the attendees sign a book kept by the deceased’s survivors to record who was present. In addition, a family may choose to display photographs taken of the deceased person during their lives. A more recent trend is to create a DVD with pictures and video of the deceased, accompanied by music, and to play this DVD continuously during the visitation. The viewing of the deceased is either in an open casket, in which the embalmed body has been clothed and treated with cosmetics for display, or a closed casket, in which the coffin is closed. The coffin may be closed if the body was badly damaged because of an accident, fire or other trauma, deformed from illness, or if any survivor is emotionally unable to cope with viewing the corpse. In cases such as these, a picture of the deceased, usually a formal photo, is placed atop the casket. However, this step is precluded in Judaism where funerals are held soon after death, preferably within a day or two, and the corpse is never displayed. The Torah forbids embalming, and flowers are not sent to a grieving Jewish family as it is a reminder of the life that is now lost. Donations are often given to a charity instead. 

Obituaries sometimes contain a request that attendees omit flowers (e.g. in lieu of flowers). Such requests have been on the rise for the past century as the preferred method of expressing sympathy. The viewing typically takes place at a funeral home, which is equipped with gathering rooms where the viewing can be conducted. A church viewing may end with a prayer service or, in a Roman Catholic funeral, may include a rosary. In parts of Ireland and Scotland, where the body of the deceased is displayed in the family home, a wake is held. A wake usually includes food, drink and sometimes music and singing and a visitation is often held the evening before the day of the funeral. However, when the deceased person is elderly, the visitation may be held immediately preceding the funeral to allow elderly friends of the deceased a chance to view the body and attend the funeral in one trip, since it may be difficult for them to arrange travel. This step may also be taken if the deceased has few survivors or the survivors want a funeral with only a small number of guests. A memorial service, or 

funeral, is often officiated by clergy from the decedent’s, or bereaved’s religious institution. A funeral may also take place at either a funeral home, crematorium or cemetery chapel. The open-casket service (which is common in North America) allows mourners to have one last opportunity to view the dead and bid farewell. There is an order of precedence when approaching the casket at this stage that usually starts with the immediate family to include siblings, parents, spouse, or children, followed by other mourners, after which the immediate family may file past again, so they are the last to view their loved one before the coffin is closed. This opportunity can take place immediately before the service begins, or at the very end of the service. Open casket funerals and visitations are very rare in some countries such as the United Kingdom and most of Europe, where it is usual for only close relatives to actually see the deceased person and not uncommon for nobody to do so. These funeral services are thus invariably closed casket. The deceased is usually transported from the funeral home to a church in a hearse designed to carry casketed remains. The deceased is often transported in a procession, or funeral cortège, with the hearse or funeral service vehicles, and private automobiles traveling in a procession to the church or other location where the services will be held. In several jurisdictions, special laws cover funeral processions, such as requiring other vehicles to give right-of-way to the funeral motorcade. Funeral service vehicles may be equipped with light bars and special flashers to increase their visibility on the roads. They may also all have their headlights on, to identify which vehicles are part of the cortège. After the funeral service, if the deceased is to be buried, the funeral procession will proceed to a cemetery if not already there. If the deceased is to be cremated, the funeral procession may then proceed to the crematorium. Religious funeral services commonly include prayers, readings from a sacred text, hymns sung either by the attendees or a hired vocalist, and words of comfort from the clergy. Frequently, a relative or close friend will be asked to give a eulogy, which details happy memories and accomplishments although sometimes the delivering of the eulogy is done by the clergy. At a Christian funeral, church bells may be tolled both before and after the service. During the funeral and at the burial service, the casket may be covered with a large arrangement of flowers, or casket spray. If the deceased served in a branch of the Armed forces, the casket may be covered with a national flag and include the firing of rifles as well as bugle calls, and conclude by presenting the flag to the family. Funeral customs vary from country to country. In the United States, any type of noise other than quiet whispering or mourning is considered disrespectful. A traditional Fire Department funeral consists of two raised aerial ladders.The deceased firefighter travels under the aerials of the fire apparatus, to the cemetery. Once there, the grave service frequently includes the playing of bagpipes as a distinguishing feature of a fallen hero’s funeral. Also a Last Alarm Bell, a portable fire department bell, is tolled at the end of the ceremony. 

In many religious traditions, pallbearers, usually males who are close, but not immediate relatives of the deceased, will carry the casket to the hearse, and from the hearse to the site of the burial service. The pallbearers often sit in a specially reserved section during the funeral service. In many religious services, coffins are kept closed during the burial ceremony. However, in Eastern Orthodox funerals, the coffins are reopened just before burial to allow loved ones a glimpse of the deceased one last time and give their final adieux. Greek funerals are an exception as the coffin is open during the whole procedure unless the state of the body does not allow it. Greek morticians will typically ensure that all jewelry that were displayed at the viewing are in the casket before it is buried or entombed although there is an exception in the case of cremation. Jewelry and other such items tend to melt or suffer damage, so they are usually removed before the body goes into the furnace. Likewise, pacemakers are removed prior to cremation––if they were left in the corpse they could explode and damage the crematorium. Jewish tradition maintains that absolutely nothing of value is to be buried with the deceased. 

In most East Asian, South Asian and many Southeast Asian cultures, the wearing of white is symbolic of death. In these societies, white or off-white robes symbolize that someone has died and may be worn by relatives of the deceased during a funeral ceremony. In Chinese culture, red is strictly forbidden as it is a traditionally symbolic color of happiness. Exceptions are sometimes made if the deceased has reached a high age, particularly above their mid-eighties. In which case, the funeral is considered a celebration, where wearing white with some red is acceptable. Contemporary western influence however has meant that dark-colored or black attire is now often also acceptable for mourners to wear, particularly for those outside the family. In such cases, mourners wearing dark colors may also wear a white or off-white armband. In southern China a traditional Chinese gift to the attendees of the funeral is a white envelope containing a small sum of money in odd numbers, a sweet, a red thread, and a handkerchief, each with symbolic meaning. Chinese custom also dictates that the said sum of money, along with the sweet should be consumed the day of the funeral and anything given during the funeral must not be brought home. The exception is the red thread, which is tied to the front doorknob of the guests’ houses to ward off bad luck. The repetition of three is common where people at the funeral may brush their hair three times or spit three times before leaving the funeral to ward off bad luck. Most Japanese funerals are conducted with Buddhist rites. Many feature a ritual that bestows a new name on the deceased, with funerary names typically using obsolete or archaic words (kanji) to avoid the likelihood of the name being used in ordinary speech or writing. The new names are typically chosen by a Buddhist priest, after consulting the family of the deceased. Most Japanese are cremated with the ashes placed in an urn and then deposited in a family grave. In recent years however, alternative methods of burial have gained in popularity including scattering of the ashes, burial in outer space, and conversion of the cremated remains into a diamond that can be set in jewelry. Aside from the religious aspect, a Japanese funeral usually includes a wake with further services later performed by a Buddhist priest on specific anniversaries after death. 

Modern Zoroastrians in Mumbai are facing modern problems. The vultures that traditionally devoured their dead are going extinct. Since slaughtering cows is forbidden, dead cows are left to be eaten by the local birds. The vultures began dying once a certain painkiller was approved for use on cattle. This painkiller caused irreversible kidney failure in the birds and caused their population to shrink to a few thousand. In 2012, the Zoroastrian residents of Mumbai planned to build aviaries to repopulate the vultures for the towers which house the deceased. However, the painkiller is still a problem. It is extremely popular among humans as well as cows, and if the deceased used it three days prior to death it will continue killing the birds. 

Contemporary South Korean funerals typically mix western culture with traditional Korean culture. In most cases, all related males in the family wear woven arm bands representing seniority and lineage in relation to the deceased, and must grieve next to the deceased for a period of three days before burying the body. During this period of time, it is customary for the males in the family to personally greet all who come to show respect. While burials have been preferred in previous times, recent trends show a dramatic increase in cremations due to shortages of proper burial sites and difficulties in maintaining a traditional grave. The ashes of the cremated corpse are commonly stored in columbaria. 

The custom of burying the dead in the floor of family dwellings has been prevalent on the Gold Coast of Africa in accordance with the traditions of the tribe to which the deceased belonged. The funeral may last for as long as a week with a kind of memorial frequently taking place seven years after the person’s death. These funerals, and especially the memorials, may be extremely expensive for the surviving family, with cattle, sheep, goats, and poultry, offered and then consumed. The Ashanti and Akan ethnic groups in Ghana will typically wear red and black during funerals. For special family members, there is typically a funeral celebration with singing and dancing to honor the life of the departed. Afterwards, the Akan hold a somber funeral procession and burial with intense displays of sorrow. Other funerals in Ghana are held with the deceased put in elaborate modern coffins colored and shaped after a certain object, such as a fish, crab, boat, and even an airplane. The Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop in Teshie was named after Seth Kane Kwei who invented this newer style of coffin. Elsewhere, in Kenya funerals are an expensive undertaking and keeping bodies in morgues to allow for fund raising is a common occurrence in urban areas with some families opting to bury their dead in their countryside homes instead of urban cemeteries to save money. 

In the past, the main purpose of a funeral mute was to attend funerals with a sad, pathetic face. The mute was thought to be a symbolic protector of the deceased and stand near the door of the home or church. In Victorian times, mutes would wear somber clothing including black cloaks, top hats with trailing hatbands, and gloves. In other locales, professional mourners, generally women, would shriek and wail often while clawing their faces and tearing at their clothing, to encourage others to weep. These people were mentioned in ancient Greek plays, and were commonly employed throughout Europe until the beginning of the nineteenth century. They continue to exist in Africa and the Middle East and the Chinese use professional mourners to help expedite the entry of a deceased loved one’s soul into the next life by giving the impression that he or she was a good person and well loved by many. 

Airlines have a variety of ways to deal with in-flight deaths. Some airlines keep body bags onboard for just such occasions, and Singapore Airlines even has special cupboards for the corpses. Most airlines, though, have no facilities to hold the dead. In the past, when someone died on British Airways, staff would give them a vodka tonic, a newspaper, and sunglasses, pretending they were asleep so as not to alarm other passengers. But pretending corpses are asleep has since fallen out of fashion. Keeping a corpse beside another passenger poses a health risk, so the dead are now moved to an empty seat with the fewest passengers nearby. Often, this place is in first class. In 2007, British Airways apologized to first-class passengers for moving a corpse to an empty seat while the deceased’s wife, wailing in distress, was moved beside him. 

Perhaps a funeral is not a rite of transition but simply a modification which serves to separate the image of the deceased from the disambiguation of nature and autolysis. There is an African proverb which states, “when death finds you, may it find you alive.” The Nguni of Swaziland in southern Africa call the slaying of the ox “the returning ox,” because the beast accompanies the deceased back home to his or her family and enables the deceased to act as a protecting ancestor. The home bringing rite is a common African ceremony. Only when a deceased person’s surviving relatives have gone, and there is no one left to remember him or her, can the person be said to have really died. At that point the deceased passes into the graveyard of time, losing individuality and becoming one of the unknown multitude of immortals. Many African burial rites begin with the sending away of the departed with a request that they do not bring trouble to the living, and they end with a plea for the strengthening of life on the earth and all that favors it. Tanzanian funeral rites simultaneously mourn for the dead and celebrate life in all its abundance. Such funerals are a time for the community to be in solidarity and to regain its communal identity. In some communities this may include dancing and merriment for all but the immediate family, thus limiting or even denying the destructive powers of death by providing the deceased with light feet for the journey to the other world. Ancient customs are adapted in many African urban funerals. When someone has died in a house, all the windows are smeared with ash, all pictures in the house turned around and all mirrors and televisions and any other reflective objects covered. The beds are removed from the deceased’s room, and the bereaved sit on the floor, usually on a mattress. During the time preceding the funeral, from seven to thirteen days, visits are paid by the community to comfort the bereaved family. Consolatory services are usually held at the bereaved home. The day before the funeral the corpse is brought to the home before sunset and placed in the bedroom. A night vigil then takes place, often lasting until the morning. The night vigil is a time of pastoral care, to comfort the bereaved. A ritual killing of an animal is sometimes made for the ancestors, with a reliance that blood must be shed at this time to avoid further misfortune. Some peoples use the hide of the slaughtered beast to cover the corpse or place it on top of the coffin as a blanket for the deceased. Traditionally, the funeral takes place in the early morning, before sunrise, and not late in the afternoon, as it is believed that sorcerers move around in the afternoons looking for corpses to use for inimical purposes. It is believed that sorcerers tend to be asleep in the early morning which is therefore a good time to bury the dead. In some African communities children and unmarried adults are not allowed to attend the funeral. During the burial the immediate family of the departed is expected to stay together at a designated place on one side of the grave. They are forbidden from speaking or taking any vocal part in the funeral. It is customary to place the lamented’s personal property, including eating utensils, walking sticks, blankets, and other useful items, in the grave. After the funeral the attendees are invited to the deceased’s home for a funeral meal. Many people follow a cleansing ritual at the gate of the home, where everyone must wash off the dust of the graveyard before entering the house. In southern Africa a period of strict mourning continues for at least a week after the funeral. During this time the bereaved stay at home and do not socialize. Some family members wear black clothes or black cloths fastened to their clothes, and shave their hair the day after the funeral. Because life is believed to be concentrated in the hair, shaving the hair symbolizes death, and its growing again indicates the strengthening of life. People in physical contact with a corpse are often regarded as unclean, and the belongings of the dead should not be used at this time, such as the eating utensils or the chairs the deceased used. Blankets and anything else in contact with the departed are all washed while the clothes are wrapped up in a bundle and put away for a year or until the period of mourning has ended, after which they are distributed to family members or destroyed by burning. After a certain period the house and the family must be cleansed from bad luck, from uncleanness and darkness. The bereaved family members are washed and a ritual animal killing takes place. The cleansing usually lasts for seven days after the funeral, but some observe a month or longer. A widow must remain in mourning for a year after her husband’s death and the children of a deceased parent are in mourning for three months. A month or two after the funeral, the grieving family again slaughters a beast and then goes to the graveyard as part of the home-bringing ritual. They speak to the ancestors to allow the deceased to return home to rest. It is believed that at the graves the spirits are hovering on the earth and are restless until they are brought home, with the restless spirit being an extremely dangerous situation for the family. The family members take some of the earth covering the grave and put it in a bottle. They proceed home with the assurance that the deceased relative is accompanying them to look after the family as an ancestor. 

In Western culture, there was a transition from skull-and-crossbones carvings to the winged angels of eighteenth-century tombstones. This change occurred at the same time in which a puritanical and bleak fixation on death, decay and damnation was replaced by more confidence in the soul’s everlasting life. Such anthropomorphizing or secularizing concepts of the after-life are found in all religious teachings. These concepts are also to be found in systems of folk beliefs that are not in close connection to churches or religious institutions. Anthropomorphic explanation is attributed to the widespread practice of placing the preferred chattel of the deceased in the tomb as observed in the pyramids of the Egyptian pharaohs. These items are usually placed by the body because the deceased may require them in the afterlife. The departed must be nourished in a primarily symbolic way because the worldly concept of sustenance must be adjusted to the physiological changes induced by death to appear real and interpretable for the living. A discernable anthropomorphic feature of the Hungarian peasant system of folk beliefs is observed where the surviving substance of the deceased is thought to cross a bridge over a river or a sea in order to reach the other world. Before crossing, the dead must pay a toll. Another anthropomorphic notion from the Hungarian cultural sphere occurs on the night of the vigil where the departed may be fed with the steam of the food placed on the windowsill of the death house, and later distributed to the indigent of the community as charity. 

The aboriginal people of Australia employ methods of dealing with corpses, including burial, cremation, exposure on tree platforms, interment inside a tree or hollow log, and mummification. Each method is designed to mark stages in the separation of body and spirit. These people believe in multiple human souls, which fall into two broad categories. One category is comparable to the western concept of the ego —a self-created, autonomous agency that accompanies the body and constitutes the person’s identity. This egoist soul initially becomes a dangerous ghost that remains near the deceased’s body and property. It eventually passes into non-existence, either by dissolution or by travel to a distant place of no consequence for the living. Its absence is often marked by destruction or abandonment of the deceased’s property and a long- term ban on the use of the deceased person’s name by the living. The other category, the ancestral soul, comes from the dreaming or from God. Ancestral souls, however, are eternal. They return to the environment and to the sites and ritual paraphernalia associated with specific totemic beings or with God. 

Many pre-Hispanic Aztec religious scenes illustrate burial as an act of the feeding the earth, with the bundled dead in the open gullet of the earth monster. Just as day becomes night, death was a natural and necessary fate for the living. People who eventually capitulated to illness and old age went to Mictlan, the clandestine underworld administered by the skeletal god of death, Mictlantecuhtli, and his consort Mictlancihuatl. In preparation for this journey, the corpse was dressed in paper vestments, wrapped and tied in a cloth bundle, and then cremated, along with a dog to serve as a guide through the underworld. The path to Mictlan traversed a landscape fraught with dangers. Having passed these perils, the soul reached the lugubrious Mictlan. In contrast to this hellish realm of Mictlan, there was the afterworld of Tlalocan, the paradise of Tlaloc, the god of rain and water. A region of eternal spring, abundance, and wealth, this place was for those who died by lightning, drowning, or were afflicted by particular diseases. Rather than being cremated, these individuals were buried whole along with images of the mountain gods or deities closely related to Tlaloc. Additionally, a celestial paradise awaited warriors and lords who died by sacrifice or combat in honor of the sun god Tonatiuh. The bodies of the slain heroes were burned in warrior bundles, with images of birds and butterflies symbolizing their fiery souls. These warrior souls followed the sun to the zenith of the sky perhaps best expressed much later by the writer Vladimir Nabokov who observed, “life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.” 

The Bahá’í faith posits three layers of existence. These layers include the concealed secret of the divine oneness, the intermediate world of spiritual reality, and the world of physical reality known as a world of possibility. Bahá’ís believe that human life moves between the two interrelated poles of the physical and the spiritual. The world of physical existence has the dimension of temporality whereas the world of spiritual existence is eternal. Death does not mean movement into another life, but continuation of this life. Death is simply another category or stage of existence and regarded as the mere shedding of the physical frame while the indestructible soul lives on. Because the soul is the sum total of the personality and the physical body is pure matter with no real identity, the person, leaving the material side behind, remains the same person, and continues the life which was conducted in the physical world. At the time of death the body of a Bahá’í must be treated with utmost care and can not be moved a distance of more than an hour’s journey from the place of death. The body must be wrapped in a shroud of silk or cotton and on its finger should be placed a ring bearing the inscription “I came forth from God and return unto Him, detached from all save Him, holding fast to His Name, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” The coffin should be made from crystal, stone, or hardwood, and a special prayer for the dead must be said before interment. 

During the death event, the individual leaves an initial state (living) by rites such as a funeral and is forced to leave something behind (the body) by breaking with previous practices and routines. From here the initiate (the deceased) proceeds to a transitional phase or a temporary state of existence between the world of the living and the dead, e.g. the bar do, eventually reaching a post transitory and inanimate state (dead). At this stage, the awareness of the deceased may be thought to become a spectator of their own thanatology, in contrast to Freud’s suggestion that every one of us is unconsciously convinced of his/her own immortality. To Freud, the unconscious does not deal with the passage of time nor with negations. Thus, that one’s life could end seems irrational. Furthermore, whatever one fears cannot be death because one has never died. The awareness, perceived in the west as the soul, perhaps may not cease to exist but is simply no longer incarnate. Death anxiety is the most profound source of humanity’s concern, producing apprehension so intense that it generates many if not all of the specific fears and phobias people experience in everyday life. In 1903 the scientist Elie Metchnikoff called for the establishment of a discipline devoted to the study of death. He suggested that the life sciences would not be complete unless attention was also given to death. Only a few scholars and educators followed his lead. Medical students had their obligatory encounters with cadavers but received almost no instruction in care for the dying, nor was death included in the curriculum for students of other professions and sciences. Thanatology is the study of dying, death, and grief. Today this study encompasses the thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and events concerning death. Contributors to the growing knowledge of death-related phenomena include social, behavioral, and biomedical researchers as well as economists, health-care providers, historians, literary critics, philosophers, and theologians.

The concept of death never loses sight of the biological aspect of life, which restrains any reality-constructing activity to maintain a fragile harmony between the physiological dimension of mortality and the ideology which seeks to eliminate the discomposing elements. Funeral rites will not entirely nullify the oeuvre of death. Survivors seek to obfuscate the differences between the stipulations of the living and the dead, in an endeavor to alleviate death’s dramatic nature. Death and the belief in the spirit of the deceased played important roles in the evolutionist-intellectual theories of the nineteenth century. Extraordinary experiences such as dreams and visions, encountered in various states of altered consciousness, and the salient differences between the features of living and dead bodies were sought in spiritualist table- rappings and séances. This nineteenth century concept of the spirits of the deceased was later extended to animals, plants, and objects, and progressed into a belief in spiritual beings endowed with supernatural power. The most fundamental purpose of these spiritual practices was to promote the reorganization of the social order, and optimism in the perpetual continuation of a society, which had been challenged by the death of an individual. Death rituals are primarily parts of the society’s construction of reality that reflect the sociocultural context in which the deceased enters the mythic world of souls which each society constructs in its own image. In his essay “Contribution à une étude sur la representation collective de la mort,” anthropologist Robert Hertz observed that the emotion aroused by death varies in intensity according to the social status of the deceased, and may in certain cases be entirely lacking. At the death of a person of high rank, dismay and even hysteria overwhelms the social order, yet the death of a stranger will arouse no emotion, and often occasion no ritual. This is where society plays its role. No function of society is more crucial than its strengthening of individual defenses against the perturbations of death. Many beliefs and practices are in the service of death relinquishment, thereby reducing the experience of anxiety. Funeral homes and homilies offer such a reduction, as does the tranquility of the cemetery. Such institutions seek to assure that the survivor will remain relatively unscathed by a quietus, a surrender, which must be tolerated as well as tolerable. That there is nothing to fear is neither fiction nor fact. Fragile defenses fail to protect some members of society against the terror of annihilation. Yet most people in a society function more competently in everyday life because they have succeeded, at least temporarily, in denying death. The prospect of death is likely to make people more anxious if they feel that they have not and cannot accomplish something meaningful in life. 

A photograph allows the viewer to reconsider their memories and expectations, and also discover how to live more fully in the present moment. A photographic representation of the dead is a small archive in which the photographer is not an image maker, but a context maker or story teller. As photographic subjects, cemeteries and images of the deceased enable anxiety reduction by allowing viewers to reconsider their memories of the lamented in the present and not worry about the certainty of their own departure in the future. The rise of modern science has led some to challenge belief in divine judgment, in a heaven or a hell, and in the necessity of dying in the presence of the clergy. Attention has shifted to the intimate realm of the family and immediate survivors, attempting to provide solace in the death of a loved one with an image, such as a photograph, of the departed at rest. Thus the image allows a justified consolation where the emphasis falls on the emotional pain of severance and on preserving the dead in memory. In the nineteenth century, some people regarded death and even the dead as beautiful. As the poet Walt Whitman suggested, 

And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death. 

Post-mortem photography of deceased loved ones were a normal part of American and European culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Commissioned by grieving families, postmortem photographs not only helped in the grieving process, but often represented the only visual remembrance of the deceased and were among a family’s most cherished possessions. This was especially common with infants and young children. Postmortem photography boomed during the Victorian era, becoming a common practice only two years after the first daguerreotype method of photography became popular. Victorians sought to preserve their loved one’s shadow as a way to commemorate their lives. Often, photographs of the deceased were family affairs. The deceased was dressed up and posed with family members around them as if still alive. At first, such photography was an expensive luxury that only the upper classes could afford, but as the technology became less expensive photos with the dead became common throughout society. Families simply wanted a way to remember their departed loved ones. Victorian era childhood mortality rates were extremely high, and a post- mortem photograph was often the only image of the child the family ever had. The later invention of the carte de visite, which allowed multiple prints to be made from a single negative, meant that copies of the image could be sent to relatives. The photographer James Van Der Zee (1886-1983) did the beautiful Harlem Book of the Dead as an example of postmortem photography. In addition to serving as a form of commemoration, a postmortem photograph was also a memento mori to serve, like a skull, as a possible warning or reminder of death. 

The embalmed corpse became increasingly common after the U.S. Civil War and became the focus of the American way of death. Although embalming attempted, in a sense, to deny death, it also kept the dead present. Emphasis fell on the emotional pain of separation and on keeping the dead alive in commemoration. An embalmed corpse suggests that the dead was prepared and died well. Such a sentiment, suggesting a preserved and gratified corpse, may be found in a poem by Wendell Berry: 

We come at last to the
dark and enter in.
We are given bodies
newly made out of their absence from one another in the light                                                        of the ordinary day.
We come to the space between ourselves, the narrow doorway, and pass through into the land of the wholly loved.

The embalming of corpses is a rather recent innovation. In the days prior to funeral parlors, embalming was done at the home of the decedent. The embalmer would take a kit with him, which included jars containing fluid and empty jars to fill with blood. It was actually a cleaner process in those days, even though indoor plumbing was not available. The blood would be contained via medical tubing and sealed in jars for disposal. 

In the Middle Ages, death abroad proved a particular problem because those of high rank wanted to be buried at home. Ancient attempts to preserve bodies included doctors, monks, or butchers removing a corpse’s innards and burying them locally. The rest of the body was soaked in vinegar or treated with salt and then wrapped in animal hides for transport. If the embalming technique was not successful, the transporters would be left with a horribly reeking corpse for their journey back home. In response to the failures of embalming techniques that tried to preserve the whole body, another form of preservation called mos teutonicus was developed. This practice involved cutting the corpse into manageable pieces and boiling it which thereby separated the flesh from the bones. The bones could then be sent back to the deceased’s homeland while the tissue was interred near the place of death. However, some preferred their entire remains to be shipped back. Henry V had both his bones and flesh sealed in lead cases and buried in Westminster Abbey. Mos teutonicus was controversial at the time, and Pope Boniface VIII condemned the technique, though other clergy supported it. 

Samuel Pepys is a name best remembered for his exhaustive diary, an important source of information on the English Reformation period. However, along with detailing events such as plagues and fires, the diary also offers a glimpse into Pepys’s social life, including details of liaisons with his mistress. Perhaps the most bizarre entry comes from February 23, 1669, when Pepys and his family visited Westminster Abbey on the occasion of his thirty-sixth birthday. It reads in part, 

Therefore I now took them to Westminster Abbey, and there did show them all the tombs very finely, having one with us alone, there being other company this day to see the tombs, it being Shrove Tuesday; and here we did see, by particular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois; and I had the upper part of her body in my hands, and I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birthday, thirty-six years old, that I did first kiss a Queen. 

Catherine of Valois, the wife of Henry V died in 1437. She had been dead for over 230 years before Pepys’s romantic advances. 

Medieval people accepted death as a part of life to be expected, foreseen, and more or less controlled through ritual. At home or on the battlefield, they met death with resignation, but also with the hope of a long and amicable slumber before a communal judgment. By 1400 the Christian tradition had well-established beliefs and practices concerning death, dying, and the afterlife. The Ars Moriendi, or “art of dying,” is a body of Christian literature that provided heuristic guidance for the dying and those attending them. These manuals informed the dying about what to expect, prescribing prayers, actions, and attitudes that would lead to a “good death” and salvation. During the later Middle Ages, religious and secular elites slowly abandoned an acceptance that “we all die” (nous mourons tous) and concentrated on their own deaths, developing an attitude of la mort de soi or la mort de moi (my death). The early Middle Ages had emphasized humanity’s collective judgment at the end of time, and by the fifteenth century attention focused on individual judgment immediately after death. One’s own death and judgment thus became urgent issues that required preparation. The Ars Moriendi survives in two different versions. The first is a longer treatise of six chapters that prescribes rites and prayers to be used at the time of death. The second is a brief, illustrated book that shows the dying person’s struggle with temptations before attaining a good death. While many deathbed images pre-date the Ars Moriendi, never before had these scenes been linked into a series of connected actions. The longer Latin treatise and its many translations survive in manuscripts and printed editions throughout Europe. Anxious about the state of their souls and increasingly attached to the things in which their exertions and enterprise had triumphed, they represented death as a tournament where the fate of the soul hangs in the balance. The second chapter is the treatise’s longest section. It confronts the dying with five temptations and their corresponding inspirations or remedies. These panaceas include temptation against faith versus reaffirmation of faith; temptation to despair versus hope for forgiveness; temptation to impatience versus charity and forbearance; temptation to vainglorious complacency versus humility and recollection of sins; and temptation to avarice and attachment to property versus detachment. In the fifth chapter the emphasis shifts to those who assist the dying, including family and friends. They follow earlier prescriptions which present the dying with images of the crucifix and saints, and encourage them to repent, receive the sacraments, and draw up a testament disposing of their possessions. Throughout all five temptations, the Ars Moriendi emphasizes the active role of the dying in freely deciding their destinies. This scheme accounts for many of the illustrations in the Ars Moriendi, where demons are rendered as tempting the dying in contrast to angels offering their inspirations. Many of the scenes depicted later on tombstones suggest a similar tournament. A necropolis of angels, skulls, flowers, etc., are the visual equivalent of the Ars Moriendi in which the cemetery becomes a library of vade mecum concerning death, with tombstones serving as an archive or inventory for the lives lived by those interred. The more modern and often minimalist decoration found on many contemporary tombstones may suggest a Pelagian denial of original sin and predestination, where death is accepted as a natural part of life and not a reward or punishment. But whatever the attitude on devolution, life inevitably ceases regardless of how primitive or rational that life may be.

Memorials and the landscapes containing them have dominated the funerary scene in North America from colonial times to the present. The first, the graveyard, almost invariably is located in towns and cities, typically adjoined to a church and operated gratis or for a nominal fee by members of the congregation. The second, the rural cemetery, is usually situated at the outskirts of towns and cities and is generally owned and managed by its patrons. The third, the lawn cemetery, is typically located away from towns and cities and ordinarily is managed by professional superintendents and owned by private corporations. From the beginning of colonization and for many years thereafter, cemeteries in North America presented visitors with the imperative to remember death in which the time of judgment was at hand while simultaneously serving as a convenient place to dispose of the dead. Yet its more significant purpose derives from the capacity to evoke or establish the memory of death which reminds the living of their own fragility and urgent need to prepare for their inevitable conclusion. Locating the dead among the living thus helps to ensure that the living will witness the cemetery’s message regularly as a reminder that the negation of this life is the beginning rather than the end. Tombstone inscriptions and iconography continually reinforce these assertions by understating temporal life and accentuating the necessity of attending to the demands of eternal judgment. Only rarely do these memorials provide viewers with information beyond the deceased’s name, date of death, and date of birth. Occasional but implicit instructions may include fugit hora or mottos like hours flee. Seemingly contrary to the concept of remembrance, involves locating the dead away from the living, enclosing burial grounds with fences to separate the living from the dead, decorating and adorning the gravescape, or ordering the cemetery according to dictates of efficiency and structural linearity. Yet the formal unity of of such memorials both ensures the cemetery’s identity and sustains its rhetorical and cultural purpose. The common size and shape of a tombstone speak to visitors of its purpose. Although the cemetery provides ample space for variation, an overwhelming majority of memorials belong to a tradition of relatively modest structures between one and five feet in height and width and between two and five inches thick. Most tombstones are variations of single and triple arches. Single arch memorials are small, smoothed slabs with three squared sides and a convex or squared crown. Triple arch memorials are also small, smoothed slabs with three squared sides but feature smaller arches on either side of a single large arch. Together with location and general appearance, such minimal uniformity helps ensure that visitors would not mistake the graveyard for a vacant allotment. Rural cemeteries sought to change this by fostering guidebooks and walking tours. The owners of rural cemeteries sought to capture the hearts and imaginations of visitors and ensure that visitors, along with the dead, would encounter nature’s many splendors. They accomplished this by taking care to select sites that would engender such sentiments thus frequently appearing to be lush, albeit carefully constructed, nature preserves. The main objective was the appearance of a sylvan tranquility associated with the ideal afterlife. In this way cemetery owners recommended that memorials were to be works of art. Even the smallest rural cemeteries suggested this by creating, at the very least, elaborate entrance gates to greet visitors to their Elysian realm. In doing so, the traditional gravescape was designed to remind the living of their need to prepare for death while the modern cemetery is calculated to allow mourners to deal with their loss homeopathically. While the rural cemetery fulfilled the needs of many people, a segment of the population found such gravescapes too ornate, too sentimental, too individualized, and too expensive. The American landscape designer and advocate of the Gothic Revival style, Andrew Jackson Downing, who had long been a proponent of the rural cemetery, publicly lamented that the natural beauty of the rural cemetery was severely diminished 

by the most violent bad taste…the hideous ironmongery, which all more or less display…conceits and gimcracks in iron [which] might be pardonable as adornments of the balustrade of a circus or a temple of Comus…but how reasonable beings can tolerate them as enclosures to the quiet grave of a family, and in such scenes of sylvan beauty, is mountain high above our comprehension. 

That the German term schauerroman is sometimes equated with the idea of the
Gothic novel is only partially correct. Both the genres of English and German Gothic literature are based on the terrifying side of the Middle Ages, and both frequently feature the same elements (castles, ghosts, cemeteries, monsters, etc.). However, schauerroman’s key elements are necromancy and secret societies and the form is remarkably more pessimistic than that of the British Gothic novel. An important and innovative reinterpreter of the Gothic in this period was the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Poe used many of the traditional elements of gothic stories but focused more on the psychology of his characters as they often descended into madness. Despite being one of Americas greatest writers, Poe’s critics complained about his ‘German’ tales, to which he replied “that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” The Gothic genre was also a heavy influence on more mainstream writers, such as English writer Charles Dickens, who read Gothic novels as a teenager and incorporated their gloomy atmosphere and melodrama into his own works, shifting them to a more modern period and an urban setting, including Oliver Twist (1837-8), Bleak House (1854) and Great Expectations (1860–61). Bleak House in particular is credited with seeing the introduction of urban fog to the novel, which would become a frequent characteristic of urban Gothic literature. The mood and themes of the Gothic novel held a particular fascination for the Victorians, who maintained a morbid obsession with mourning rituals, mementos, cemeteries and mortality in general. The 1880s saw the revival of the Gothic as a powerful literary form allied to fin de siecle, which fictionalized contemporary fears like ethical degeneration and questioned the social structures of the time. Literary, cultural, and architectural studies have appreciated the Gothic as an area that facilitates the investigation of the beginnings of scientific certainty. The Gothic was a counterbalance produced by writers and thinkers who felt limited by such a confident worldview and recognized that death, the power of the past, the irrational, and the violent continue to hold sway in the world. The Gothic image helped the reader better understand their own doubts about the self-assurance of science and technology. The ruins of Gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay, death, and collapse of human creations. Thus was created the architectural urge to add fake ruins as decoration in English parks and cemeteries. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, superstitious and supernatural rituals. Just as elements of Gothic building construction were borrowed during the Gothic Revival period in architecture, ideas about the Gothic period and Gothic period architecture were used by Gothic novelists. Architecture itself played a role in the naming of Gothic novels, with many titles referring to castles or other common Gothic buildings. This appellation was followed up with many Gothic novels set in architecturally Gothic buildings, with the action taking place in castles, cemeteries, abbeys, convents and monasteries, many of them in ruins, to evoke feelings of fear, surprise, and confinement. A macabre setting or locale was an essential element of these novels. Placing a story in a Gothic setting drew on feelings of awe, implying that the story was set in the past with an impression of isolation or being cut off from the rest of the world. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a 1757 treatise on aesthetics written by Edmund Burke. What is original to Burke’s view of beauty is that it cannot be understood by the traditional bases of beauty to include such modes as proportion, fitness, or perfection. The formal cause of beauty is the passion of love, the material cause being aspects of certain objects such as smallness, smoothness, and delicacy, etc. The efficient cause of beauty is the calming of our nerves with the final cause being God’s providence. The sublime, in contrast, has a causal structure that is unlike that of beauty. Its formal cause is of fear, especially the fear of death. The material cause of the sublime is created by aspects of certain objects such as vastness, infinity, magnificence, etc. The sublime’s efficient cause is the tension of our nerves, with the final cause being God’s having created and battled Satan, as expressed in such work’s as Milton’s Paradise Lost. The Gothic realm of the Victorian imagination drew largely on Burke’s theories of sublimity. 

In 1800 the population of London was one million. By 1850 it had increased to over two million. Among other shortages caused by rapid population growth, there was a lack of space to bury the dead. Up to that time people had been buried primarily in church graveyards, but London graveyards simply ran out of space. There were instances of body snatching, bodies left out to rot or not buried deep enough (at least two feet), and bodies being cleared from graves too soon. In 1832 Parliament passed a bill encouraging the establishment of seven private cemeteries in a ring around outer London, to provide ample space for burial. These are known today as the Magnificent Seven. The Magnificent Seven appealed in particular to the newly emerging middle class, keen to distance itself from the working class and to present to the public its social status. Graves were seen as a public extension to the family’s property, and cemeteries such as the Magnificent Seven provided a secure, well-maintained and costly place for families to establish permanent monuments to themselves––an immortality of sorts. Highgate Cemetery is considered the finest of the seven cemeteries for its landscaping and unusual funerary architecture. Features include an area of family vaults based around a Cedar of Lebanon, as well as an Egyptian Avenue of vaults, complete with obelisks and lotus-flower columns. Victorian graves tended to be much more elaborate than modern graves and it was expected that a middle-class family would spend as much as it could afford on a monument appropriate to the deceased’s (and the family’s) social status. Monuments were usually symbolic – either religious (crosses, angels, and the letters IHS, for Jesus Savior of Man in Greek), symbols of profession (whip and horseshoes for a coach driver, swords for a general, palette for a painter), or symbols of death. The most common symbols of death were urns, a classical symbol of Roman cremation; wreaths, a symbol of eternal life, being circular with no beginning and no end; broken columns, a classical symbol of life cut short; upside-down torches symbolizing death where the burning flame normally would be extinguished when the torch was inverted; grieving women physically exhausted from weeping, sometimes on an urn or a cross; and obelisks, an Egyptian symbol of eternal life. Curiously, many of the monuments in Victorian cemeteries are not actually Christian, but Roman or Egyptian. Christianity in nineteenth century Britain was predominantly Church of England and what Victorians put on their graves sometimes reflected their religious positions, though in counter-intuitive ways. Some Church of Englanders felt that a cross was too Catholic and deliberately used non-Christian symbols such as columns or urns on their graves. Gothic architecture was also considered by some to be linked to the Catholic Church. However, Egyptian architecture was not linked with any Christian movements, and so was popular with everyone. Victorian cemeteries such as the Magnificent Seven reached the height of their popularity between about 1860 and 1880. Although they were still very fashionable, and profitable, for a long time after, the mania of the grand Victorian mourning spectacle turned a corner. The public became exasperated with Queen Victoria’s obsessive mourning of her husband to the extent that she had become an absentee queen, rarely making public appearances. Edward VII’s succession in 1901 underlined a change in attitudes, as the world began to open out, psychologically as well as physically. But it was World War I that finally put the nail in the coffin of Victorian mourning. So many young men died for what seemed senseless reasons that Christian faith, and with it attitudes to death and mortality, was shaken to the core. The fallen men were lost or buried in France, and suddenly Victorian monuments seemed overblown, monstrous, and inappropriate. Almost overnight, lavish displays for the dead disappeared. Of course, people still had to be buried and cemeteries like Highgate had plenty of funerals. But people spent less on them and on the monuments which were usually bought at the mason’s yard run by the cemetery. With less income, cemetery staff had to be laid off, and the remaining employees simply concentrated on the business of burying. Trees and ivy slowly strangled the prized landscape design and burrowing roots toppled monuments. All of this took time, but those cemeteries, once boastful displays of wealth and status, became overgrown stone wrecks, with the odd jewel shining through the ivy. 

Funerary symbolism contains a vast iconology. The interpretation of the content of images, the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements are often distinct from other artistic styles found within a given culture. Families may have many different symbols from which to choose and many combine one or more symbols to express their feelings for the family members buried. Aside from crosses, anchors were an early Christian symbol of hope that has been found in the funerary art of many of the world’s catacombs. The cross and anchor was an early Christian symbol referring to Christ as the “hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sincere and steadfast” (Hebrews 6:19). A broken column symbolizes a life cut short. A broken flower, broken off at the stem, symbolizes a life terminated at a very young age, giving way to the phrase nipped in the bud. Clasped hands symbolize unity and affection even after death. The column has been used most often as a war memorial and is universally associated with commemoration. A crown symbolizes immortality while flowers symbolize human life and beauty, but also have individual floral associations. A daisy represents innocence whereas the lily symbolizes purity and is often associated with the Virgin Mary and resurrection. A calla lily particularly symbolizes marriage and the lily of the valley is associated with purity and humility. The pansy symbolizes remembrance and humility, the poppy is sleep and the rose is associated with the Virgin Mary, the “rose without thorns.” A red rose symbolizes martyrdom and a white rose symbolizes purity. Because the oak was looked upon as the tree from which the cross was made, it became a symbol of Christ. Originally a symbol of military victory, the palm was adapted into Christianity as a symbol of Christ’s victory over death and is often seen as an attribute of martyrdom and eternal peace. The eye of God enclosed in a triangle represents the trinity. A hand with the index finger pointing upwards symbolizes the hope of heaven. Hands holding a chain with a broken link symbolizes the death of a family member. The hand of God plucking a link of the chain represents God bringing a soul unto himself and a hand holding a heart is a symbol of the Lodge of Odd fellows. Traditionally a symbol of love, courage and intelligence, the flaming heart signifies extreme ardor. The heart encircled with thorns symbolizes the suffering of Christ. A heart pierced by a sword symbolizes the Virgin Mary, harkening to Simeon’s prophecy to Mary at the birth of Christ, “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thine own soul.” The hourglass symbolizes the passage of time and the shortness of life. The lamb symbolizes Christ in his sacrificial role and personifies innocence, gentleness and humility. The urn has likewise evolved into a popular symbol of mourning along with the weeping willow. 

Although burial is a frequent way of disposing of bodies, it is not the sole option. Many Hindus, for example, cremate the body on a pyre and shed the ashes in the Ganges River. However, the primary function of most funerary rites concerns commemoration. One way to assure a symbolic immortality is to buy a plot and construct an impressive memorial. However, the dead do not bury themselves, and a grave is often as much an indication of the social status of the funeral organizers as it is of the deceased. Cemeteries dramatize the stratification orders of the living where the segregations of life are reaffirmed in death. For the bereaved, the cemetery is a place where the relationship between the dead and their survivors is inaugurated, and is maintained with consolation established by visits to the grave. The location and organization of cemeteries, the way in which they are kept, the inscriptions, and shape and size of grave markers and tombstones reflect beliefs and notions about death and life. Indicating the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead, with the original meaning of cemetery as a resting place, reflects the notion of some kind of resurrection. However, the diminishing frequency of crosses on graves also suggests a secularization within society. Cemeteries are far more than spaces utilized for the burial of corpses. Rather they are cultural texts to be read by anyone who takes the time to learn their language.

The fear of premature burial is not wholly without basis. Cases of people thought dead and being disposed of are reported from ancient times. Pliny the Elder (23–79 C.E.) cites the case of a man placed upon a funeral pyre who revived after the fire had been lit, and who was then burnt alive, the fire having progressed too far to save him. Plutarch, Asclepiades the physician, and Plato give similar stories of men who returned to life prior to burial. Florence Wyndham, after a year of marriage, was thought to be dead and buried in the family vault at St. Decuman’s church at Watchet, Somerset in the U.K. in 1559. The sexton, knowing there were three valuable rings on one of her fingers, went to the vault and began to cut the finger. Blood flowed, the body moved, and the sexton fled leaving his lantern behind. Florence, using the lantern, returned to the house in her grave clothes, frightening the household who thought she was a ghost and thus shut the door against her. She had in fact fallen into some sort of cataleptic trance, and was awakened by the pain in her finger and rose from her coffin. A poem about her remarkable escape, called “Lady Wyndham’s Return”, was written by Rev. Lewis H. Court, Vicar of St. Decuman’s church, and includes the following verses: 

He seized the slender fingers white
And stiff in their repose
Then sought to file the circlet through;
When to his horror blood he drew,
And the fair sleeper rose.
She sat a moment gazed around,
Then great was her surprise,
And sexton startled saw at a glance
This was not death but a deep trance,
And madness leapt to his eyes.
The stagnant life steam in her veins
Again began to flow
She felt the sudden quickening,
 For her it was a joyous thing,
 For him a fearsome woe.

The percentage of premature burials has been variously estimated as somewhere between one per one thousand to as many as one or two percent of all total burials in the United States and Europe. Recently a Taiwanese ninety-five year old woman, Yang Chang Yueh-yun, was pronounced dead after multiple organ failure. The following day, upon hearing a recording of Buddhist Sutras, she began clapping and was returned to the hospital where she later chatted with visitors. Burial alive has sometimes been deliberate. In Rome, vestal virgins who had broken their vows of chastity were imprisoned in an underground chamber with a lighted candle, some bread, a little water mixed with milk, and left to die. In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), the narrator exacts revenge by luring his enemy to the wine cellar and then walling him in. Poe was obsessed with the theme of premature burial, which he used in many stories. Since the nineteenth century, the fear of being buried alive has resulted in the creation of devices that allow one to signal from the coffin. A 1983 U.S. patent (No. 4,367,461), describes an alarm system for coffins that is activated by a movement of the body in the coffin. Gothic horror stories and a few real instances made people terrified of being buried while still extant. Thus cremation was viewed as an obvious way not to be interred early. Being prematurely cremated was not a pleasant thought either, but advocates argued that, while both were horrible ways to die, premature cremation would last only a few seconds while those buried alive would suffer horrible psychological torment for days on end. 

Burial places for the dead come in a variety of forms. One ancient form is the catacomb, an underground city of the dead consisting of galleries or passages with side recesses for tombs. A related form is the ossuary, a Native American communal burial place or a depository (a vault, room, or urn) for the bones of the dead. In Persia, the Zoroastrians used a deep well for this function from the earliest times (ca. 3,000 years ago) and called it astudan (literally, “the place for the bones”). There are many rituals and regulations in the Zoroastrian faith concerning the astudans. Among the pre-seventh- century Sogdians in the region of central Asia, the name for an ossuary was tanbar. Many examples of ossuaries are found within Europe, including the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome, Italy; the San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan, Italy; the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic; the Skull Chapel in Czermna in Lower Silesia, Poland; and Capela dos Ossos (Chapel of Bones) in Évora, Portugal. The village of Wamba in the province of Valladolid, Spain, has an impressive ossuary of over a thousand skulls inside the local church, dating from between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. A more recent example is the Douaumont ossuary in France, which contains the remains of more than 130,000 French and German soldiers that fell at the Battle of Verdun during World War I. The catacombs beneath the Monastery of San Francisco in Lima, Peru, also contains an ossuary. In Eastern Orthodox monasteries, when one of the brethren dies, his remains are buried for one to three years, and then disinterred, cleaned and gathered into the monastery’s charnel house. If there is reason to believe that the departed is a saint, the remains may be placed in a reliquary, otherwise the bones are usually mingled together (skulls together in one place, long bones in another, etc.). The remains of an abbot may be placed in a separate receptacle made of wood or metal. The use of ossuaries is also found among the laity in the Greek Orthodox Church. The departed will be buried for one to three years and then, often on the anniversary of death, the family will gather with the parish priest and celebrate a parastas (memorial service), after which the remains are disinterred, washed with wine, perfumed, and placed in a small repository of wood or metal, inscribed with the name of the departed, and placed in a room, often in or near the church, which is dedicated to this purpose. During the time of the Second Temple, Jewish burial customs included primary burials in burial caves, followed by secondary burials in ossuaries placed in smaller niches of the burial caves. Some of the limestone ossuaries that have been discovered, particularly around the Jerusalem area, include intricate geometrical patterns and inscriptions identifying the deceased. Among the best-known Jewish ossuaries of this period are one inscribed “Simon the Temple builder” in the collection of the Israel Museum, another inscribed “Elisheba wife of Tarfon”, one inscribed “Yehohanan ben Hagkol” that contained an iron nail in a heel bone suggesting crucifixion, and ten ossuaries recovered from the Talpiot Tomb in 1980. During the Second Temple period, Jewish sages debated whether the occasion of the gathering of a family member’s bones for a secondary burial was a day of sorrow or rejoicing. It was resolved that it was a day of fasting in the morning and feasting in the afternoon. Catacombs originated in the Middle East approximately 6,000 years ago. The earliest examples were often secondary burials where the bones of the dead were placed in ossuary containers. Initially, the dead were buried within settlements, but with the progressive urbanization of the ensuing millennia, burials moved outside of the towns. From 3300 to 2300 B.C.E., several generations of one family were typically buried in a single cave, whether natural or artificial. Pastoral nomads used caves that were entered through a vertical shaft. Multiple interments in caves continued over succeeding millennia, together with other forms of burial, with evidence of the use of long subterranean channels and spacious chambers by about 1500 B.C.E. By the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests of Israel and Judah, some burial caves were quite large and elaborate. After the Roman conquest of Palestine, many Jews settled in Rome and adapted the burial customs of the Middle East to their new environment. In contrast to the Roman practice of cremation, the Jews buried their dead in catacombs they created for this purpose. Jewish catacombs can be recognized by depictions of the menorah on gravestones and lamps, and because they were used only for burials, they are not as elaborate as the later multipurpose Christian catacombs. 

Early Christians were regarded as a Jewish sect, and their dead were buried in catacombs modeled on those of the Jews. Early Christian martyrs buried in the catacombs became objects of veneration and, from the fourth century, consistent with the cult of martyrs, the catacombs served not only as tombs but also for memorial services. The wish for burial near these martyrs ensured the continued use of the catacombs until the early fifth century C.E., when the Goths invaded Rome. Because interment was forbidden within the boundaries of the city, the catacombs were always outside the city. In the eighth and ninth centuries the remains of the martyrs were moved to churches resulting in the catacombs falling into disuse so that by the twelfth century they were forgotten. 

A predecessor to the modern Western cemetery is the Roman cemetery, where each body was given an identifiable home in a separate grave. Excavations from fourth- century British cemeteries reveal extensive urban burial grounds, often on sites outside of a town. The separation of the living from the dead, with the town periphery as a geographic partition, was unequivocal. With the waning of the Roman Empire, the consortium of society in rural villages, and the Christian cult of martyrs, this procedure slowly changed. When churches were constructed over the remnants of a martyr, death became predominant in the lives of the extant. In the tenth century the churchyard was the common burial terrain in Christian countries. The nonpareil and elite members of the community often had private vaults inside the church while the most despised were buried outside the churchyard in collective burial pits surrounded by charnel houses. 

During the thirteenth century the tradition of burying in individual sepulchers with personalized tombstones became common procedure. Later however, before separate aristocratic cemeteries were created in old England, the preferred place to bury the dead was in the traditional churchyard. In large European towns where space was limited, multiple interments were made in a single grave. These graves could be dug as deep as thirty feet, and the coffins piled atop each other with only a marker between. This was done for families who could not afford multiple grave sites. There were also what were known as common graves where bodies of the poor were interred. They filled these with as many corpses as would fill the hole. There was financial gain to be made from this practice, with a particularly famous and grim example of the value of London’s prolific dead occurring at Enon Chapel. The cleric of the chapel, who was motivated by profit, began to inter the city’s dead at a rate of thirty per week beneath the floorboards of his church. The piles of dead bodies kept accumulating until there were over 12,000 bodies. This was unsustainable for a church basement, and compromises were required. Corpses were stacked to the ceiling, and the gases seeping through the floorboards caused parishioners to faint and children to be accosted by corpse flies during Sunday school. Eventually, the basement could not hold all the bodies so the dead were carted away to be dumped in the Thames River. Occasionally, parts fell out of the carts during such journeys causing horrified local residents to find skulls littering their streets. The chapel was eventually shut down once authorities discovered what was happening, though it was later bought by another party and turned into a dance hall. The parties were called “dances of the dead.” Corpses produce a host of gases as microorganisms break down the body. Some researchers even believe this corpse gas can be used to establish the time of death. These gases can build up inside sealed coffins. If enough gas is produced inside a sealed coffin, the container will burst. Exploding caskets have been a danger ever since people started putting their dead in boxes. While it generally is not a problem if the casket is buried in the ground, there have been many cases of caskets entombed in mausoleums exploding. London sextons traditionally tapped coffins to encourage the escape of pent-up gases. But tapping was not always enough. In one case in the U.K, corpse gas started a fire under St. Clement Dane’s and Wren’s Church of St. James. Even fairly modern mausoleums have to contend with exploding corpses, as when a recent Australian crypt in Melbourne suffered both an exploding corpse followed by a leaking one not long after. 

At old rural churchyards several generations were buried side by side along with a common practice of first generation immigrants repatriating the remains of the deceased. Eventually this custom obliged people to settle in villages and towns near the location where their relatives were interred and it was common to equate home with the place where ancestors were buried. The size of the grave marker often indicated the status of males over females, adults over children, and the rich over the poor with inscriptions, epitaphs, and art suggesting the level of relations between family members. Different nationalities employed different grave decorations and visited the grave on separate occasions. While there are apparent similarities between cemeteries from the middle of the nineteenth century and forward, there are also differences between countries. Noticeably, the cemeteries in Sweden and France are usually well maintained. In France cemeteries are often surrounded by high walls, and are locked during the night. High walls and locked gates can be found in Britain, but with less concern over the maintenance of the graves. This difference may be a consequence of standards concerning garden architecture where the British garden is less punctilious than the French garden. A century earlier, the danger of corpse profusion spread from France to other nations where immigration to industrializing towns and cities with high mortality rates resulted in overcrowded urban cemeteries. The scores of bodies precipitated public health hazards. Corpses were buried in shallow graves and disinterred after a brief period, usually in a state of semi-decay, to make room for others thus causing infectious pollutants to enter the environment and poison the ground water. A justified fear of disease promoted burial laws that varied between different countries. There were rules governing how close to a populated area a cemetery could be situated, how far down a corpse had to be buried, and how long a grave must be left untouched until it can be reused. Neglected graves often remained in perpetuity which produced vast areas of cemeteries with unattended graves. Despite this neglect, such burial spots were often the most serene although there was a growing reluctance to allow permanent burial, instead advocating for reuse of graves and cremation. Such concerns have created a clear trend in the western world toward cremation instead of inhumation. Because urns and ashes require less space than coffins, there is a growing preference of depersonalized gardens of remembrance instead of personalized graves. It is likely that cemeteries in the future will turn into forms of public parks or gardens. Hopefully, these places of inhumation will retain their tranquility. 

The use of urns for cremation resulted in charnel houses filled with numerous ashes of various corpses. A charnel house is a building, chamber, or other area in which bodies or bones are deposited, usually in a mortuary chapel. Charnel houses arose due to the limited areas available in cemeteries. When cemetery utilization had reached its maximum, the bones would be dug up and deposited in the charnel house, thus making room for new burials. At St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert, where thousands of monks have lived and died over the centuries, the monks are buried in the small cemetery, later exhumed, and their bones placed in the crypt below the Chapel of St. Trifonio. Charnel houses can be found in many cultures and in many time periods, including the present. Late prehistoric peoples of Maryland saved the dead in charnel houses and periodically disposed of them in large mass graves. Among America’s First Nations, corpses were first allowed to decompose and then placed in mortuaries, or charnel houses. They were then interred in an ossuary, a communal burial place for the bones. The charnel house, along with the urn which contains the ashes of the deceased, may vary in adornment and accessory depending on the status of the departed. A Korean manufacturer currently sells natural jade funeral urns for use in charnel houses utilized by wealthier patrons. 

In every human society one can find manifestations of the human desire for some kind of continuance beyond death. In the west, much of human experience concerns religious conjectures of continuance of the individual spiritual self or soul. Typically, a person is encouraged to live in a way which is preparatory for salvation after death. Discounting Buddhist influence, in quondam China a person’s desire for continuance beyond death maintained assumptions not related specifically to individual salvation. Formerly, the Chinese focused perpetuance through descendants to whom they gave the gift of life and for whom they sacrificed many of life’s material pleasures. Personal sacrifice was founded in a belief that sacrificing for one’s successors would engender in their scions obligations toward elders and ancestors. Filial piety (xiao) included obligations to care for one’s body as a gift from one’s parents and to succeed in life in order to venerate the family ancestors. An after death continuity was maintained through the health and success of children, grandchildren, and great- grandchildren. Hereditary obligations which had been inculcated in children and grandchildren assumed that these heirs would care for their elderly in old age and in the afterlife. Such an afterlife maintenance involved many complex rituals including funerals, burials, mourning practices, and rites for the ancestors. This was important not only as an expression of a person’s hope for continuance beyond death but as an expression of public concern in which neglected souls might become ghosts intent on causing mischief. There existed an emphasis on the principle of reciprocity that similarly governed relations among the living members of a Chinese community. The dead could influence the quality of life for those still in this world in both beneficial and detrimental ways. Correct burial, virtuous observance of mourning practices, and regular offerings of food and gifts for ancestors assured the continued aid of the deceased. On the other hand, failure to observe ritual obligations might bring on the wrath of the ancestors and cause family disharmony, economic ruin, or infirmity. Unattended ancestral spirits were thought to become “hungry ghosts” (egui), which might assail anyone in the community. Although the world of the ancestors was conceived as a dark realm, a “yin” space (yinjian), the Chinese considered this world of neglected spirits similar to the world of the living. They believed residents of the other realm needed money and sustenance, must deal with bureaucrats, and should work (with the help of the living) to improve their fate. The system of Chinese funerary rituals include the family giving public notification by wailing and erecting banners, donning mourning attire of white cloth and hemp, ritually bathing the corpse, making food offerings, burning spirit money and various other items made of paper. The family installs an ancestral tablet at the family altar and pays money to Taoists priests or Buddhist clerics so that the spirit of the deceased can be safely expelled from the community and sent forth on its otherworldly journey. Additionally, the family arranges for music to accompany movement of the corpse in order to settle its spirit and have it sealed in an airtight coffin. Finally the coffin is expelled from the community in a procession to the gravesite that marks the completion of the funeral rites and sets the stage for burial. Few Chinese select Buddhism’s custom of cremation, despite the strong influence this religion has had on Chinese ideas and practices related to life and death. Unlike Indians, for whom the body could be seen as a temporary vehicle for the spirit, the Chinese typically have perceived the body as a valued gift from the ancestors that one should place whole under the soil near one’s ancestral village. The mortal remains, or at least the bones, represented powers that lasted beyond death and thus could affect the fate of living relatives. For this reason, an appointed expert in geomancy, feng-shui, discerned the time, locale, and orientation of the interment of the corpse. In addition to observing mourning customs, relatives of the deceased were obliged to care for the soul of the departed at the home altar or the clan ancestral hall, if one existed. At the home altar the family remembered a recently deceased relative through highly personalized offerings of favorite foods and other items which served as a reminder that ancestors were still part of the family and were included as honored guests at holiday meals. 

In 1974 thousands of statues were unearthed on the archaeological site at Shaanxi province, where Qin Shih Huang (c. 221–210 B.C.E.), the first unifier of China, was buried. For more than 2,200 years, these statues had been buried together with the Emperor in a massive city surrounded by two walls some sixty-five feet high, and punctuated with gates on the northern, southern, western, and eastern sides with square towers at each corner. The excavation near Qin Shih Huang’s tomb also uncovered four pits containing a total of nearly 8,000 figures. The figures are mostly soldiers and are organized according to the military conventions of the time. Qin Shih Huang was king of Qin, the largest warrior state in ancient China and one of the most powerful and innovative monarchs in Chinese history. His legacy includes the building of the Great Wall and many extravagant palaces. Wishing to retain his riches in the afterlife, upon taking the throne Qin Shih Huang began to build a magnificent underground palace in which he was to be buried. The tomb took some 700,000 workers thirty-eight years to complete and relics excavated from the mausoleum are both rich in contents and great in quantity. The king was buried with a symbolic force of life-sized terracotta soldiers, chariots, and horses assembled to protect him in the next world. Additionally there are sculptured animals including oxen, dogs, sheep, and pigs along with a clay soldier lying beside two iron cooking pots, two large ceramic soup bowls, and some smaller bowls. The human figures are all impressively lifelike in their degree of detail signifying that the arrangement of the tomb was not only an important life event but also a religious rite. Qin Shih Huang believed that some people could escape from death, either by living for a very long time or by being reborn in a new form. Therefore, he sent people to find drugs that would grant him longevity and prepared replicas of worldly goods to help him in his new life. People believed that if the spirit of the deceased were happy, it would intercede in the spirit world on behalf of the living and they would also do well. 

In the early Christian world, death was a private affair. Contact with a corpse was believed to cause ritual impurity with the consequence that ritual activity around the deathbed was minimal. A relative might bestow a final kiss or attempt to catch the dying’s last breath. Except for cases of accidental death, people tended to die in the presence of family and friends with no medical staff or religious personnel present. Early physicians usually withdrew themselves when cases became futile, and priests and priestesses tended more to their gods rather than ordinary people. Family members closed the eyes and mouth of the deceased, washed the corpse, anointed it with scented oils and herbs, and dressed it, sometimes in the attire befitting the social position of the departed, but often in a shroud. A procession accompanied the body to a necropolis outside the city walls. There it was laid to rest, or cremated and placed in an urn, in a family plot that provided a structure to house the dead. Upon returning from the inhumation, the family purified themselves and their residence through rituals of fire and water. Slowly, the belief that the purification of baptism was permanent, unless tainted by mortal sin, and the corpse of a Christian heralded the transformed body to be resurrected into eternal life at the end of time. As a result, Christians later handled the bodies of the dead without fear of pollution. As Christianity progressed in the ancient world, the Christian living had less need to placate their dead, who were presumably less plausible to reappear as disgruntled ghosts. Non-Christians noted the serenity at funerals of the Christian dead. They observed how Christians gave decent burials to even the poorest of the poor, as opposed to the Roman practice of dumping the corpses of the impoverished in large pits which lined the roads outside the city walls away from the well-kept family tombs of the prosperous. 

A gisant is a recumbent effigy on a tomb depicting a prominent deceased person in the process of dying or as a corpse. Such compositions, developed in western Europe in late Medieval, Renaissance, and early Moderns times, represent the deceased in a state of eternal repose, hands folded in prayer and awaiting resurrection. A husband and wife might be depicted together. The first medieval gisants emerged in the twelfth century. They were executed in low relief, and were horizontal, with the subjects appearing as in life. The faces were generalized rather than portraits. Gradually these became full high-relief effigies, usually recumbent as in death, and, by the fourteenth century depicted with hands folded together in prayer. In general, such monumental effigies were carved in stone, marble or wood, or cast in bronze or brass. Often the stone effigies were painted to simulate life, but in the majority of the extant medieval monuments, this has long since disappeared. During the Renaissance, other non- recumbent types of effigy became more popular. Variations showed the deceased lying on their side as if reading, kneeling in prayer and even standing. The gisant had something of a vogue during the Gothic revival period of the nineteenth century. A variant of the gisant, technically known as a transi (‘passed’ into physical death), depicts the deceased as nude and shrouded, revealed in the coffin with embalming scars in the abdomen (an approach used during the Renaissance for French kings) or in a state of advanced desiccation or decomposition (an approach popular in northern Europe during the Middle Ages). The transi variation often positioned the deceased below a priant, a portrait effigy of the deceased kneeling in prayer, as in life. Because the gisant was a slab, it replaced the tombstone as a grave marker much like the lapis manalis stone which was a marker believed to be the gate to the underworld (mundus ceresis). This gate was ceremonially opened three times a year, during which spirits of the blessed dead were able to commune with the living. Described in his Saturnalia, a compendium of ancient Roman religious and antiquarian lore, Macrobius, a Roman who flourished during the early fifth century, the lapis manalis was a stone marking the mundus ceresis which: 

When the mundus is open, it is as if a door stands open for the sorrowful gods of the underworld (Mundus cum patet, deorum tristium atque inferum quasi ianua patet). 

The Lemuria was a feast in the religion of ancient Rome during which the Romans performed rites to exorcise the malevolent and fearful ghosts of the dead from their former homes. When the gate to the underworld was opened, the unwholesome spectres of the restless dead, the lemures or larvae, were given access to the living. These beings were believed to be the wandering and vengeful spirits of those not afforded proper burial and funeral rites by the living. Nor were they attested by tomb or votive inscriptions. Ovid interprets them as vagrant, insatiable, and potentially vengeful di manes or di parentes, ancestral gods or spirits of the underworld. To him, the rites of their cult suggested an incomprehensibly, quasi-magical and probably very ancient rural tradition. Four centuries later, St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 C.E.) describes both the lemures and the larvae as evil and restless manes that torment and terrify the living. To pacify these spirits with proper burial rites, the gisant served both as a door to the underworld as well as an appeasement for those interred beneath the slab. 

Baptism was the first Christian death ritual. In the fourth century Bishop Ambrose of Milan lectured that the baptismal font was a tomb in which baptism was a ritual of death and resurrection. Bishop Ambrose also urged baptized Christians to rejoice in death, for physical death was just a stopover on the road to paradise. However, St. Augustine held a different view in which baptism did not guarantee salvation inasmuch as only God could grant such an assurance. The proper response to death, according to Augustine, ought to be the fear of human sinfulness and God’s inscrutable judgment. His ideas of mortality were informed by various belief systems, such as the early Christian view that death is a punishment for original sin as well as the Platonic notion of the immaterial and immortal essence of the soul. Augustine takes from Greco-Roman culture, particularly from the Stoics, the notion that every living thing has an instinct for self-preservation. One of the apothegms of the Stoics was poenam non sentio mortis, poena fuit vita (“I suffer not from death, my suffering is life”). This instinct was thought to be the basis for morality, as the rational self strives to preserve its rational nature and not to become irrational or inorganic in nature. From the books of the Pentateuch, Augustine receives a juridical account of the origin and character of death as a punishment where in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return (Genesis 3:19). Augustine’s evaluation of death undergoes a profound change after he encounters the theology of Pelagius. In his earlier writings Augustine regards death as good because it is natural. Death is the ordered succession of living entities, each coming and going the way the sound of a word comes and goes, but if the sound remained forever, nothing could be said. But in Pelagius’s theology, Augustine encounters a radical statement of the naturalness of death. Even if there had never been any sin, Pelagius says, there would still be death. Such an understanding of death is very rare in early Christianity, and Augustine eventually stands with the early Christian tradition by insisting upon the exegetically derived judgment that death is a punishment that diminishes the original condition of human nature. It is a consistent feature of Augustine’s theology of death that it is articulated almost exclusively through the opening chapters of Genesis. The Augustinian point of view did not hold dominance, and the older Christian structures of a triumphant death persisted. The psalms and prayers, representing the older Roman death ritual were more in accord with the triumphant theology of Ambrose of Milan and the Imperial Church. The Eucharist ceremony, commemorating the Last Supper of Christ, was given to a person near death. The viaticum became an exponent of the resurrection of the just. The rite does not present the bread and wine as provisions for the soul’s journey to the otherworld, but as a symbol of its membership in the community of the saved, to be rendered at the last judgment. In southern Gaul, Bishop Caesarius of Arles (503–543 C.E.) urged the sick to seek ritual anointing from priests rather than magicians and folk healers and authored some of the most enduring prayers that accompanied death and burial in medieval Christianity. Pope Gregory the Great (590–604 C.E.) first promoted the practice of offering the mass as an aid to souls in the afterlife, thus establishing the basis for a system of suffrages for the dead. In seventh-century Spain, the Visigothic Church developed an elaborate rite of deathbed penance. This ritual, which purified and transformed the body and soul of the dying, was so powerful that anyone who subsequently recovered was required to retire into a monastery for life. In the afterlife, death included the fear of punishment for misdeeds committed and unforgiven during life, resulting in believers confessing their sins and seeking forgiveness on their deathbeds. The souls of those who had not been forgiven were believed to wander where they had lived, bringing distress and ill fortune to their survivors. Over time, humanity developed various means to ease the passage of souls to a peaceful life in the hereafter. One method, whose origins can be traced to Egyptian and Greek civilizations, was embodied in the sin eater, a person who was believed to possess the ability to ingest the sins of the deceased through eating and drinking over a recently deceased corpse. The sin eater, a secular person performing a quasi-spiritual role, was paid for this important service. 

The rise of the cult of saints demonstrates the changing relationship between the living and the dead in the early Medieval west. The saints mediated between the living and the dead and the shrines of the saints inspired people to worship in the cemeteries outside the city walls. Eventually, the dead even appeared inside the walls of the city, first as saints’ relics, and then as the bodies of those who wished to be buried near them. During the latter half of the first millennium, graves began to cluster around urban and rural churches designing the landscape of Christendom in ways that survive until the present. The living and the dead formed a single community and shared a common space. Medieval Christians placed the ritual commemoration of the dead at the very center of social life. Between 760 and 762 C.E., a group of clergy at the Carolingian royal villa of Attigny committed themselves to mutual commemoration after death. 

Shortly thereafter, monastic congregations began to make similar arrangements with other communicants as well as members of the laity. Additionally, they began to record the names of participants in books, growing to include as many as 40,000 entries. Cloistered men and women, perceived as dead to this world, mediated these exchanges. They accepted gifts to the poor, which included themselves, in exchange for prayers for the souls of the givers and their dead relatives. Whatever their motivations, their actions, like the actions of the saints, helped bind together the community of the living and the dead. 

Long distant communication has greatly improved since ancient times. People can reconcile the span between absent loved ones by picking up a phone, sending an e- mail, or boarding a plane to lessen physical distance. Yet technology has not improved communication when death separates individuals. The magician John Dee fascinated Queen Elizabeth in the middle of the sixteenth century, with her interest particularly piqued by Dee’s mirror. It was an Aztec mirror in which one could supposedly see visions by gazing into the mirror in a receptive state of mind. The Queen was among those who believed she had seen a departed friend in Dee’s mirror. Since ancient times it has been alleged that the dead choose to communicate with the living, and the living with the dead, by using special instruments and rituals. Greek religious cults and the Aztecs both discovered the value of reflective surfaces for this purpose. In the ruins of a temple known as the Oracle of the Dead, on a remote and sacred Greek hilltop in Heraclea, priests arranged for encounters between the living and the dead. In the apparition chamber of the temple a cauldron was situated with a highly polished metal surface which glittered with reflections. Through priestly guidance, the solicitors gazed at the mirrored surface and the dead reportedly appeared in much the same way as Dee’s Aztec mirror was also the stimulus for similar visions in sixteenth-century England. The crystal ball eventually emerged as the preferred intermediary reflective object. Scryers were adroit at peering into this mystical sphere where they could see the past and future including the living and the dead. Meanwhile, in jungles thousands of miles away, there were magicians who could invoke the dead through a skull. Bones survived decomposition and the skull was believed to be the crowning glory of all bones. Although not reflective, the skull was believed to contain a physical link with the spirit of the deceased. It was a treasure to own a hut filled with the skulls of ancestors and members of other tribes. The skulls of the dead were there all the time and could be called upon for their wisdom and power, thereby allowing the living and the dead a second chance to resolve any tensions of misunderstandings from their earlier relationships. 

Shamans’ relationships to death and dying are multifaceted and involve both training and healing capabilities. Shamans are often chosen because they can cheat death in recovering from severe illness. During their training they may undergo one or more powerful death and rebirth experiences in which they experience themselves dying and being reborn, often finding themselves healed and strengthened by the process. Shamans are valued and sought in multiple cultures and religious traditions for their spiritually transformative potential. During training, the shaman is expected to see and relate to spirits, some of whom are thought to be ancestors or ancient shamans, and some of whom may become guardian spirits that guide and empower the shaman. Once shamans are trained, several of their practices relate to contacting the dead––although the spiritual entities with whom shamans interact may be the spirits of the living or the dead. Sick individuals may lose their spirit (the term dispirited is still used) and face suffering and death unless the shaman can recover it. Spirits of the dead may be lost, troublesome, or malevolent, and the shaman must intervene by guiding, healing, or vanquishing them. 

Prayer messages and heavy sacrifices are usually intended for the gods. Many prayers, though, are messages to the dead. Ancestor worship is a vital feature of Yoruba society, and Shintoism, in its various forms, is organized around behavior toward the dead. Zoroastrianism has been especially considerate of the dead. Sacrifices are offered every day for a month on behalf of the deceased, and food offerings are given for thirty years. Prayers go with the deceased to urge that divine judgment be favorable. There are also annual holidays during which the dead revisit their homes, much like the Mexican Days of the Dead. During the Zoroastrian Fravardegan holiday the spirits of the dead reciprocate for the prayers that have been said for them by blessing the living with health, fertility, and success. By the fourth century Christians decided that the dead could use support from the living until God renders a final judgment. Masses for the dead became an important part of Christian music. The Gregorian chant and subsequent styles of music assisted in conveying fervent words both to God and the dead, although most communication intended for the dead occurred in a more private way. People continue to bring flowers to the graveside and tell the deceased how much they miss them and also share current events with them although the conversation is usually one-sided. 

The term Shinto, the way of the gods, was coined in the nineteenth century. Because Shinto, unlike Buddhism, has never been an organized tradition and has no official doctrines or creed, its ideas concerning death vary widely from one individual to the next. No moral notion of sin exists in Shinto. Death is not the wages of sin or the outcome of evil-doing. Rather, because purity is valued above all else, evil is defined as that which is pollution. The primary pollutions are sickness, blood, and death. When kami, native Japanese deities, are offended because of exposure to pollution, they can create disasters such as plagues and famines. Consequently, Shinto shrines do not conduct funerals. This tradition is evidenced in the familiar adage, “Shinto for weddings, Buddhism for funerals.” Nevertheless, certain Shinto ideas have dealt with death. Practitioners believe that the spirits of the dead go to either the mountains above the sky, below the earth, or beyond the horizon. Kami also dwell in these places. Living beings from this world may visit those from the other worlds in border lands, which include cliffs, caves, and coastlines. The Japanese welcome these souls back to their homes in August at the Obon festival although there is no concept of an eternal soul in Shinto. Two of Japan’s oldest texts, the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and the Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan), tell the story of Izanami and Izanagi, the two kami who created Japan. After Izanami dies giving birth to the kami of fire, she goes to a place called the Land of Darkness (Yomi no Kuni). Her husband misses her so badly that he follows her, only to be shocked by Izanami’s advanced state of decay. He flees the Land of Darkness, stopping at a river to cleanse himself on his way back to the Land of the Living thus emphasizing the Shinto understanding of death as pollution. However, most deceased persons in Japan are not regarded as kami, and most Japanese turn to Buddhism for answers to problems concerning death. As the Buddhist monk and poet Thich Nhat Hanh has asserted, “Water is free from the birth and death of a wave.” 

“We are destined to die, as death is an essential part of the life-cycle,” stated Guru Tegh Bahadur (1664–1675 C.E.), the ninth of the ten Indian Gurus who founded Sikhism. Death for this religion’s twenty million members is an essential path in the journey of life and not to be feared. Death is followed by rebirth through transmigration or metempsychosis, the passage of the soul of a human being or animal after death into a new body of the same or a different species. At the deathbed of a Sikh, the relatives and friends console themselves and the departing soul by reading the religious hymns of the Sikh Gurus (Gurbani), especially Sukhmani Sahib, the Hymns of Peace, written by the fifth Guru, Arjan Dev (1581–1606 C.E.). When death occurs, no loud lamentations are allowed. Instead, the Sikhs chant Wahiguru Wahiguru (“Hail to the Wonderful Lord”). 

All dead bodies, whether those of children or of adults, are cremated, usually within twenty-four hours in the Indian subcontinent, but this may occur several days later in other countries where the body can be more easily preserved. Where cremation is not possible, it is permissible to throw the dead body into a sea or river. The dead body is washed and dressed in new clothes before it is taken out on a bier to the cremation ground. The procession starts after a prayer, with the participants singing hymns from the Sikh scriptures (Guru Granth Sahib) on the way. At the cremation ground, the body is placed on the pyre, the Ardas prayer (a supplication to God to support and help the devotee with whatever is about to be undertaken) is recited, and the nearest relative (usually the eldest son) lights the pyre. When the fire is fully ablaze, Sohila (a hymn recited at the conclusion of evening ceremonies and also at Sikh funeral services) is read and prayers are offered for the benefit of the dead. People then come away and are thanked before departing and leaving the relatives of the deceased at their door. The bereaved family, often along with friends and relations, start a reading of the holy Guru Granth Sahib either at their own home or a neighboring temple (gurdwara). After a week or so they again come together when the reading is finished. At this time a prayer is offered and holy food or sacrament (karah prasad) is distributed. The charred bones of the dead, together with the ashes, are taken from the cremation ground three or four days later and thrown into the nearest river. It is forbidden to erect monuments over the remains of the dead, although a suitable monument in the deceased’s honor at another place is permissible. 

Technology and science rapidly transformed western society by the middle of the nineteenth century. But these rational advances also produced very credulous attitudes. Inventors Thomas Edison who invented the incandescent light bulb, and Guglielmo Marconi who invented the radio, were among the innovators who toyed with the idea that they could develop a device to communicate with the dead. Traditional ideas and practices were dropping by the wayside, though not without a struggle. It was just as the industrial age was starting that an old idea appeared suggesting communication with the spirits of the dead despite what scientists might say. There was an urgency about this quest. Although a belief in a congenial afterlife was one of the core assumptions that had become jeopardized by science, contact from a deceased family member or friend would nonetheless be quite reassuring. Those who claimed to have the power for arranging these contacts became known as mediums. Like the communication technology of the twenty-first century, mediumship had its share of disappointments. The spirits were not always willing or able to visit the séances. The presence of even one skeptic in the group could break the receptive mood necessary to encourage the wraith’s visitation. Mediums who were proficient in persuading the dead to their chambers provided comfort to those gathered. Fascination with spirit contacts swept through much of the world, becoming ever more influential as aristocrats, royalty, and numerous celebrities took up the diversion. Spiritualists in New York City were associated with an estimated three hundred circles of devout believers. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and a former Supreme Court judge, was among the luminaries who had become supporters of the movement which sought communication with the dead. The movement, which became known as Spiritualism, spread rapidly throughout North America and crossed the oceans, where it soon engaged adherents in abundance. 

An apparitional experience is an anomalous, quasi-perceptual experience. It is characterized by the apparent perception of either a living being or an inanimate object without there being any material stimulus for such a perception. The person experiencing the apparition is awake, although sometimes in a state of trance. In scientific or academic discussion, the term apparitional experience is preferred to the term ghost. The term ghost implies that some element of the human being survives death and, at least under certain circumstances, can make itself perceptible to the living. Subjects of apparitional experiences are by no means always frightened by the experience and they may find the experiences soothing or reassuring at times of crisis or ongoing stress in their lives. Spontaneous apparitional experiences tend to happen in humdrum or everyday surroundings––while doing housework, for example. By contrast, subjects who visit reputedly haunted locations in hopes of seeing a ghost are often disappointed. Apparitions tend to appear solid and not transparent and they may be so realistic in a variety of ways that they deceive the percipient as to their hallucinatory nature. In some cases the subject only achieves insight after the experience has ended. It is unusual for an apparitional figure to engage in any verbal interaction with the percipient and the majority of such experiences involve only one sense, most commonly the visual. The quasi-perceptual experience that eventually appears to the consciousness embodies paranormal information in a symbolic way, for example a person drowning at a distance appearing soaked in water. The apparition may be a way for the unconscious part of the mind to bring to consciousness information that has been paranormally acquired. The hallucinatory character of the experience is virtually unknown with apparitional figures rarely leaving any of the normal physical effects, such as footprints in snow, that one would expect of a real person. 

The practical application for the study of apparitions can be seen in the many scientific and scholarly institutions that study the phenomenon of apparitions. The Society for Psychical Research is a non-profit organisation in the United Kingdom whose stated purpose is to understand “events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal by promoting and supporting important research in this area” and to “examine allegedly paranormal phenomena in a scientific and unbiased way.” The period which saw the formation of the Society was a time of intense intellectual uncertainty, with natural sciences making great strides in explaining the world in terms which challenged traditional religious views. At the same time, since the 1850s, there was a virtual explosion of extravagant paranormal claims and interest in them throughout the western world. This interest was related to the spread of the new religion of Spiritualism. While stories of apparitions, clairvoyant visions, precognitive dreams and other miraculous events have been with humanity since time immemorial, the new mediums, of whom there were many, were very influential in gaining credence for their claims of being able to contact the dead. The issues raised by both science and Spiritualism were the subject of fierce debate. Like many Victorians who applied themselves to sifting through information about organisms collected from many exotic parts of the world, the Society sifted and corroborated reports of spontaneous cases, and learnt to spot fake mediums by sitting through many boring séances, in the pursuit of scientific explanations. Their work was distributed across a number of committees, which, among other things, investigated telepathy, mesmerism, clairvoyance, physical phenomena and apparitions as well as haunted houses and cemeteries. Early on in the work of the Society, its researchers came across a small number of mental mediums regarded as trustworthy, who were prepared to work with the Society under the required conditions, and did so over many years.The study of mediumship continued, providing much information on aspects of human personality and altered states of consciousness, as well as perfecting investigative techniques. Now that parapsychology has become an academic subject, with postgraduate courses offered at a number of universities, many of these projects are carried out as part of institutional research. 

Spiritualism is the belief that the living can communicate with the dead. The belief in a spirit world and the living’s ability to correspond with the spiritual realm dates to antiquity. Spirit contact is often facilitated when an individual is on his or her deathbed. Two great spiritualism influences were Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1722) in Sweden and Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910) in America. A well-known scientist and clairvoyant, Swedenborg reported being in constant communication with the spirit 

world throughout his life. Davis, a clairvoyant, while in a mesmeric trance, could communicate with the spirit world and accurately diagnose medical disorders. While in a trance he supposedly foresaw the coming of the spiritualist movement. The modern spiritualism movement began in March 1848 when the sisters Catherine and Margaretta Fox encountered several disturbances in their new home in Hydesville, New York. The Fox sisters discovered a way of communicating with a spirit by employing a tapping system and discovered that the spirit causing the problem had been robbed, murdered, and buried in the house several years prior to when the Fox family moved into the home. Several neighbors were brought into the house to substantiate the fact that the Fox family had communicated with the dead. The press popularized the actions of the Fox sisters’ ability to communicate beyond the grave, causing the sisters to enjoy several years of fame as mediums. Following the events in Hydesville, spiritualism became a major international social movement. The Hydesville tappings validated communication with the spirit world, the natural mediumistic abilities of certain people, and that communication could be enhanced by employing a code. The protagonist was a medium, someone capable of communicating with the dead, who served as the intermediary between the individual wishing to converse with the dead and the spirit of the deceased. The most common form of communication with the spirit world became the séance, which typically took place in a darkened room with participants sitting in a circle holding hands. Often the medium would be tied to a chair with his or her legs secured, thus preventing the extremities to fallaciously produce ghostly phenomena. The environment of the séance might include sounds of various kinds, the appearance and disappearances of small physical objects, the medium talking in various voices, furniture moving about the room, or a spirit materializing in a momentary physical form. Other séance effects included spirit bells and horns, candles, lightning and thunder, animated objects such as books, and spirit photography. Methods of communicating with the spirit world, whether or not there is a séance, have included crystal balls, tarot cards, rapping or tapping a code, mental telepathy, a mesmeric or hypnotic trance, and automatic writing. The Hydesville incident led to the establishment of many independent churches and organizations whose objective was to advance the ideas of spiritualism with early, but small, groups of spiritualists meeting at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on November 14, 1849. As others realized they had psychic powers, the movement grew. The First Spiritual Temple in Boston was established by Marcellus Ayer in September 1885 and became an immediate success, with a membership of over 1,000 people. During a trance, Ayer was told that it was time for him to begin a society from which the Noble Truths of a New Dispensation in Spiritualism could emerge. Furthermore, he was told that such inspiration was being given to others, throughout the planet, primarily in Germany, Russia, and South America. The spiritualism movement made its way to England in 1852 via a Boston medium, Mrs. Maria Hayden. Mrs. Hayden is first recorded as being a medium in 1851, following a séance which was held at the Hayden’s house. Her talent was described as “a limited type of mediumship consisting mainly of raps; however, they furnished information beyond the knowledge of the sitters.” The Haydens travelled to the UK in October 1852 accompanied by a Mr. Stone who was a lecturer in the art of inducing hypnotism by gazing at metallic discs. Robert Chambers, a supporter of Spiritualism, was a man of science who wrote in his monthly publication Chambers Journal on May 21, 1853 that he had seen the medium, Mrs. Hayden, work successfully with an alphabet behind her back and he was unable to account for such a marvel. He was followed in his support by another publication The Critic. Shortly afterwards, two eminent individuals added their support. The first was Sir Charles Isham, the tenth Baronet of Isham who is credited with beginning the tradition of garden gnomes in the United Kingdom, and the Royal Physician Dr. Ashburner. Séances continued to grow in popularity, with the famous mathematician and philosopher Augustus de Morgan and his wife, both becoming committed Spiritualists. Mrs. de Morgan went on to publish a book, From Matter to Spirit, as a result of her experiences with Mrs. Hayden. The preface to this book was written by Augustus and includes a section on his conversion to Spiritualism through the events he witnessed at the Hayden séances. Spiritualism was very popular during the Victorian and Edwardian eras and was strengthened by the first world war which left many people desperately seeking to contact the spirits of loved ones killed in that conflict. During this time Spiritualism gained further support from several members of the Anglican Church. Although numerous distinguished individuals such as Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the acclaimed scientist Sir Oliver Lodge attempted to influence the movement’s popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century, by 1920 spiritualism finally lost its momentum, never again receiving the same level of notoriety. Numerous people rejected Spiritualism because of a socialized fear of spirits. Through socialization, people had learned to fear ghosts, goblins, demons, witches, and other affiliates of the spirit world. They avoided cemeteries because ghosts of the dead might prevail and generally believed that morgues and funeral homes were the haunted abodes of spirits. Many were also critical of the important role of women in the Spiritualist movement and its strong feminist theme. There was even a belief among some Spiritualists in a female, or an androgynous, divinity. 

Table-rapping was supplemented and eventually replaced by other communication technologies. The Ouija board was wildly popular for many years. This was a modern device which had derived from similar instruments employed to communicate with the dead 2,500 years ago in China and Greece. The new version started as the planchette, a heart-shaped or triangular, three-legged platform. While moving the device over a piece of paper, a living participant could augur textual messages believed to come from the dead. It was believed that the person who operates the device does not have control over the messages coming from the deceased. The Ouija board was criticized by some as too effective, and, therefore, dangerous. Believers in the spirit world feared that evil entities would respond to the summons, taking the place of the dearly departed. Other critics warned that the manifestations did not come from spirits of the dead but rather had escaped from hidden regions of the user’s own mind and could lead to psychosis. Later, automatic writing seemed to corroborate a more elevated attempt at spirit communication. In this dissociated state of consciousness a person’s writing hand seems to be at the service of some unseen presence of the departed. The writing comes at a rapid tempo and looks as though written by a different hand. Many of the early occurrences were unexpected and therefore surprised the writer. It was soon conjectured that these were messages from the dead, and automatic writing was passed into the repertoire of professional mediums. The writings ranged from personal letters to complete books. A century later, the spirits of Chopin and other great composers dictated new compositions to Rosemary Brown, a Londoner with limited skills at the piano. The unkind verdict was that death had taken the luster off Chopin’s genius. Automatic writing provided the basis for a new wave of investigations and experiments into the possibility of authentic communication with the dead. Some examples convinced some people while others dismissed such chirography as an interesting but unsubstantiated activity in which, literally, the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. 

Cremation is the burning of the human body until its soft parts are destroyed by fire. The skeletal remains and ash residue, cremains, often become the object of religious rites, one for the body and one for the bones. The chief difference between cremation and burial, or what writer Evelyn Waugh has termed ensarcophusment, is the speed of transformation. Corpses burn in two hours or less, but bodies take months or years to decay, depending upon methods used and local soil conditions. The method of body disposal least like cremation is mummification, which seeks to preserve the body rather than destroy it. In classical antiquity, cremation was a military procedure and associated with battlefield honors. Both cremation and the interment of cremated remains are described in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. The seventeenth century French painter Nicolas Poussin depicted a classical story of cremation in his Ashes of Phocion, which portrays a faithful wife gathering the ashes of her husband, an unfairly vilified member of the Athenian Assembly, who was cremated without the proper rites. The ritual cremation of Roman emperors involved the release of an eagle above the cremation pyre to symbolize deification and the passing of the emperor-god’s spirit. The shifts from cremation to burial in classical times are not always obvious although the availability of wood may have been involved. For Hindus, cremation is seen symbolically where the human embryo results from the combination of male seed forming bones and female blood providing flesh. The spirit enters the fetus through the cranial suture of the skull where the growing embryo is cooked by the heat of the womb. At the end of life, a symbolic reversal sees the heat of the funeral pyre separating flesh from bones at which time the rite of skull-cracking frees the spirit for its ongoing journey. The fire itself is the medium by which the body is offered to the gods as a kind of last sacrifice. For Hindus, the outer or gross body (skin, bones, muscles, nervous system, and brain) is said to fall away. The subtle body sheath (composed of karmic tendencies, knowledge, breath, and mind) that coats the jiva, or psychic substratum, also begins to disappear. After death the jiva initially remains within or near the body before it completely departs to eventually enter an otherworldly reality conditioned by the deceased’s susceptibility to earthly cravings. When these cravings have ceased, the jiva enters a temporally blissful existence until, at a karmically determined time, it takes on a new physical body and is reborn. This flux embodies a continual series of births, deaths, and rebirths. Reincarnation blends a natural evolution with a spiritual evolution toward an awakening. The secret of death is realized not by preaching or sacrifice, but through meditation and grace. This realization of a supreme self concealed in the chamber of the heart is emancipated from the fluctuations of samsara. This supreme self (atma) is similar to the western concept of the soul. Yama, the Hindu lord of death proclaims in the Kathopanishad (2:18): 

This luminous atma which possesses a variety of knowledge is not born nor does it die. There is no creator of this atma. It is unborn. Everlasting. Immortal. Ancient. Also, it is ‘hanyamãna’, that is, although it lives in a perishable body, when the body perishes, it never perishes (na jãyate mriyate va vipaschinnãyam kutaschinna babhoova kaschit ajonityaha shãshvato’yam purãno na hanyate hanyamãne sharire) 

For Hindus, cremation should ideally take place in Banaras (Varanasi), the holy city through which the sacred Ganges River flows. It is on the banks of the Ganges that cremations occur and cremated remains are placed in its holy waters. Typically, as a Hindu approaches death in Banaras, they are surrounded with religious rites and ceremonies that support the dying. Before a Hindu dies, the eldest son and other relatives put water taken, if possible, from the Ganges River into the dying person’s mouth. Prior to cremation, the body is washed and anointed, the hair (and beard) is trimmed, and the corpse is given clean clothes. During the funeral procession, relatives and mourners, who carry the body to the cremation ground, chant verses that invoke Yama’s help. The body is then placed on a funeral pyre. The eldest son walks around the pyre three times, each time pouring sacred water on the deceased. He then sets fire to the wood with a torch that has been blessed. While rites are performed for set periods after cremation, there is no monument for the dead, whose ultimate destiny lies in the future and not in some past event. Similarly, cremation is the preferred funeral rite for Buddhists, and the Buddha was himself cremated. Tradition tells how his funeral pyre self-ignited after many followers had come to pay respects to his body. When the flames ceased, no ash remained—only bones. These remains were divided into eight parts and built into eight stupas, or dome shaped reliquaries, in different locales. Christian churches often contended that cremation would interfere with the resurrection of the body or that cremation spurned the example of the burial of Jesus. Sometimes such reasoning was political rather than theological. Catholics in Italy, for example, found cremation unacceptable because it was favored and advocated by the Freemasons and it was not until the mid-1960s that the Roman Catholic Church accepted cremation as an acceptable form of funeral for its members. Greek and Russian Orthodoxy stand in firm opposition to cremation, and cremation rates are very low in stringent Orthodox societies such as Greece. Concern emanating from the environmental community has noted the injurious effect of emission of gases, causing many communities to adopt more stringent laws regarding the running of crematoriums and raising a question about the desirability of cremation. In Great Britain some groups have suggested the idea of green woodland burials in which individuals are buried without elaborate coffins, thereby causing bodies to return to the earth in a form of earth-friendly decay. 

Dance, like other forms of art, has treated the subject of death continually throughout history and will continue to be used as a vehicle to express the human fascination with death’s eternally unanswered questions. Rituals have surrounded the mystery of death from prehistoric times. Repeated rhythmic movements become dance, and the solace of rocking and keening can be therapeutic. Funeral processions are an example of organized movement to music, expressive of grief in which, as T. S. Eliot observed, “You are the music while the music lasts.” The aboriginal peoples of Australia sing and dance to evoke the clan totems of those dying. Two months after a death they dance again to recreate the symbolic animals needed to purify the bones and release the soul of the deceased. The Sagari dances are part of a cycle performed on the anniversary of a death on the islands of Melanesia, New Guinea. Dancing by a female shaman is an important element of Korean ceremonies to cleanse a deceased soul and allow it to achieve nirvana , closing the cycle of birth and rebirth. At Kachin, Upper Burma, funeral rites include dances to send back spirits to the land of the dead. The Dayal shamans of Pakistan fall into dance trances to imitate the spirits of the dead. In Africa the Kenga people perform Dodi or Mutu, mourning dances, on burial day. The Yoruba dance wearing a likeness of the deceased, and the Dogon of Mali perform masked dances to confront death and pass on traditions after death. The Lugbara people of Uganda and the Angas of northern Nigeria also include dance in their rituals surrounding death. The Umutima Indians of Upper Paraguay, South America, possess seventeen different death cult dances. Mexico celebrates All Souls’ Day with masked street dancers dressed in skeleton costumes. The Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians of North America reaffirms an ancestral tribal continuity which has recently been revived after prohibition by the U.S. government which deemed the dance subversive. The Danse Macabre (Totentanz, or Dance of Death) of the European Middle Ages was portrayed many times on the walls of cloistered cemeteries as a dance of linked hands between people of all levels of society and the skeletal figure of death. A band which consisted of four skeletons performing on bagpipe, portative organ, harp, and small drum was part of the dance where the dancers move in a low, stately procession following their leader—Death. 

Days of the Dead, a religious observation celebrated throughout Mexico in November, honors the memories of departed family members. In southern and central Mexico the celebration becomes more elaborate. Mexicans decorate their panteones, or cemeteries, and the nearby streets are filled with vivid imagery of death, usually skeletons and skulls. Families make altars in their homes, where the photos of departed souls are placed alongside religious icons, ofrendas or offerings of food such as pan de muertos baked in shapes of skulls and death figures, and yellow marigolds, the symbol of death are placed on the altar. On the eve of November 2, All Saints Day, some families spend the night at the cemetery, lighting candles and making offerings at the graves of their loved ones. Some communities organize a desfile, a parade with participants dressed as ghouls, ghosts, mummies, and skeletons carrying an open coffin containing an animated corpse played by a villager. A festive air surrounds the cemeteries as vendors peddle food, flowers, and religious relics. In areas that retain an indigenous tradition, this Christian religious holiday is a part of a syncretic process, a blend of pre-Columbian beliefs in the return of the ancestors to their villages and the Christian belief that only the flesh decays, but not the soul. 

Death can also be denied or abolished by segregating the dead in graveyards, which become ghettos. In early societies life and death were seen as partners in symbolic exchanges. As society evolved, the dead were excluded from the realm of the living by assigning them to graveyards, the ghettos, where they no longer play a role in the community of the living. To be dead became abnormal, where earlier it was merely another state of being human. For these earlier societies it was necessary to use various assets, through rituals, in order to avoid a disequilibrium where death would have a claim on the living. Later societies focused on economy, death is simply the end of life— the dead can no longer produce or consume, and thus are no longer available for exchanges with the living. Yet private mourning practices still existed as death became a hyperreality for the living. In earlier societies a mask was created for the family after the death of the person as a reminder of the deceased, as well as a protector from evil spirits returning from the grave. In some cultures, mostly in African, the American First Nations, and Oceanic tribes, death masks are considered an important part of social and religious life. Death masks facilitate communication between the living and the dead in funerary rites and create a new, superhuman identity for the bearer. Death masks can take the form of animals or spirits, thereby allowing the bearer to assume the role of the invoked spirit or to fend off evil forces. In some tribes death masks are used in initiatory or homage ceremonies, which recount the creation of the world and the appearance of death among humanity. For others, where the link to ancestors is sacred, death masks are also used as a tool to help the deceased’s soul pass easily to the other life. The respect of the funeral rites of masked dancing can also protect against reprisals from the dead, preventing the risk of a wandering soul. 

For millennia the epitaph has been a significant part of the death ritual. Before the development of written language and adequate tools for carving, the grave was marked with such items as sticks and rocks. Marking a grave using any mode of expression involved taking a sharp rock and engraving symbols or initials of the deceased on another rock. This was the way the first human societies expressed themselves when they developed the ability to use language symbols. Memorials were an important part of ancient societies. The Greeks used forms of grave markers which included round columns, rectangular slabs, stelae or inscribed stones, shrine-shaped stones, marble vases, square or round receptacles for cremains, and sarcophagi or stone coffins. Many of these early societies employed sepulchral iconography or the use of beautiful, elaborate, and detailed scenes or panoramas portraying the life of the decedent, as well as written inscriptions such as “farewell.” The epitaph, or inscription at a grave in memory of someone deceased provided information about the deceased, to memorialize, and to convey a message to the living. In the present era most tombstones will contain some sort of biographical information about the deceased, including the name of the decedent, the date of birth, and the date of death. In addition to this information, many markers include an inscription in verse or prose upon a marker to attempt the establishment of symbolic immortality by relaying a message to the living: 

Remember friend as you pass by
As you are now so once was I.
As I am now you will surely be
Prepare thyself to follow me.

Cemeteries exist as resting places, and most cultures assert that the dead should not be disturbed. However, for a variety of reasons, they are disturbed through the process of exhumation or removal of a corpse from the earth. Many early groups placed the corpse in the ground and exhumed it at a later date for religious rituals, and this practice is still undertaken by some traditional societies. In fourteenth-century France it became a common procedure to dig up the more or less dried-out bones in the older graves in order to make room for new ones. The fact that there were plague pits in London during the Black Plague was well known, but these pits were much more horrible places than many realized. Aside from being simple holes where the dead were tossed, they terrified London residents for reasons aside from their association with death. Several of the plague pits were dug on unconsecrated ground, and burials proceeded without any religious ceremony. Londoners living during the plague feared not only for their lives but their afterlives as well. No visitors were allowed at the pits. This was done partially to prevent the spread of disease, but also because many plague victims on the verge of death would simply throw themselves into the pit. Officials would then be forced to drag them out again and several bodies were found buried alive. The high death rate from European plagues accompanied with a desire to be buried in already-full church cemeteries resulted in old bones being exhumed so that new bodies could be placed in the graves. In former times, prior to embalming, the body was removed from the ground. This happened when burial professionals or the authorities suspected that the person might have been buried alive. In 1905, the English reformer William Tebb collected accounts of premature burial finding that there were 149 actual live burials, ten cases of live dissection and two cases of awakening while being embalmed. The sayings saved by the bell and dead ringer are both derived from the notion of having a rope attached to a bell outside the coffin that could alert people that the recently buried person was not yet deceased. Additional cases of exhumation include necrophiliacs who disinterred dead bodies for assorted nefarious purposes and scientists who dug up corpses to conduct scientific experiments. One of the reasons the wake was enacted was to deter grave robbery. 

For centuries, until cadavers were legally provided, medical schools exhumed dead bodies for teaching purposes. As medical science developed, anatomy schools began to steal increasingly more bodies from graves. While grave robbers were technically people who stole jewelry from the deceased, some respected anatomy instructors dug up bodies themselves. The anatomist Thomas Sewell, who later became the personal physician for three U.S. presidents, was convicted in 1818 of digging up a corpse for dissection. Some anatomists would even dissect members of their own family. William Harvey, the man famous for discovering the circulatory system, was so dedicated he dissected his father and sister. From 1827 to 1828 in Scotland, murders were carried out, so that the bodies could be sold to medical schools for cash. These included the infamous West Port murders. The Anatomy Act of 1832 was formed and passed because of these murders. By 1828 anatomists were mostly paying others to do the digging. At that time, London anatomy schools employed ten full-time body snatchers and about two hundred part-time workers during the dissection season. This period ran from October to May, when the winter cold slowed down the decomposition of the bodies. A crew of six or seven could dig up over three hundred bodies. The poor were most vulnerable, because they could not afford sturdy coffins to keep the body snatchers out. Disposing of the dissected body was difficult. One possibility was to secretly bury the remains behind the school. Another rumored possibility was that they gave the bodies to zoo keepers, as feed for carnivorous animals, or fed the bodies to vultures kept specifically for this purpose. Numerous stories appeared of people murdering for the money they could make off cadaver sales. Before the Anatomy Act of 1832, the only legal supply of corpses for anatomical purposes in the U.K. were those condemned to death and dissection by the courts. Those who were sentenced to dissection by the courts were often guilty of comparatively harsher crimes. However, such sentences did not provide enough subjects for the medical and private anatomical schools and these schools did not require a licence before 1832. During the eighteenth century hundreds had been executed for trivial crimes, but by the nineteenth century only about fifty-five people were being sentenced to capital punishment each year. With the expansion of the medical schools, however, as many as five hundred cadavers were needed annually. Interfering with a grave was a misdemeanor, not a felony, and therefore only punishable with a fine and imprisonment rather than penal transportation or execution. The trade was a sufficiently lucrative business to run the risk of detection, particularly as the authorities tended to ignore what they considered a necessary evil. Body snatching became so prevalent that it was not unusual for relatives and friends of someone who had just died to watch over the body until burial, and then to keep watch over the grave after burial, to stop it being violated. Iron coffins, too, were used frequently, or the graves were protected by a framework of iron bars called mortsafes. Mort houses were also used to store bodies until decomposition, rendering the cadavers useless for medical dissection. One method the body snatchers used was to dig at the head end of a recent burial, using a wooden spade which was quieter than metal. When they reached the coffin they broke it open, put a rope around the corpse and dragged it out. They were often careful not to steal anything such as jewelry or clothes as this would cause them to be liable to a felony charge. Sometimes a manhole- sized square of turf was removed about twenty feet away from the head of the grave, and a tunnel dug to intercept the coffin, which would be about four feet down. The end of the coffin would be pulled off, and the corpse pulled up through the tunnel. The turf was then replaced, and any relatives watching the graves would not notice the small, somewhat remote disturbance. Two of the most notorious cases of body snatchers are that of Burke and Hare, and that of Bishop, May, and Williams. Burke and Hare ran a boarding house. When one of their tenants died, they brought him to Robert Knox’s anatomy classroom in Edinburgh where they were paid seven pounds for the body. Realizing the possible profit, they murdered sixteen people by asphyxiation over the next year and sold their bodies to Knox. They were eventually caught and Hare testified against Burke in exchange for amnesty. Burke was found guilty, hanged, and publicly dissected. The body snatchers, Bishop, May and Williams, killed three boys, ages ten, eleven and fourteen years old. However, the anatomist to whom they sold the cadavers became suspicious and to delay the grave robbers departure the anatomist said he needed to break a fifty pound note. While doing so he sent for the police who arrested the men. In Bishop’s confession he stated, “I have followed the course of obtaining a livelihood as a body snatcher for twelve years, and have obtained and sold, I think from five hundred to one thousand bodies.” 

In the United States, body snatchers generally worked in small groups, which scouted and pillaged fresh graves. Fresh graves were generally given preference since the earth had not yet settled, thus making digging easier work. The removed earth was often shoveled onto canvas tarp laid by the grave, so the nearby grounds were undisturbed. Usually, the body would be disrobed with the garments thrown back into the coffin before the earth was put back into place. Grave robbers, known as resurrectionists, were known to hire women to act the part of grieving relatives and to claim the bodies of the dead at poorhouses. Women were also hired to attend funerals as grieving mourners with the purpose of ascertaining any hardships the body snatchers may later encounter during the disinterment. Bribed servants would sometimes offer body snatchers access to their dead master or mistress lying in state, with the removed body replaced by weights. Although medical research and education lagged in the United States compared to their European counterparts, the interest in anatomical dissection grew. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York were renowned for body snatching activity and provided plenty of cadavers. The body of Ohio congressman John Scott Harrison, son of former president William Henry Harrison, was snatched in 1878 for Ohio Medical College, and discovered by his son Benjamin Harrison. Ebenezer Hersey, a physician, left Harvard College £1,000 for the creation of a Professorship in Anatomy in 1770. A year earlier, John Warren and his friends had created a secret anatomic society. This society’s purpose was to participate in anatomic dissection, using cadavers that they themselves procured. The group’s name was the Spunkers. The group is today the John Warren Surgical Society at Harvard University. Warren defended his dissections: 

At the first view of dissections, the stomach is apt to turn, but custom wears off such impressions. It is anatomy that directs the knife in the hand of a skilful surgeon, & shews him where he may perform any necessary operation with safety to the patient. It is this which enables the physician to form an accurate knowledge of diseases & open dead bodies with grace, to discover the cause or seat of the disease, & the alteration it may have made in the several parts. 

John Warren’s quest for subjects led him to consult with his colleague, W.E. Horner, professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote back, “Since the opening of our lectures, the town has been so uncommonly healthy, that I have not been able to obtain a fourth part of subjects required for our dissecting rooms.” Warren later enlisted the help of an old family friend, John Revere, son of Paul Revere, to procure subjects for dissection. Revere called upon John Godman who suggested that Warren employ the services of James Henderson, “a trusty old friend and servant” who could “at any time, and almost to any number, obtain the articles you desire.” At City Hospital in New York, on April 13, 1788, a group of boys playing near the hospital’s dissection room peered in a window. Accounts vary, but one of the boys either saw what he thought were his mother’s remains or that one of the students shook a dismembered arm at the boys. The boy, whose mother had recently died, told his father of the occurrence resulting in the father, a mason, leading a group of laborers in an attack on the hospital. H. H. Holmes, a noted murderer, sold the skeletons of some of his victims to medical schools. Holmes, was one of the first documented serial killers in Chicago at the time of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Holmes opened a hotel which he had designed and built for himself specifically with murder in mind, and which was the location for many of his executions. While he confessed to twenty-seven murders, of which nine were confirmed, his actual body count could be as high as two hundred. Holmes arrived in Chicago in August 1886 and came across Dr. Elizabeth S. Holton’s drugstore in the Englewood neighborhood. Holton gave Holmes a job, and he proved himself to be a hardworking employee. After the death of Holton’s husband, Holmes offered to buy the drugstore from Holton, and she agreed. Holmes purchased the store mainly with funds obtained by mortgaging the store’s fixtures and stock. Holmes purchased a lot across from the drugstore where he built his three-story, block-long Castle as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood. It was called the World’s Fair Hotel and opened as a hostelry for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure devoted to commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes’ own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly-angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle, so only he fully understood the design of the building. After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees. Many of these women were required, as a condition of employment, to take out life insurance policies, for which Holmes would pay the premiums but was also the beneficiary. These employees, as well as his lovers and hotel guests, he would later kill. Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them. Other victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office, where they were left to suffocate. The victims’ bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Additionally, Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty. 

A half century before the Panama Canal was constructed, a railway was built to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The chief inspiration for this project was the California Gold Rush of 1849 that offered many to stake a claim at fortune. Men came from across the globe to work on the railway, many without any identification or known next of kin. This feat of engineering would come at great cost to scores of people with diseases like yellow fever, malaria, and cholera plaguing the workers, causing thousands to die. A ban on opium caused many of the Chinese workers, who had become addicted to the drug in their homeland, to commit suicide. No official records were kept, but the death toll could have easily exceeded ten thousand. It might seem natural that the Panama Railroad Company would simply bury their dead and move on, but they had other plans. Keeping their attention on finances, they pickled many of the corpses and sold them to medical schools for experimentation. It was an exciting time in medicine with anesthesia being recently discovered. Surgeries, which had previously been hack jobs performed as swiftly as possible, became far more intricate. Bodies were in high demand, and for over five years, the Panama Railroad Company was a leading supplier. 

Grave robbing in North America has also involved long-abandoned or forgotten private Antebellum Period to pre-Great Depression era grave sites. These sites were often desecrated by grave robbers in search of old, and often valuable, jewelry. Affected sites were typically in rural, forested areas where once-prominent, wealthy landowners and their families were interred. The remote and often undocumented locations of defunct private cemeteries made them particularly susceptible to robbery. The practice was further encouraged by default upon the discovery of a previously unknown family cemetery by a new landowner. Aside from remote or rural cemeteries, one historical incident occurred during the evening of November 7, 1876, when a group of counterfeiters tried to abscond with Abraham Lincoln’s mortal remains from his grave in Springfield, Illinois, in order to secure the release of their imprisoned leader, counterfeit engraver Benjamin Boyd. However, a secret service agent was present and had notified the police beforehand, so the attempted grave robbers only succeeded in the dislodgment of the lid of his coffin. As a consequence, when reburied, additional security measures prevented further depredations against Lincoln’s body. Lincoln’s remains were re-buried in a mausoleum at Oak Ridge, but instead of being inside the sarcophagus, they were secretly hidden in a shallow grave in the basement of the tomb —a fact that was known only to a handful of people for decades. There the body stayed until 1901, when eldest son Robert Todd Lincoln had his father’s remains placed inside a steel cage, lowered ten feet into the ground, and covered in concrete for safe keeping. Soon after his death in 2001, the body of Enrico Cuccia, a powerful bank president often considered the father of Italian capitalism, was removed from its vault. The foul play was discovered by a loyal housekeeper who visited the grave on a weekly basis to clean up around the tomb. A ransom demand was received by the family a few days later, asking for the equivalent of three and a half million dollars to be deposited by Mediobanca, the bank Cuccia had controlled for more than fifty years, into a numbered Swiss account. When the ransom was not immediately paid, a man called Mediobanca to set up the transfer of funds, but was placed on hold under the pretense that the bank president was on the other line. This gave the police time to trace the call back to a small village near Turin, Italy, and found Giampaolo Pesce, a steelworker, still holding the phone. Caught red-handed, Pesce led authorities to a barn where Cuccia’s coffin had been hidden under some straw. A few hours before the late Clarence Bright was to be buried at a Detroit cemetery, his body was discovered missing. The next day, police found Bright’s son, Vincent Bright, and another man with an empty casket in the back of their van and arrested them. The police state that Vincent had moved his father’s body into a freezer in the basement of his home hoping that the corpse might come back to life. He was charged with disinterment of a body, a felony. Jean Stevens and her twin sister, June, were so inseparable, they even married brothers. When June was diagnosed with cancer, Jean shared a bed with her and rubbed her back. When June died in October 2009, she was buried in her sister’s backyard. Lonely and claustrophobic at the thought of her sister trapped underground, Jean had June dug up and brought inside to live with her, just like she had done ten years earlier with James, her husband of sixty years, who had been buried at a nearby cemetery. There they lived, rather Jean lived, with her husband’s body on a couch in the extended garage and her sister propped up in a spare room off her bedroom for almost a year before the police were informed that the ninety-one year-old was not completely alone. In an interview shortly thereafter, Stevens was aware that her behavior appeared disturbing, but explained unapologetically that she “felt differently about death.” During the French Revolution, a decree was made that the tombs of the kings and queens of France should be destroyed, particularly those at the Basilica of Saint Denis. On October 12, 1793, a mob intent on destruction descended on it and other church grounds. One of the first coffins they came upon was Henry IV’s. Henry had been a popular king, and they treated his remains with a kind of curiosity, if not awe. The body was in pristine condition after its embalmment and even the stab wounds from where he had been assassinated were still visible. The fascinated crowd set the corpse on display, and it became an attraction to thousands who flocked to see the late monarch. Not everyone was impressed by Henry, though. A member of Henry’s audience sarcastically remarked that the crowd should put him on an altar if they loved him so much and maybe he would do a miracle. The remark caused Henry to be thrown into a common grave pit. In China there were reports in 2006 of a resurgence in the ancient practice of ghost marriages in the northern coal-mining regions of Shanxi, Hebei and Shandong. Although the practice has long been abandoned in modern China, some superstitious families in isolated rural areas still pay very high prices for the procurement of female corpses for deceased unmarried male relatives. It is speculated that the very high death toll among young male miners in these areas has led more and more entrepreneurial body snatchers to steal female cadavers from graves and then resell them through the black market to families of the

deceased miners. In 2007, a previously convicted grave robber, Song Tiantang, was arrested by Chinese authorities for murdering six women and selling their bodies as ghost brides. In Dublin, Ireland, the medical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were on a constant hunt for bodies. The Bullys’ Acre or Hospital Fields at Kilmainham was a rich source of anatomical material as it was a communal burial ground and easily accessed. Soldiers attached to the nearby Royal Hospital were always on the alert for grave robbers mainly because many of their comrades were buried there. In November 1825 a sentry captured Thomas Tuite, a known resurrectionist, in possession of five bodies. When Tuite was searched his pockets were found to be full of teeth. In those days a set of teeth fetched £1 (about £50 today). Many other graveyards were targets of the medical students or those who made robbing graves their profession. The largest cemetery in Ireland, Glasnevin Cemetery, laid out in the eighteenth century, had a high wall with strategically placed watch-towers as well as blood-hounds to deter body snatchers. In The Netherlands, poorhouses were accustomed to receiving a small fee by undertakers who paid a fine for ignoring burial laws and resold the bodies (especially those with no family) to doctors. In the 1530s while studying in Paris, Vesalius, often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy, was accustomed to robbing the Paris graveyards with fellow anatomy pupils. Body snatchers in France were called les corbeaux (the crows). In February 2006, Michael Mastromarino, then a forty-two year old former New Jersey-based oral surgeon and CEO and executive director of operations at Biomedical Tissue Services, was convicted along with three employees of illegally harvesting human bones, organs, tissue and other cadaver parts from individuals awaiting cremation, for forging numerous consent forms, and for selling the illegally obtained body parts to medical companies without consent of the deceased’s families. Additionally, grave robbers often sell stolen Aztec or Mayan goods and body parts on the black market for an extremely high price. The buyers (museum curators, historians, etc.) do not often suffer the repercussions of being in possession of stolen goods and the blame, and charges, are put on the lower-class grave robbers. Today’s antiquities trade has become a streamlined industry and the speed with which these artifacts enter the market has grown exponentially. Laws have been enacted in the regions of these thefts, but due to extreme poverty, grave robberies continue to grow each year. In his Stealing History, Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World, Roger Atwood points out: 

Looting obliterates the memory of the ancient world and turns its highest artistic creations into decorations, adornments on a shelf, divorced from historical context and ultimately from all meaning. 

Local funeral homes across the country have won respect as established and trusted places of business and as a source of comfort for families suffering from the loss of a close friend or relative. Variously called undertakers, funeral directors, and morticians, America’s new ritual specialists have transformed the previous experience of death and body disposal. In antebellum America, the integrity of the dead body, even one disintegrating in the coffin, had to be preserved at all costs. Even though it might be placed on a cooling board, the interior of the corpse was generally not accessible to prying eyes, hands, or medical equipment. During and after the Civil War, embalming became acceptable as more Americans wanted to ensure that they could have a last look at their lost loved ones. Many northern families arranged to have the remains of their fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands shipped home from southern battlefields. They hired death specialists who found innovative methods, including arterial injection, to preserve bodies for the journey home. After the Civil War, increasingly more undertakers began to experiment with embalming as an alternative mode of preservation. By the early decades of the twentieth century, embalming had become a standard practice in much of the country. American undertakers, many of whom had connections with the furniture industry and had a growing interest in the production of coffins, began to focus on the transformed appearance of the body. Embalming relied on theories about public health and sanitation with many contending that embalmed bodies posed less of a threat to the health of a community than bodies left to rot in the ground naturally. A modern funeral aesthetic emerged based on chemical company assertions about the value of providing mourners with a pleasing and well-preserved corpse. Abraham Lincoln’s embalming had presented a striking image, and families of deceased Civil War soldiers were likewise impressed by the preservation of the bodies of those killed in the war. Embalming helped lead to the acceptance of alternatives to direct burial. One U.S. doctor—accurately or inaccurately—linked the spread of disease in his community to local burials. He claimed that the pine boxes used to lay bodies to rest were not enough to contain the disease-causing matter of the corpses, which then mixed with groundwater to infect the living. In response, he built the U.S.’s first crematorium. However, embalming burgeoned on a mythology that the current practices were a technological culmination of ancient sacred rites dating back to ancient Egypt. Morticians maintained that most Americans did not want to handle their dead or prepare them for burial. The funeral of an embalmed corpse offered a last look and provided the bereaved with the confirmation that death had occurred. Gazing at the final remains initiated a process of healing. The funeral offered those in grief a lasting image of an agreeable looking body in repose which erased many of the negative images associated with dying. 

Ceremonies and rites have been associated with the disposal of a corpse since ancient times. The occasions of these rites were to eulogize the deceased, to petition divine favor, as well as console the bereaved. Among the various observances that evolved, oratory emerged as a preferred mode of responding to death. More than any other activity, oratory accentuated the personal qualities of the deceased as a means of reinforcing social bonds and status. The Roman funeral oration, laudatio funebris, was typically utilized by the aristocracy to furnish a public reaffirmation of the sovereignty of the Roman state, along with the prestige of the deceased’s family, and the maintenance of cultural and social hierarchies. A close relative, often a son, expatiated the funeral oration in the city forum, accompanied by a variety of public and private rituals. During the oration, the deceased’s meritorious deeds and virtues were described. The oration highlighted the virtuous acts performed in life by the dead. 

Service to Rome in public office or military rank also further reinforced the authority of the Empire. Recitation of the legendary deeds and achievements of the deceased’s ancestors showed continuity with the past. The Roman chronicler Polybius, in his Histories, recounts the benefits of an aristocratic funeral for younger citizens, noting that such orations inspired the young to emulate the comportment of the deceased. The mood of Roman funerary orations was positive. Families kept these eulogies and obituaries as a verification of moral heritage. During the later medieval period de mortuis funerary sermons, originating with Ambrose of Milan, combined Roman orations of commendation and lamentation with Christian consolation. The medieval funeral sermon occurred between the funeral mass and the burial, given in Latin for a clerical audience, and the vernacular for the lay audience. Sermons featured three main themes of death including those found in biblical scriptures, a eulogy of the deceased as a role model, and an entreaty to the living to help the dead. Medieval funeral sermons strove to celebrate the person in his or her societal role, not as an individual. The sermons did not convey a strong impression of the deceased’s individuality, but instead gave a sense of the person’s place in the community. Later funerary orations have sought to extend the dead’s journey to the other world in a series of transition rites to help structure the mourning process of survivors. Transition rather than separation became the dominant element of funerary rites, affecting both the living and the dead. 

In late antiquity, a prominent feature of the funerary rites was the conclamatio, the calling out of the deceased’s name. Numerous sarcophagi and reliefs from antiquity depict the conclamatio. The tomb of Haterii, an ancient Roman tomb dating from 79-80 C.E., is an example of this. One of the reliefs shows a funerary monument with the deceased resting upon a couch while those who stand around her call out her name. The central object is the corpse extended on a high bed or bier, at the corners of which burn four tall torches standing on the ground, while at the head and foot is a lighted oil lamp on a candelabrum of smaller dimensions. Below, at either of the two front corners of the bier, is a small flaming vessel, probably the acerra which was used for burning incense before the dead. In the personages who assist at the scene are the relatives of the deceased, the praeficae or hired mourners, and various attendants, one of whom is laying a wreath on the corpse, which is already crowned, while another on the right is about to throw more incense on to the acerra. During the conclamatio the mourners would continue to throw incense until the actual burial. If the deceased were to be cremated, the conclamatio continued until the pyre was doused, often with wine and water. People who were cremated often had a piece of flesh removed to be buried in the earth. Servius, in his commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid (Vergilii Aeneidem commentarii) says that the purpose of calling out the name was simply to make sure the assumed deceased were indeed dead. Additionally the conclamatio served an apotropaic purpose of keeping the spirits of the deceased from remaining in the house which also seems to have been the purpose of the loud music and dirges at the funerals. The musicians can be seen on the Haterii relief in the lower left corner. Wealthy families would hire professional musicians and professional mourners to lament at funerals. Despite its popularity in Rome, there are no instances of a conclamatio in any early Christian literature. Funeral dirges were replaced by the antiphonal singing of the Psalms. 1 Thessalonians (4:16), also states that loud trumpets should not be played at a Christian funeral lest the buried Christian miss the trumpet of the angel: 

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 

Because the Christians had abandoned the traditional Roman and Greek views of the afterlife which, in the late ancient world, were numerous, they had no reason to participate in those particular mourning customs that had developed around traditional Roman beliefs. Conclamatio, amongst the ancient Romans, was similar to the Irish howl over the dead and, as in Ireland, women led the funeral cortège, weeping ostentatiously and gesticulating. “One not howled over” (corpus nondum conclamatum) meant one at the point of death whereas “one howled for” (conclamatio est) was one already deceased. Virgil notes that such ululation was a Phœnician custom and therefore makes the palace ring with howls when Dido burnt herself to death: Lamentis, gemituque, et fœmineo ululato, Texta fremunt (Æneid, iv. 687). 

The Romans believed that the soul cannot rest until the body was laid to rest. Until then, the spirit was supposed to haunt its home because it was unhappy. The term justa facere, meaning doing the right things, refers to the respect for the rites of the dead. If the body cannot be recovered, then a cenotaphium, an empty tomb was used for the funeral rites. If a Roman citizen happened upon an unburied, dead citizen, they were obligated to perform the necessary rites. If the body could not be properly buried, then three handfuls of dust were scattered on the body. In the classical times, tombs were believed to be a home for the dead, and thus were not completely cut off from the living. There were numerous burials grounds with various sizes and shapes. In early times, the tomb was often shaped like an early Roman house. As the tombs got larger, the burial grounds would often include shelters, arbors, summerhouses, along with trees, flowers, wells, and cisterns. Some were even big enough to accommodate houses and other buildings for slaves and freedmen. These larger domatomorphic edifices were used for anniversary feasts as well as cremation sites. There were many types of tombs as well. There were monuments, which were subdivided into altars and temples. There were memorial arches and niches. There were also tombs without a sepulchral chamber, where the burial was beside the monument. In this latter case, there would be a lead pipe or tube attached to an underground receptacle for offerings of wine and milk. After the development of family tombs, columbaria, or dovecotes, were created to house many urns in a small space. This was often a result of high land prices, making private burials for the poor impossible. Some columbaria, having the capacity of holding a thousand urns, were often underground and rectangular. The niches would be placed in a grid- like format with a podium extended at the base of the wall. Occasionally sarcophagi were placed under the floor as well as in niches under the stairway. Wooden galleries might also have been present if the columbarium was high enough. Light was provided by small windows near the ceiling with the walls and floors usually decorated. Over the entrance, the names of the owners, the date, time of erection, or other information would be given. In some columbaria, the lower niches were rectangular, while the higher ones were arched. A niche could hold up to four urns in two sets, the one in the back raised a little. There would be a titulus, a marble plaque with the owner’s name(s). A family requiring more than one niche would often surround their niches with wall decorations or pillars, suggesting a temple’s entrance. The value of niches was dependent on the position, with the higher ones costing more than the lower ones and the cheapest ones under the stairway. When the ashes had been placed in the urns, they were sealed and affixed to the niches. Small openings were made for offerings. On the urns there would be the person’s name, and the day and month of death, but never the year. After the burial, there were the Nine Days of Sorrow (sacrificium novediale). After the ashes dried, family members went to the ustrinum (the site of the funeral pyre) privately, where the ashes would be placed in jars of earthenware, glass, alabaster, or bronze and the ashes would be brought into the sepulcher. At the end of the nine days the heirs formally entered on the inheritance. Afterwards, immediate family members observed ten months of mourning, with distant relatives observing eight months. The Romans believed that by observing these ceremonies, the peace of the departed souls was secured and the deceased would rest happily. 

Ghost lore has an extensive and vibrant history. The word ghost has existed since the late sixteenth century. The word derives from the old English antecedent, gast, and later evolved into proto-Germanic gaistaz. In the New Testament, Matthew (12:43-44) gives the description: 

When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places
seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ 

One belief concerning ghosts is that they are composed of a misty, airy, or subtle material. For some time, the term ghost has signified the disembodied spirit of a deceased person. Earlier meanings still adhere to this word. Gast originally referred to a terrifying rage. A person who experiences shock and terror can still be described as aghast. A ghost is created in part by way of spirit, and spirit by way of breath. The book of Genesis states that God breathed into an inert form, and the creature then stirred with life. Similarly a newborn becomes living in drawing its first breath. Each dying person leaves the world by exhaling the last breath, sometimes depicted as the soul. The breath is seen as life. Expelling the final breath is giving up the ghost. The spirit departs while the body stays behind. Traditionally, spirit was breath, but more than breath. The spirit was believed to be a subtle, immaterial essence that departs from a person at death. The essence of theological dualism is the belief that a person is composed of a material, perishable body and an immaterial, imperishable essence. Both the Greeks and the Christians maintained that imagination, judgment, appreciation of beauty, and the moral senses were functions of the spirit within humans. The spirit is an individual’s divine or higher self, something which survives bodily death and often referred to as the soul. Ghosts, however, do not necessarily emanate from a laudable spirit from
within. Many cultures believe in assorted spirits that may accompany the living. This spirit is a pall or duplicate image of the physical body. The German term doppelganger clearly conveys the idea of a second spirit that moves mysteriously through one’s life. This shadow spirit is apt to leave the body from time to time and linger around a person’s place of death and burial. This spirit or ghost might be either a blessed spirit on a mission of mercy, or the tortured and malevolent image of a body that suffered an anguished death. Contrasting beliefs about ghosts have long coexisted. A good ghost appears to be related to the higher spirit of a deceased person while a menacing ghost might be the treacherous doppelganger of a higher soul that has turned evil. Thus, two opposing ghostly prototypes exist either as the angry ghost, dangerous because it is angry about being dead, having been killed in an unacceptable way, having been treated badly by family and community, or just plain inveterate nastiness; and the emotionally neutral ghost, a spiritual essence of the deceased that lingers or returns in order to warn, comfort, inspire, and protect the living in a harmless fashion. Similarly, ghosts themselves can have mixed feelings. There are lost souls who cannot find rest, and others, like Wagner’s Der Fliegende Hollander, who are condemned to a weary and aimless exile that can end only with the discovery of pure love. Such sad ghosts are capable of either good or evil, depending on how they are treated. Funeral rites and prayers often function to provide safe guidance for the soul of the deceased and prevent it from lingering or returning as a dangerous ghost. Candles or torches have been used to help guide the departing soul while discouraging wandering evil spirits from entering the corpse or its attendants. Elaborate precautions have been taken when a person has died by violence. An executed murderer often had all his body orifices sealed and his limbs amputated so the vengeful ghost cannot return to continue its evil career. The English enforced laws to combat suicides because they feared ghosts. Superstition held that a suicide victim’s spirit could return to haunt their home after death and, in order to prevent these spirits from roaming the town, the bodies of suicide victims were buried at crossroads. It was believed that being buried in such a manner would confuse the restless soul and prevent them from finding their way back home. A further safety measure included driving a stake through the corpse’s heart. 

There is more than one way in which a ghost can present itself. The visual visitation is most common. Visible ghosts are often elusive, appearing only in glimpses, but sometimes lingering. Apparitions include ghosts of deceased persons but can also represent living people who are physically absent, as well as animals, objects, and unusual beings that are without classification. Phantoms may include visions of either a deceased or an absent living person. Specter and shade are more archaic terms to refer to ghosts or spirits. Some ghosts are heard rather than seen. Poltergeists, or noisy ghosts, are notorious for dragging their chains, dropping dishes from a shelf, or even hurling objects across a room. Unseen spirits may communicate by rapping on walls or tables. In reports of haunted houses, poltergeists are usually the chief perpetrators. However, a more subtle type of ghost is neither seen nor heard. One feels its presence. This presence is most common among the recently bereaved where such visitations are a sense of the deceased’s uncanny presence. The sensed ghost was often encountered at the end of Christianity’s first millennium where mystical experiences of an invisible presence were frequently reported. Praying for the dead became a prime responsibility for Christians, and these orisons seemed to attract ghosts. Ghosts usually make solitary appearances, but during the Middle Ages hordes of ghosts were reported rising from their graves. In the nineteenth century witnesses have sworn that they beheld the apparitions of numerous slain soldiers arising from battlefields such as Gettysburg. By contrast, some people have met entire families of ghosts residing comfortably in an ordinary home where the events of former residents’ lives remain locked in the form of an aura in the house where they previously lived. These domestic ghosts have become, literally, the spirit of the house. The Bible has a virtual absence of ghosts although a ghost was conjured from the grave of Samuel by the Witch of Endor. Many reports tell of a ghost that appears in a particular location, sometimes repeatedly for generations. In some instances the witnesses identify the apparition as a person who once lived in a particular home or vicinity. Ghosts have also been encountered in the wilderness with witnesses believing that the spirit lingers for a while before undertaking its postmortem journey. Sometimes such a ghost is unable to leave until unfinished business has been completed. A roving ghost is sometimes thought to be a soul which is lost and disoriented due to having died far from home and not sanctified by purification and other mortuary rituals. The skinwalkers reported in American First Nations’ lore are among these restless souls. Scientific investigations of ghosts suggest that ghostly apparitions are perhaps a manifestation of persistent personal energy after death. As such, a ghost is not an independent, free-roaming spirit, nor is it a hallucination or trick of the mind. Rather, a ghost is a kind of after-image of the deceased person comparable to the strange flashes of a light perceived from distant stars that have long since ceased to exist. The image of an absent person may suddenly appear to a friend or family member. This image, or ghost, is not a vague, wispy apparition but seems to be the very person. In some reports, such a ghost appears at the time of the person’s death, and sometimes thousands of miles away. 

There is another kind of ghost, however, whose origin is an unfortunate rebirth. Hungry ghosts (Sanskrit preta, Tibetan yi dwags, Chinese e-kuei) are Buddhist spirits who are in constant torment because they are starving and thirsty but cannot receive nourishment. Whatever they try to eat or drink bursts into fire and then turns to ashes. In the Ullambana Sutra, there is a descriptive account of a Buddhist monk named Maudgalyāyana, originally a Brahmin youth who was later ordained, and became one of the Buddha’s chief disciples. Maudgalyāyana was known for having clairvoyant powers which was an uncommon trait amongst monks as well as laity. As he grew older, Maudgalyāyana began to think deeply of his deceased parents, and wondered what had happened to them. He used his clairvoyance to see where they were reborn and found his father in the heavenly realms. However, his mother had been reborn in a lower realm, known as the Avici Hell, or the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. His mother had been greedy with the money Maudgalyāyana had left her. He had instructed her to kindly host any Buddhist monks that ever came her way, but instead she withheld her kindness and her money. It was for this reason she was reborn in the realm of pretas. 

Maudgalyāyana eased his mother’s suffering by receiving the instructions of feeding pretas from the Buddha. The Buddha instructed Maudgalyāyana to place pieces of food on a clean plate, recite a specific mantra seven times to bless the food, snap his fingers to call out to the deceased and finally tip the food onto clean ground. By doing so, the preta’s hunger would be relieved. Through these merits, his mother was able to be reborn as a dog under the care of a noble family. The Chinese text of the Divine Dharani Sutra for Saving Hungry Ghosts with Burning Faces (Chiu mien-jan e-kuei t’o-lo-ni shen-chou ching) offers hope for these unfortunate ghosts. The Festival of Ghosts includes a ritual designed specifically to provide such spirits with sanctified water, accompanied by chant and magic, to release the ghosts from their terrible plight. The Ghost Festival is held during the seventh month of the Chinese calendar. It also falls at the same time as a full moon, the new season of the fall harvest, the peak of Buddhist monastic asceticism, the rebirth of ancestors, and the assembly of the local community. To Mahayana Buddhists, the seventh lunar month is a month of joy. This is because the fifteenth day of the seventh month is often known as the Buddha’s joyful day and the day of rejoice for monks. The origins of the Buddha’s joyful day can be found in various scriptures. When the Buddha was alive, his disciples meditated in the forests of India during the rainy season of summer. Three months later, on the fifteen day of the seventh month, they would emerge from the forests to celebrate the completion of their meditation and report their progress to the Buddha. Also during this month, the gates of hell are opened and ghosts are free to roam the earth where they seek food and entertainment. These ghosts are believed to be ancestors of those who forgot to pay tribute to them after they died, or those who were never given a proper farewell ritual. In Chinese culture, the fifteenth day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar is called Ghost Day and the seventh month in general is regarded as the Ghost Month, in which ghosts and spirits, including those of the deceased ancestors, come out from the lower realm. Distinct from both the Qingming Festival (in spring) and Double Ninth Festival (in autumn) in which living descendants pay homage to their deceased ancestors, during Ghost Festival, the deceased are believed to visit the living. During this time, family members offer prayers to their deceased relatives, offer food and drink and burn hell bank notes and other forms of joss paper. Families also pay tribute to other unknown wandering ghosts so that these homeless souls do not intrude on their descendants’ lives and bring misfortune. A large feast is held for the ghosts on the fourteenth day of the seventh month, when people bring samples of food and place them on an offering table to please the ghosts and ward off bad luck. In some East Asian countries live performances are held and everyone is invited to attend. The first row of seats is reserved for the ghosts to sit. The shows are always put on at night and at high volumes as sound is believed to attract and please the ghosts. During the evening, incense is burnt in front of household doors. Incense is associated with prosperity in Chinese culture, so families believe that there is more good fortune in burning an abundance of incense at this time. During the festival, some shops are closed to leave the streets open for the ghosts. In the middle of each street stands an altar of incense with fresh fruit and other offerings displayed on it. Fourteen days after the festival, to make sure all the hungry ghosts find their way back to the underworld, people float water lanterns and set lanterns outside their houses. Sixteen hungry ghosts are said to live in specific regions of hell. Unlike other hell dwellers, they can leave hell and wander. They look through garbage and human waste on the outskirts of cities. They are said to be invisible during the daylight hours but visible at night. Some hungry ghosts can only eat corpses, or else their food burns up in their mouths. Some are described as having mouths and throats the size of a needle’s eye and a stomach the size of a mountain. Buddhists from China claim that the Ghost Festival originated with the canonical scriptures of Buddhism, but many of the visible aspects of the ceremonies originate from Chinese folk religion, and other local folk traditions. This process of syncretism is not limited to China. The ghost festival has parallels in Theravada Buddhism, such as the Cambodian Pchum Ben festival, reflecting the same assumptions about an annual opening of the gates of hell, and with the same, ultimately canonical role of King Yama. In Tang Dynasty China, the Buddhist festival Ullambana (based on the Sutra) and the Ghost Festival were mixed and celebrated together. 

The anticipation of death reveals who one really is. Intellectually, death helps to define human nature and brings people into contact with their deepest feelings, needs, and opportunities. Humans have often desired to be released from the custody of time and shed the anxiety of uncertainty over the occasion of death and other portending events. The creation of omens seems to have arisen from a desire to quell this doubt. Omens often take various forms. The prediction of approaching death may be connected with specific dreams or to the strange behavior or sudden appearance of certain animals. Crowing hens or a visit from an owl are often thought to be harbingers of death. Poe’s raven is such a portent, 

Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning— little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door 

Some omens not only predict an approaching misfortune but also disclose its location and precise circumstances. Prophecies are often sought when omens occur. The term necromancy derives from the Greek words nekros (dead) and manteia (divination). Necromancy is the evocation of the dead to augur insights into the future or other secret information. The practice is based on the belief that the deceased, free of physical limits, holds the power to obtain information that is not accessible to the living. Necromancy likely originated in ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome, but was most popular in medieval Europe. The most common form of necromancy is to summon the spirit of the corpse by sacrifices and incantations but may also occasion attempts to raise the corpse to life. The rituals demand meticulous execution and elaborate preparations involving the choice of a proper place, such as a cemetery or the ruins of an ancient monastery. Likewise efficacy is determined by the choice of the right time, usually between the hours of midnight and one in the morning using specific incantations and accessories such as bells. One of the most important elements is the use of a magic circle which protects the necromancer and his or her assistants from being harmed by provoking the dead. Often viewed as a sinister practice, necromancy was condemned by the Catholic Church and was outlawed by the Witchcraft Act of 1604 in Elizabethan England.  

Several societies evolved myths of death and resurrection built on the analogy with plant life, which emerges and then dies in an annual cycle. The Greeks told the story of Adonis, loved by both Aphrodite and the underworld goddess Persephone. When he was killed by a jealous Ares, scarlet anemones sprang up from drops of his blood. Zeus solved the rivalry between the two goddesses by decreeing that Adonis should spend half his year with Aphrodite, and half with Persephone in the underworld. Death and resurrection formed the background to the emergence of mystery religions, so-called because only initiates knew their secrets. In ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology, the phoenix was a bird associated with the Egyptian sun god Ra and the Greek god Phoibos Apollo. Unlike Poe’s raven as a harbinger of dread, the phoenix symbolized resurrection and immortality and retained its symbolic connotation of life arising anew from the ashes of death. The Romans compared the phoenix with the Eternal City, and even put it on a coin as a symbol of the undying Roman empire. According to the Egyptians, the phoenix was as large as an eagle or as a peacock, with brilliant plumage and a melodious cry. According to the Greeks, the bird lived in Arabia. Each morning at dawn the phoenix would bathe in water and sing so beautifully that the sun god would stop to listen. Both the Egyptian and the Greek traditions mention that only one phoenix could exist at any time and that it had a long life (from 500 to 1,461 years). Upon sensing its approaching death, the phoenix would build a nest of aromatic wood, set it on fire, and allow itself to be consumed by the flames. From the ashes of the pyre a new phoenix would spring to life. The new phoenix would then embalm the ashes of its predecessor in an egg of myrrh and fly to Heliopolis, the city of the sun in Egypt, where it would deposit the egg on the altar of the sun god Ra. 

Osiris was the Egyptian god of the beyond whose death and resurrection brought a guarantee of an afterlife to mortals. He was a kindly pharaoh, teaching agriculture, music, arts, and religion to his people. Jealous of his successful reign, his brother Set, with the help of accomplices, killed Osiris and took control of Egypt. However, Set’s reign was foreshortened by Isis, wife and sister of Osiris whom she brought back from the dead. A skillful magician, she transformed into a bird and gave Osiris breath by flapping her wings above him. Osiris and Isis then conceived Horus, their beloved son. Set, seething in anger, killed Osiris once again, this time by cutting his body to pieces and throwing them into the Nile river. During this act, Thoth, the god of magic and wisdom, recited an incantation as Isis, with the help of Anubis, the god with the jackal head and protector of graves and cemeteries, reconstituted Osiris’s body with bandages and embalming rites, thus creating the first mummy. Eventually, Horus avenged his father Osiris in a bloody duel with Set in which Horus lost his eye which was given as a food offering to Osiris. By using forces such as mummification and incantations to ensure immortality, early mystery religions extended the chance of a better hereafter beyond the realm of the living. Each of the ceremonies which followed after Osiris’s death became the ensuing rituals that the Egyptians performed to ensure access to an eternal life after death. Egyptians performed mummification of the body to preserve it eternally, recited incantations to facilitate access to the hereafter and provided gifts to help on this journey. The deceased’s spirit proceeded to the netherworld of Duat to appear before Osiris’s court, where Anubis weighs the soul’s good and bad actions. Here the deceased’s heart must be light as a feather, representing Ma’at, the goddess of truth and justice, to obtain salvation. Otherwise, the consequence is torment and destruction. The heart could become out of balance because of failure to follow Ma’at and any hearts heavier or lighter than her feather were rejected and eaten by Ammit, the Devourer of Souls. Those souls that passed the test would be allowed to travel toward the paradise of Aaru where they would exist in pleasure for all eternity. From belief in these forces, evolved the Mysteries of Isis, a popular cult in Ptolemaic Egypt and Rome, from the first century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E. At their initiation, devotees were told the secret name of the sun god Ra, which Isis won from him in order to revivify Osiris. They believed that knowing this name empowered them to conquer both age and sickness, and even death. 

No other example of mortuary culture stands out in world consciousness as much as the Egyptian pyramids. The first large-scale stone construction in Egypt was the funerary complex of the Third Dynasty king, Netjerikhet Djoser at Saqqara, demonstrating the strong connection between the pyramid and the royal afterlife. This monument was designed by the king’s famous vizier and overseer of works, Imhotep. 

At its center stood a step-pyramid rising in seven stages to approximately 240 feet in height. Pyramid building reached its climax during the Fourth Dynasty. The first king of the dynasty, Snofru, constructed the dynasty’s first true pyramid, but it was his son Khufu (Kheops) who built the first and largest of all the pyramids at Giza. Over 2.3 million blocks of stone averaging around 2.5 tons apiece were used to erect this enormous structure, which attained a height of about 481 feet and whose square base was 756 feet at each side. These enormous constructions placed a considerable strain on the nation’s resources, and after the Fourth Dynasty both pyramids and royal mortuary complexes decreased in scale and their construction became shoddier. After some rather small monuments at the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty, pyramids ceased to be used for royal burials. Nevertheless, the Egyptians continued to consider pyramids as the most preferable tomb form and small versions were occasionally incorporated into the superstructure of private tombs during the New Kingdom and Ramesside periods. Even though texts explain little about the meaning of the pyramids and say virtually nothing about how they were built, the evidence clearly shows that they were intended as royal funerary monuments. A combination of archaeological evidence from the sites along with some sparse textual material clearly demonstrates a connection between these monuments and the mortuary cult. There was a strong association with worship of the sun god Ra, the chief religious belief during the Old Kingdom with the pyramids’ shape showing a similarity with a sunburst. Normally the pyramid was the largest part of a vast tripartite temple enclosure whose purpose was to maintain the king’s cult, theoretically in perpetuity. The design details changed constantly, but retained essentially the same pattern. The main access to the pyramid complex was at the valley temple at the edge of the cultivation in the Nile valley, usually affording access to a canal. The valley temple was connected to the high desert plateau by a covered causeway. Finally, the pyramid precinct itself was surrounded by an enclosing wall behind which were subsidiary temples and smaller pyramids intended for the king’s soul or family members. In Egyptian religious and political ideology, the king, who was both the earthly incarnation of the god Horus and the son of the sun god Ra, was always the nexus between humanity and the realm of the gods. Therefore the pyramids were not merely royal tombs but national endeavors that assisted all Egyptians in the afterlife. 

The spirit, or force, behind the great pyramids provided a symbolic immortality to their occupants. Elsewhere in the world, similar forces brought the Greeks to the happy isles of paradise instead of gloomy Hades. Norse warriors were carried off the battlefield by Odin’s battle-maidens, the Valkyries, to the goddess Freyja’s meadow of Folkvangr, or to the everlasting feast in Odin’s mead-hall Valhalla, whereas the less valiant who died in their beds instead of the battlefield were consigned to the dismal realm of the goddess Hel. The mystery religions always promised life after death to its followers. From Iran came the cult of the creator and war god Mithra who fought and killed the primeval bull, from whose blood and marrow sprang all vegetation. Mithra eternally mediates on humankind’s behalf with his father, Ahura Mazda, the god of light, and combats the dark lord, Ahriman, the evil principle. This battle will end on Judgment Day with Mithra’s triumph. In ancient Rome, where he was known as Mithras, Mithra became the focus of a mystery religion practiced especially by soldiers. Initiation into his cult, as into that of Isis, was believed to ensure immortality. 

Historically, societies have viewed the good death as one that did not expose the community to reprisals from angry spirits or stir up confusion and discontent among the survivors. Personal sorrow was experienced when a family member died, but the community as a whole responded with a sequence of rituals intended to avoid the disasters attendant on a bad death. The Lugbara of Uganda and Zaire do not practice many rituals for birth, puberty, or marriage, but they become intensely involved in the funeral process. Death is regarded as an enemy or alien force that raids the village. Nobody just dies. Much of Lugbara life is therefore devoted to controlling or placating the evil spirits associated with death. The Lugbara articulo mortis scene shows compassion for the dying person as well as concern for the well being of the community. Nevertheless, it is a tense occasion because a bad death can leave the survivors vulnerable to the forces of evil. In many other world cultures the passage from life to death has also been regarded as a crucial transaction with the realm of gods and spirits. The populace becomes especially vulnerable at times of death and the community must support this passage with rules and rituals. These observances begin while the person is still alive and continue later when the deceased is exploring its new state of being. Dying people receive compassionate care because of close relationships but also because any situation causing a bad death is considered risky for the community. 

Other conceptions of the good death have also been around for a long time. Life was often difficult and brief in the ancient world. Patriotic and religious beliefs extolled those who chose a glorious death instead of an increasingly burdensome and uncertain life. The suicide of the Athenian philosopher Socrates is an example of a person who remained true to his principles rather than take an available escape route. His suicide is further distinguished as a death intended to serve as instruction for his followers. As he was dying from drinking hemlock, he advised his wealthy friend Crito, “Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Please, don’t forget to pay the debt.” The good death, then, might be the one that strengthens and educates the living. In contrast, the contemporary artist Jeremy Millar’s Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (The Willows), created in 2011, was a lifelike cast of the artist’s mangled body, covered in holes and lying prone on the Turner Contemporary Gallery floor in Margate U.K. It amalgamated two references, the horror story “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood, and the 1840 photograph by Hippolyte Bayard, entitled Self Portrait as a Drowned Man, in which Bayard simulated his suicide for the camera. Millar noted that “I didn’t quite realize the implications of depicting myself in such a way, and the horror of seeing oneself as if dead…was extremely upsetting. I really thought that I must be dead, as there was my corpse, which meant that I wasn’t sure who was the ’me’ who was looking at it. It was terrifying.” 

Differing objects of memory provide a background for understanding the development of tombstones and other markers of the cemetery. Markers belonging to a tradition of memento mori encourage viewers to remember death and prepare for an inevitable judgment. Such markers seek to persuade the viewer to deprecate the body and all things temporal. The memento mori markers tend to be relatively modest structures. Marker dedications of early tombstones provided only the deceased’s name, age, date of death, with less frequent dates of birth, cause of death, family or community status, and often provided nothing more than a brief inscription. During the early eighteenth century and continuing to the present are markers identifying a particular individual as the object of memory. The in memory of tradition, borrowed heavily from the memento mori tradition in size, shape, and general appearance. However, rather than instructing viewers to “remember death,” these markers emphasize the deceased, often by elucidating the emotions occasioned by the individual’ termination. Attention was given not only to the memory of the deceased but also to the work of art as a memorial. Some of the more popular motifs for this kind of marker are the steadfast animal, the ethereal angel, women and children, nature or natural phenomena, all of which were portrayed with heavy emulation of Egyptian, Greek, Gothic, and Roman sources. These memorial markers serve not as preparation for an impending death, but as a means of encouraging viewers to live aesthetically and naturally in the moment. A later form of marker may be perceived as the ignoratio mori which explicitly emphasized the deceased’s worldly achievements, social or cultural standing, and heroic actions, thereby ignoring death. 

Heaven is often perceived as a sort of afterlife, a view provoking a confidence for the deceased. Western civilizations tend to think of a heaven inhabited by angels with harps, wings, and clouds, a paradise often used as an opiate to divert people from bettering their present, earthly lives. However, a more global essence of the word heaven is the transformation of chaos into order (from the Greek kosmos, meaning ordered universe). Heaven’s attributes are usually joy, contentment, harmony, compassion, bliss, community, love, perhaps a vision of deity, or even the deification of the deceased. Different languages have different words for heaven. The concepts behind these words vary among different religions and even within each religion. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and innumerable other religions display a panoply of beliefs. Heaven is not necessarily an afterlife but is the concept of a joyful existence beyond the plane of human ordinary thought, feelings, and perceptions. As such, heaven is perceived as a new life or different life for the deceased. The concept is frequently expressed as afterlife which suggests a timeless, eternal, or transcendent life, and as a state of existence in which humans can live a life free of the difficulties of their present lives. Beliefs in a life different from what humans daily experience appeared at least as early as the Neolithic period. Primal religions were frequently characterized by belief in a world other than, or beyond, physical life, a place or time (the Australian Aboriginal dreamtime where an individual’s entire ancestry exists as one) of a different, often greater, reality than that of the physical world. In this context, heaven was accompanied by the belief that humans have contact with that other world both during life and after death. Shamans, oracles, and dreams could be consulted in order for the living to be in touch with the other life. The spirits of the dead remained with the living or entered that other life where the living would eventually join them. Burials often included artifacts that the deceased would use in the other, or heavenly, world. The other world could be a place or a state of being. Many traditions affirmed that a primal cosmic order was deformed by the actions of ignorant humans or deities. In western traditions this order was expressed in a chronological story which begins with a harmonious paradise. This paradise is corrupted by a conscious choice made by humanity (e.g. Adam and Eve) to reject that harmony and thereby disrupt the cosmos. At the end of time, harmony will be restored. In that sense, paradise was where humankind begins and heaven where humankind ends, but often the two were blended and taken as synonyms. In ancient Egypt, cosmic order and justice (ma’at) prevailed, but it could be temporarily distorted by human evil. The ka (spirit of the dead person) descends into the underworld to be judged by the gods (specifically Anubis). The unjust were tormented in scorching heat, while those living in accordance with ma’at rose into the eternal realm of the gods. Ancient Mesopotamian religion had virtually no concept of heaven. The dead were doomed to unending gloom and wretchedness in the darkness only slightly beneath the surface of the earth, with the dubious consolation that the rich and powerful in earthly life would have a less miserable status in the afterlife. There were exceptions in the ancient world such as the Sumerian work, The Death of Urnamma, which describes the spirits of the dead rejoicing and feasting after the ruler Urnamma’s arrival in the netherworld. One of the most vivid portrayals of the netherworld describes a subterranean great city (Sumerian iri gal) protected by seven walls and gates where the spirits of the dead dwell. The community of spirits living in the great city was called arallu in Akkadian and ganzer in Sumerian. Paralleling the Mesopotamian idea of divine authority in heaven and earth, the realm of the dead was governed by particular deities who were ranked in hierarchical order with a supreme chief at their head. The goddess Ereshkigal (mistress of the great earth) was queen of this netherworld. In the Babylonian Atrahasis epic, the gods created humans by mixing clay with the blood of a insurgent deity named We-ilu who was specifically slaughtered for the occasion. Humans therefore contained both an earthly and a divine component. Yet the divine element did not mean that humans were immortal. Rather, Enki (Akkadian Ea), the Sumerian deity of wisdom and magic, ordained death for humans from their very inception. Mortality defined the fundamental human condition, and is even described as the destiny (Akkadian šimtu) of mankind. In Mesopotamian conceptions of the afterlife, life did not end after physical death but continued in the form of an eṭemmu, a spirit or ghost dwelling in the netherworld. Furthermore, physical death did not sever the relationship between living and deceased but reinforced their bond through a set of mutual obligations. Just as the well being of the ghost in the netherworld was contingent upon offerings from the living, so too was the well being of the living contingent upon on the proper propitiations of the dead. 

The major religions and spiritual practices of the east had less defined concepts of heaven and hell than the western Abrahamic and monotheist religions because their distinction between good and evil tended to be less sharp. The first great period of Hinduism was that of the Vedas, (ca. 1500 to 1000 B.C.E). In Vedic religion, the dead, who retained personal consciousness, went to a lush green place with beautiful music. Those more devout and observant of ritual were closest to the gods while those who were less observant in ritual remained farther away. Between about 700 and 100 B.C.E., the sacred scriptures of the Upanishads reshaped Hinduism. They taught that heaven was free from maya (illusion), which confined humanity from a true reality as the living were submerged in a deluge of desire, pain, and suffering inherent in earthly life. Freedom from maya was obtained through knowledge and through the practice of spiritual disciplines known as yogas. Hinduism affirmed that souls, having entered the world, were bound to a long series of rebirths. The deeds of their lives formed a tendency of character, which they could improve or impair in future lives. Heaven became merely a transitory state between rebirths. Ritual remained central as, later, devotion to a particular god or goddess, such as Krishna or Durga, became a way of escaping the cycle of rebirth. True heaven was union with Brahman (the ultimate divine principle), in which consciousness of the self disappeared. In this state, known as samadhi, a non-dualistic state of consciousness in which the experiencing subject becomes one with the experienced object, the soul was reabsorbed into the infinity of being, similar to a drop of water merging with the sea. This belief is similar to the dzog chen traditions of Tibetan Buddhism in which the consciousness of the practitioner transforms into the object of enlightenment through development and completion stages of meditation. Buddhism, partially drawing from early Hindu culture, asserted a state of cyclical flux known as samsara. Samsara results in a rebirth of sentient beings whose incarnations are characterized by suffering, craving, and impermanence. A person’s actions, karma, produce results in future lives, which can be improved through meritorious deeds. Ultimate heaven, nirvana, is the escape from the cycle of samsara into a union with true reality. Nirvana is the extinction of all concerns, desires, and fears, thereby producing a complete union with ultimate reality beyond human comprehension. This requires the practice of meditation and detachment—from objects, from people, and from the self. Buddhism has no concept of individual immortality. The Udānavarga, a collection of aphorisms attributed to the Buddha and his disciples, states: 

The end of accumulation is dissipation, The end of ascending is descending, The end of meeting is parting,
The end of life is death. 

The atman (soul) of Hinduism is seen by Buddhists as illusory and is immortal only as part of the world soul. The individual is simply a spark as a part of a fire. Elsewhere in Asia, Taoism was a syncretistic blend of philosophical, shamanistic, and popular religion. Virtue, for Taoists, consists in negating the conviction that an individual has any meaning apart from the whole society or world. Taoism, which believed in no other world beyond this one, influenced Confucianism. Heaven was the harmony of being, not a habitation for humans or gods. Confucianism maintains accord with that harmony in human society, particularly the family. However, Confucianism holds a definite belief in immortality concerning the worship of ancestors, who are believed to continue with their earthly family in the present life. 

Reductionism, or the belief that the only truth is scientific truth, permeates contemporary thought, adding to skepticism, since heaven is not locatable in the space- time continuum. Modern concepts of heaven are so diverse that skepticism on the overt level is natural. Yet statements about heaven appear to be true if are they are taken, not as scientific or historical statements about space-time, but rather as metaphors for more diverse validity beyond that conceived by materialists, reductionists, and those maintaining that truth is exclusively to be found in the scientific observation of phenomena. As Albert Einstein observed, 

…he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. 

Modern affluence, encouraging faith in acquisition of objects and power, along with alienation from nature have caused heaven to fade. Yet it is a deeply rooted longing for explanation, for a greater understanding of the cosmos, of other people, and of the self, and for greater knowledge and love than are comprised in this current life that gives heaven a significance. No human concept can possibly contain the fullness of reality. In considering the reality of death, there is no evidence against the existence of heaven, and hundreds of generations of wise, sensitive, and knowledgeable people have affirmed it and claimed its validity. 

In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman of the dead. The messenger of the gods, Hermes, brings Charon the souls of the deceased. Charon then ferries these souls across the river Acheron to Hades. Only the dead who are properly buried or burned and who pay the obolus (silver coin) for their passage are accepted on his boat. Thus in ancient Greek burial rites the corpse always had an obolus placed under the tongue. Charon does not hesitate to throw out of his boat the souls whose bodies received improper burial or cremation. After acceptance on the boat, Charon ferries the deceased across the Styx, one of the five rivers of the underworld that separate Hades from the world of the living. These five rivers of Hell are Acheron, the river of woe, Cocytus, the river of lamentation, Phlegethon, the river of fire, Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and finally, Styx. The word styx comes from the Greek word stugein, which means “hateful” and expresses the horror of death. Alexander the Great was believed to have been poisoned by Styx water. The classical Greek concept of Hades, domos haidou, was a land of the dead and a place of discarnate shadows. Homer’s Odyssey portrays mighty heroes being rendered into pathetic wraiths, desperately thirsting after life, waiting for the grave offerings that their relatives would offer at their tombs. Hades was a dark and dismal realm in which bodiless ghosts flitted across the grey fields of asphodel flowers, whining and squealing as Mercury, the healer of sorrow, leads them down into the dark abode of death. Located at the end of the earth, Hades was conceived to be on the far western shore of the earth-encircling river Okeanos, beyond the gates of the sun, and the land of dreams. It is bordered by the Akherousian lake and the five rivers including the Styx. The judge, Minos, receives the dead and sentences the most wicked to eternal torment. In the classical period, the mystic Orphic and Pythagorean prophets modified the realm of the dead to include an Elysian paradise for the good, and a Tartarean hell for the wicked. Hesiod describes the realm of Hades as a dark, dank realm, located at the western edge of the flat earth, beyond the sea Okeanos and the setting sun. The Hades of Hesiod is wrapped in the mists of Erebos (darkness). It is a place where the great dome of heaven descends to rest upon the earth, and where, from below, the walls of the hell of Tartaros rise up to enclose the cosmic pit. The river Styx, broken from the Okeanos, circles the border of Hades. It is lined with silver pillars which rise to support the cavernous roof of the descending sky. Within the realm are found the homes of Night and Day, Sleep and Death, and the palace of the underworld deities, Hades and Persephone. This netherworld is guarded by the fierce hound Cerberus. The great pit of Tartaros descends beneath Hades to a depth matching the span between heaven and earth. The sole access to the pit lies beyond Hades on the rim of the earth. Here the edge is secured with a surrounding wall of bronze with a single set of gates providing the only entrance. According to Greek myth, Orpheus is one of the few who descended into Hell and lived to tell about it. The son of Oeagrus, the king of Thrace, and the muse Calliope, Orpheus is famous for his musical and poetic gifts inherited from the god Apollo and the Muses. In his Pythian Odes, the Greek poet Pindar calls Orpheus “the father of songs” and the odes Orpheus created were so charming that upon hearing them, wild animals became quiet, and trees and rocks began to move. Orpheus fell in love with the nymph Eurydice and married her, but she died suddenly from a snake bite. In despair Orpheus followed Eurydice into Hades to bring her back. His music and lyrics enchanted Hades’ protectors, and the gods of Hades were persuaded to bring the dead wife back to life. One stipulation of Eurydice’s return was that Orpheus could not look back at her until he reached the entrance to Hades. Despite this condition however, Orpheus looked back to see whether Eurydice was following him and, as a result, lost her forever. Orpheus’s death resulted from the Thracian women, jealous of his love and fidelity toward his deceased wife and hurt by his indifference, tore his body to pieces and threw his head and lyre into the river Hebrus. Still singing mournful songs, the head of Orpheus floated to the the isle of Lesbos, the cradle of lyric poetry, where he was considered an initiate who retained secrets of the afterlife, having brought back revelations from his descent into Hell. The magic spell created by Orpheus’s music is described by Virgil in book four of the Georgics in which Ixion was punished by Zeus and tied to a winged flaming wheel that was always spinning, first in the sky and then in Tartarus. Only when Orpheus came down to the Underworld to rescue Eurydice did it stop spinning because of the music Orpheus was playing: 

The House of the Dead itself was stupefied, and innermost Tartarus, and the Furies, with dark snakes twined in their hair, and Cerberus held his three mouths gaping wide, and the whirling of Ixion’s wheel stopped in the wind. (Quin ipsae stupuere domus atque intima Leti Tartara caeruleosque implexae crinibus anguis Eumenides, tenuitque inhians tria Cerberus ora, Atque Ixionii vento rota constitit orbis.) 

The classical descriptions of Hades were borrowed by Christians as one of the images for hell. The earliest iconic images of the Resurrection, in Byzantine art, depict Christ descending into Hades, breaking down the doors and liberating the souls of all those who had been consigned to imprisonment before his incarnation. Having infiltrated the realm of darkness, the risen Christ is shown stretching out a hand to Adam and Eve, to lift them from their tombs, while other righteous members of the time before his coming wait in line to be taken to heaven. Earlier, the prophet Isaiah had used the image of a fire that falls upon the wicked and established it for later use (Isaiah 66:24). The enemy raids that inflicted destructive fires and suffering on ancient Israel were real enough to need little explanation. The image of punishing fire thus became associated in the prophetic literature with unfaithfulness as it was being corrected by God, whose anger was temporary, and who, after the devastation, would restore his people to peace and favor: 

And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh. 

Jesus explicitly quoted Isaiah’s image of the fire burning day and night, and the worm incessantly feeding on the bloated corpses of the fallen: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched (Mark 9:44). As in the prophecies of Isaiah, when God came to vindicate Israel, he would make a radical separation of the good and the wicked. Jesus also used the idea of Gehenna as a vision of hell. Gehenna was the valley of Hinnom, a narrow wasteland marking out the plateau on which Jerusalem was built. It was a biblical symbol of everything opposed to God, which would be purified when God made his judgment on the evils of the earth. Gehenna had been the place in ancient times where some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem had offered their own children in sacrifice to the god Moloch. The King Josiah made the valley into the place of detritus incineration where the bodies of criminals were thrown. In Jesus’s teaching, Gehenna symbolized the desolate state of all who fall under the wrathful judgment of God. The burning of endless fires in a stinking wasteland that symbolized human folly and wickedness was an early figurative image of hell as well as a literal cemetery used for cremation. However, Christian theologians gradually acceded to the subduing of the Hellenistic notions of Hades, and its imagery of the burning fires of Gehenna or the sea of flames. Later Greek theologians such as Origen of Alexandria argued that the words of Jesus, describing the fire of Gehenna as eternal (aionios), did not simply mean endless but more contextually belonging to the next age. In his Contra Celsum (5:15) Origen suggests that the idea of hell was a doctrine intended only “for the simple who needed threats to bring them to order.” Because of its vivid representation, and the increasingly static graphic imagination of later Christian centuries, hell came to be associated with an image of God as the tormentor of souls in some eternal horror. The apocalyptic book of Revelation of John, whose image of the lake of fire, where the dark angels were punished by God, exercised a profound hold on the Western churches, whereas the Byzantine and Eastern churches never afforded the book of Revelation the same attention as did the West, and the doomsday visions of the medieval period never entered the Eastern Orthodox consciousness to the same extent. 

Repha’im are residents of the Netherworld who reside in She’ol. She’ol is translated as grave, pit, or abode of the dead, and is the Hebrew term for the common grave of humans, or the underworld. It is a place of darkness to which all the dead go, both the righteous and the unrighteous, regardless of the moral choices made in life, a place of stillness and darkness cut off from life and from God. The inhabitants of Sheol were the shades (repha’im), entities without personality or strength. Under some circumstances they are thought to be able to be contacted by the living, as the Witch of Endor contacts the shade of Samuel for Saul. However, such necromantic practices were forbidden as shown in Deuteronomy (18:10-11) which gives the following interdiction: 

There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. 

In Ugarit’s cult of the dead, beings called rapi’uma, the long dead, and malakuma, recently dead kings, were invoked in a funeral liturgy, presented with oblations, and asked to provide blessings for the reign of the current king. The many references to repha’im in the Tanakh involving She’ol and dead spirits strongly suggests that many ancient Israelites imagined the spirits of the dead as playing an active and important role in securing blessings, healing, or other benefits in the lives of the living. The Valley of Rephaim (Emeq Rephaim) descends southwest from Jerusalem to the Valley of Elah below. It is an ancient route from the coastal plain to the Judean Hills named after a legendary race of giants known as Nephilim. Cotton Mather believed that fossilized leg bones and teeth discovered near Albany, New York, in 1705 were the remains of Nephilim who perished in a great flood. However, these fossils have since been identified as mastodon remains. The tales of the Nephilim are probably based on aspects of the apkallu tradition. The apkallu in Sumerian mythology were seven legendary culture heroes from before the Flood, who were of human descent, but possessing extraordinary wisdom from the gods. Originally, the apkallu were amphibious half-fish, half-human creatures, who emerged from the oceans to live with the early human beings and teach them the arts and other aspects of civilization such as writing, law, temple and city building and agriculture. These creatures remained with human beings after teaching them the ways of civilization, and served as advisors to the kings. Enoch, the father of Methuselah and the great-grandfather of Noah, was believed to be an apkallu. Genesis (6:4) states: 

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. 

The Nephilim were a hybrid race between two distinct beings which caused God to create the Flood. In Genesis, where the global flood is described, it states that the Nephilim were also on earth after the flood. Many of the descriptions of giants in the Bible are references to Nephilim bloodlines. Numbers (13:33) gives the description: 

And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight. 

Scripture describes how the tribes of giants were fought and destroyed by the tribes of normal humans, including the Israelites, who replaced them. Moses killed Og, king of the giant Repha’im who lived on the Golan heights near Mt. Hermon. Og had a bed nine cubits long and was called the last remnant of the giants. Og may be the source of Orcus, the Roman god of the underworld, with the word later becoming ogre in the French and subsequent English languages. Thus, as inhabitants of She’ol, the netherworld may be perceived as filled with both giants and ogres. The Romans sometimes conflated Orcus with other gods such as Pluto and Hades, the gods associated with the land of the dead. The name Orcus seems to have been given to his evil and punishing side, as the god who tormented evildoers in the afterlife. Like the name Hades, Orcus could also mean the land of the dead. The god Orcus was chiefly worshipped in rural areas with no official cult in the cities. This remoteness allowed him to survive in the countryside long after the more prevalent gods had ceased to be worshipped. He survived as a folk figure into the Middle Ages, and aspects of his worship were transmuted into the wild man festivals held in rural parts of Europe through modern times, although much of what is known about the celebrations associated with Orcus come from medieval sources. From Orcus’s association with death and the underworld, his name came to be used for demons and other netherworld monsters, particularly in Italian where orco refers to a kind of monster found in fairy-tales that feeds on human flesh. 

Early theologians reflected on the obscurities concerning the state of the soul after death and deduced that between the death and the final judgment at the end of time there would be an intermediate state. During this state the souls of the dead inhabited a place where, according to their deeds, they were either happy or wretched. Those souls requiring purification of their past deeds would experience a cleansing fire (purgatorium) more severe than those more pious before death. The Greek theologians generally regarded the posthumous purification by fire in a spiritual sense of psychic transfiguration into a higher condition. Clement and Origen of Alexandria envisaged that the soul of the departed would be made to learn all the things it had refused to learn on the earth through the pedagogy of correcting angels until the soul had been purified enough to ascend closer to God. Gregory of Nazianzus decreed a fearful river of fire that will purify the sinner after death. The idea of purgatorium as a place of after- death purification was distinct from the finality of the place of the elect or the damned (heaven or hell) and was later advocated by leading western theologians, particularly Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. These theorists sought some systematic order into the diffuse doctrine of the afterlife and judgment. The Latin church developed the doctrine of purgatory as a state of painful purification that would attend the souls of all those who had not reached a state of purity before their death. The Eastern Church held a simpler doctrine of the afterlife where the souls of the elect, even those who were not particularly holy, would be retained without sorrow. The afterlife as conceived in the Eastern Church was generally a happy and restful condition in which the departed souls of the faithful were not divorced from God, but waited on Judgment Day with hopeful anticipation. In the tradition of both Eastern and Western churches, the state of souls after death required the living to assist these souls in prayers, both public and private, so that God would show mercy. In the tenth century, under the influence of Odilo of Cluny, the Feast of All Souls (November 2) was established in the western calendar as a time when the living prayed for the release from sufferings of all departed Christians. The popularity of this feast helped to fix the idea of purgatory in the religious imagination. After the twelfth century, western theology further rationalized the state and purpose of purgatory as a cleansing by fire of the lesser (venial) sins. Purgatory through the later Middle Ages, became increasingly more of a dismal idea. The medieval obsession with the state of souls after death led to a flourishing of legends and narratives on the suffering of the souls in this realm of anguish, serving as a prelude to Dante’s Purgatorio. Mystics such as Catherine of Genoa made it a central theme of their visionary teachings, further establishing purgatory in the western mind. In the medieval Latin church the desire to assist the departed souls in 

their sorrow led to an escalating demand for masses and intercessions for the dead. Additionally, indulgences were held to lessen the time of suffering that the souls in purgatory would be required to undergo. Thus, the concept of purgatory, with its indulgences, became one of the early points of contention in the religious crisis known as the Reformation. 

Reformers challenged the Catholic Church’s manipulation of death and destiny to achieve power and raise revenue. Church responses to the reformers’ challenge, and the social and political alliances shaped by the debate, led to churches becoming independent of Rome. At this time society was preoccupied with death. The Roman Catholic Church occupied a central role mediating between the living and the dead, including those who were in purgatory readying themselves to enter heaven. The period of suffering in purgatory could be reduced by masses and prayers endowed by family and friends. Because it was possible to obtain a special gift of pardon, or indulgence, by the late Middle Ages indulgences had become commodities sold by the Church. The reformers asserted that God saved souls by a free, unmerited, gift of grace, not through church practices or decrees. They rejected purgatory, prayers for the dead, and the invocation of the saints, adopting an agnostic stance concerning such matters that were not directly attested to by Scripture. Their insistence that the living could no longer work on behalf of the dead brought significant changes to beliefs and practices concerning death, dying, and disposal. On their death beds Protestants no longer made provision for the repose of their souls through endowing masses, purchasing indulgences, or providing alms for the poor in order to be remembered by them in their prayers. Rather, they sought to testify to the faith they held and in which they now died. A good death was calm, peaceful, and assured. Catholic funerals had eulogized the deceased and interceded for them in their entry into eternal life. Protestants preached to the living, avoiding any suggestion of intercessions on behalf of the dead. Protestants merely remembered the deceased and sought to learn from their example. But both Catholicism and Protestantism continued to evangelize by heightening the fear of death, fostering contempt for the world and emphasizing suffering as a route to salvation. 

One of the most prevalent views of the afterlife in the ancient world was a gradual dimming of the departed spirit. According to some accounts, the piteous dead continued to become even weaker until the end of creation while others believed that the spirits dissolved as their vital essence eventually gave way. Still other interpretations suggest a force field or faded image of the person that occurs immediately after death, but soon vanishes. Witnesses are left with the feeling that something happened or somebody was there, yet have no tangible evidence to verify it. The universe itself is often viewed as alive with pulsations from the unimaginable subatomic to the unimaginably vast. Individuals pulsate as unique units for a brief time and then participate in the music of the spheres in different forms. These forms are sometimes seen as the reincarnation beliefs that exist in many world cultures. For example the Druses, a group that split from a Shiite Muslim sect, believe in reincarnation that does not include the concept of karma. Instead, they believe that God assigns souls to a series of lives in different circumstances that are generally disconnected from one another until the ultimate Judgment Day, when God sends them to heaven or hell based their actions during all the various lives. The Druses also believe that rebirth occurs immediately after death with no discarnate existence possible before being reborn as another Druse, and never as animals or other non-Druse humans. 

Society and the world itself is sometimes perceived as regenerated through death and many communal rituals are devoted to this purpose. A philosophy of continued survival holds that there is more than one possible outcome after death. A person might or might not survive death. This survival might be glorious or horrible as well as everlasting or only temporary. As such, it should not be assumed that survival of death is identical with immortality. There is no guarantee that passing through death assures the deceased a continued existence for all time or eternity. The nature of the self is believed to be a key to what happens after death because the self is always in process, always in the making. The concept of a data base has become widely known as the ability to register and store large quantities of information in electronic form. The modern world has created a digital theology in which the dead can exist as information and therefore possibly be reconstituted or resurrected in the future as a potential source of information. The idea that survival of death might operate through data bases does not appear in the sacred writings of the great religions or rituals of world societies. However, when effective retrieval and reconstitution techniques are developed, possibly through such branches of physics as cryogenics, the souls on file can be accessed and, in a sense, returned to life. The online persona of an individual can live for generations on the internet after the person’s death. A major concern would be the relationship between person and soul. Is the soul the essence of the individual or is the soul a sort of passenger-spirit that has very little to do with the individual’s unique life? In either case, there might be an immortal bodily survival (cryogenics), but not necessarily of the actual person. In such a scenario, would there be a need for a physical cemetery to form a digital memorial which would serve as an archive for retrieval? Perhaps there will eventually be a Facebook of the Dead in which tweets will come from the hereafter. 

Are humans immortal in any meaningful sense of the word? The history of religion is closely associated with beliefs in survival of death. Ancient burial pits, mounds, and tombs often included objects designed to be useful by the deceased in their next lives. From prehistory onward evidence suggests that survival belief has been widespread and dominant. Belief can be grounded on custom, authority, positive personal experience, inner knowledge, external fact, reason, or any combination of these. By faith is usually meant a certainty of belief derived from personal experience or inner knowledge. Doubt and disbelief can be occasioned by weakened or conflicted customs, discredited authority, negative personal experience, refuted or counter facts, or compelling alternative arguments. Rituals overwhelmed doubts about death and were enough for many people who lived in small societies and worshiped local gods. Intense ritual experiences helped produce the inner conviction that one had touched the sacred. Truth was therefore felt as inside the self as well as with the people and nature. Authority became a stronger force in religious belief as people organized themselves into larger coordinated structures. Religions were tightly entwined in emerging civilizations and all were beset with internal dissension on a variety of concepts and practices. Authorities, bolstered by canons of approved writings, accepted a particular view of survival while rejecting others, but questions about the survival of death lingered despite authority and tradition. Some argued that the soul is immortal despite its association with a vulnerable body because it comes from a deity who is the necessity on whom all creatures depend. Although this was an influential view, there were dissenters who argued that an immortality that survives death would have none of the characteristics of the actual person who died. Such an immortality was too abstract and distant for such critics. Immortality became an issue for society as science emerged, challenging the order of the universe as conceived by theology. Astronomers in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries made observations that contradicted official beliefs about the motions of earth, sun, and other celestial bodies. In the nineteenth century the theory of evolution led to a convulsive response on the part of established institutions. If humans are simply another kind of animal, what then of immortality? Beliefs about death were of prime importance in establishing and maintaining social order. How people thought they should live was ruled to an appreciable extent by how they hoped to fare in the next life. 

Living close to nature from ancient times to the modern era, peoples of the American First Nations knew that death from hunger, disease, or other environmental calamities was never far away. The various death customs which evolved during the journey to the Americas of Asians from Siberia either by boat or across a land bridge during the last Ice Age, gave these people the means to cope with that experience. Individual tribes maintained their own death customs and adapted them to their regional environments into which they migrated, although such rituals also often passed from one group to the other through trade and intermarriage. Many members of the First Nations believed that the souls of the dead passed into a spirit world and became part of the spiritual forces that influenced many aspects of the lives of the living. Many tribes believed in a soul that died when the body died and another soul that would wander on but eventually die. Burial customs varied widely from tribe to tribe with the indigenous tribes disposing of their dead in a variety of ways. Arctic tribes, for example, simply left their dead on the frozen ground for wild animals to devour. The ancient mound-building Hopewell societies of the upper midwestern regions placed the dead in lavishly furnished tombs. Southeastern tribes practiced secondary bone burial by digging up the corpse, cleansing the bones, and then reburying them. The northeastern Iroquois, before they formed the Five Nations Confederation in the seventeenth century, saved skeletons of the deceased for a final mass burial that included furs and ornaments for the dead to use in the afterlife. Northwestern coastal tribes put their dead in mortuary cabins or canoes fastened to poles. Southern California tribes practiced cremation. In western mountain areas tribes often deposited their dead in caves or fissures in the rocks. Nomadic tribes of the Great Plains region either buried their dead, if the ground was soft, or left the corpses on tree platforms or scaffolds. Central and south Atlantic tribes embalmed and mummified their dead. During outbreaks of diseases leading to the sudden deaths of many tribe members, survivors hurriedly cast the corpses into a mass grave or threw them into a river. Rites among First Nations often focused on assisting the deceased in the afterlife. Some tribes left food or the possessions of the deceased in or near the gravesite. Groups, such as the Nez Perce of the northwest, sacrificed wives, slaves, or the favorite horse of a dead warrior. Among many tribes, mourners, especially widows, cut their hair. Some of the Nations discarded personal ornaments or blacked their faces to honor the dead. Others gashed their arms and legs to express their grief. California tribes partook in wailing, staged long funeral ceremonies, and held a one or two year anniversary mourning ritual. Southwest Hopi wailed on the day of the death, and cried a year later. Some southwestern tribes, especially the Apache and Navajo, feared the ghosts of the deceased who were believed to be offended by the living. The nomadic Apache swiftly buried corpses and burned the deceased’s house and possessions with the mourning family purifying itself ritually and moving to a new place to escape the ghost of the dead family member. The Navajo also buried their dead quickly with little ceremony, with those exposed to a corpse having to endure a long and costly ritual purification. 

Western concepts of death have seen many alterations over the centuries. Around 600 B.C.E. the early philosophers of Greece were primarily cosmologists concerned with the origin and nature of the universe. The meaning of death was not a prominent issue in their work. The philosopher Thales described the universe as full of gods, indicating that the universe was alive without any dead or inert matter. Anaximander (610-546 B.C.E), who was Thales’s student, suggested an evolutionary mechanism for life and the human species. About death he states that, “things perish into those things from which they have their being” implying that death and demise are natural parts of the cycle of life and that all dying things return to the element from which they came (apeiron): 

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time. 

For Anaximenes, a student of Anaximander, life occurs through the breathing in of air, seen as a divine element and the nature of the soul itself. While his predecessors, Thales and Anaximander, proposed that the archai (the underlying material of the world) were water and the ambiguous substance apeiron, respectively, Anaximenes asserted that air was the primary substance of which all other things were made. Anaximenes offered the first naturalistic explanation of death. It occurs, he explains, when a creature is no longer able to respire and the outside air can no longer enter to counteract compression. Heraclitus spoke of death more than many of the pre-Socratics. For Heraclitus death was a basic feature of the universe involving a periodic consumption of the universe by fire. Heraclitus considered fire as the most fundamental element. He believed fire gave rise to the other elements and thus to all things. He regarded the soul as being a mixture of fire and water, with fire being the noble part of the soul, and water the ignoble part. A soul should therefore strive toward becoming more full of fire and less full of water. According to Heraclitus, a dry soul was best. Worldly pleasures made the soul moist, and he considered mastering one’s worldly desires to be a noble pursuit which purified the soul’s fire. Heraclitus has subsequently been interpreted as using fire metaphorically, in lieu of logos, as the origin of all things. In his cosmology, Heraclitus suggests that the whole world and each creature in it are in a constant state of flux, and each of the world’s elements live by the death of another. The processes of life and death are a necessary feature of the world, for without them the cosmos would disintegrate. Heraclitus was among the first to suggest that not all souls perish at death. Virtuous souls, he believed, may rejoin the divine spark itself. Pythagoras, the philosopher and mathematician, elaborated a doctrine of reincarnation or transmigration of the soul. In the Pythagorean view, life and death involved a progression through many series of physical forms, both human and animal, with a goal of achieving a spiritual purity which produces an ultimate reunion with the state of divine origin. The survival of the spirit after the death of the body is supported in other pre-Socratic thinkers such as Empedocles and Anaxagoras but met opposition in the materialist metaphysics of the atomists Leucippus and Democritus. The atomistic theory suggests that all things in the universe are composed of indivisible particles of matter (atomoi). At death the atoms disperse with no survival of the individual. Atomism was the last great theory of the death process offered by the philosophers before Socrates. 

With Socrates, a philosopher of the Greek agora or gathering place, the topic of death achieves more focus. If death is a state of nothingness, argues Socrates, it will be like an eternal sleep and therefore will be nothing to fear. If death is migration of the soul into another realm of true judges, then there is also nothing to fear because no evil can await a good person. Socrates concludes that the good person should be pleased knowing with certainty that nothing can harm those of virtue either in life or after death. Plato, a student of Socrates, believed that death is most definitely not an eternal sleep but rather the moment at which the soul, as the true person is finally released from its earthly prison, the body. In the Phaedo, Plato attempts to prove the immortality of the soul, offering reasons why the real philosopher should never fear the end. The Phaedo gives no less than four proofs based on two Platonic premises of a dualism in the relation between the body and soul, and the conviction that the core of true being is the soul, which survives the death of the body. The most widely debated argument is the last offered by Plato which states that the soul is incapable of death because death implies the decomposition of the physical body, but the soul, being uncompounded, cannot decompose. In his Phaedo Plato reasons that the soul is its own self moving principle and is therefore uncreated, eternal, and indestructible. The arguments in the Phaedo are offered based on the cyclical nature of life and death including knowledge that the soul could only have gained in a pre-existence; the incorporeal or spiritual nature of the soul; and the view that the soul is the essence and principle of life itself. The argument regarding the nature of the soul states that if the soul is incorporeal, it is simple or uncomposed (not made up of parts). But death is the decay and corruption of a thing into its elementary parts (decomposition). The soul, therefore, cannot die since an uncomposed entity cannot be decomposed. The logic of this argument is compelling although it depends on the premise that the soul is spiritual, not corporeal. Plato’s dualism advocates that there is the physical and changing world (to which the body belongs), and the permanent and immaterial world (to which the mind or soul belongs). The body is conceived as the prison, or temporary residence, of a soul which existed before its imprisonment and which will exist again after its release from the body at death. In this way, states Plato, the true philosopher, is always pursuing death and dying. The Dialogues likewise offers a variety of arguments for the immortality of the soul and in the Republic, Plato argues that the soul cannot be destroyed by any inherent evil or by anything external to it. Aristotle, Plato’s greatest student, did not share his mentor’s conviction about the immortality of the soul. In On the Soul (De Anima) Aristotle repudiates the Platonic dualism of soul and body, arguing that the soul is the form of the body. While Aristotle renounces Platonic dualism and consequent views on immortality, it is not certain that he believes death is the end of the soul entirely. The highest part of the soul, the purely intellectual part, is analogous to the divine and may survive death. Aristotle does not elaborate on this possibility, but it is clear that this cannot be a belief in the survival of the whole, or true, person, as in Plato’s view, since for Aristotle the person is a union of body and soul together, and at death that union no longer exists. The neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus was attracted to the Platonic metaphysics of transcendence in which the location of reality is outside of the physical, sensory world, yet existing in a suprarational, spiritual world of the Good. Plotinus used mystical phrases such as the One, All Transcending, Author at once of Being, the First, and the Indefinable to refer to this reality. Plotinus, whose views are pantheistic, was convinced that divinity is present in and throughout the entire universe, although a dualistic representation (where the divine and the created universe are seen as separate) could also be supported, given the subtleties of neoplatonic thought. Plotinus saw life in the universe as a double movement where there exists an emanation from a source, and then a return back to the divine. The human soul lives in exile on this earth, and desires the return home. One can achieve home in this life through a mystical union with the divine. One could also reach home through reincarnation (another Platonic influence) where one can achieve higher forms of life until eventually passing out of the cycle of birth and death. This emancipation of souls is accomplished only by a purification in which the soul avoids attachments to the body and sensual impulses. Porphyry of Tyre, a student of Plotinus, was an opponent of Christianity and defender of Paganism. Porphyry’s contribution to philosophy may be discovered in the fragments of Philosophy from Oracles (De Philosophia ex Oraculis Haurienda) where Porphyry relates that his master, Plotinus, had achieved a mystic state quite often in his life, and that this experience could not be given a completely rational account. 

As the Roman empire collapsed, the great thinkers of the early Middle Ages became theologians first and philosophers second. Augustine of Hippo held firm to the Christian notions of the human predicament. The human being is in a state of misery because of a diseased condition brought on by original sin, for which the chief punishment is death. In Augustine’s view, God created human beings to live according to his commandments. In the City of God, Augustine argues that should the human being live righteously, 

He should pass into the company of angels, and obtain, without the intervention of death, a blessed and endless immortality; but if he offended the Lord his God by a proud and disobedient use of his free will, he should become subject to death, and live as the beasts do, the slave of appetite, and doomed to eternal punishment after death. 

Yet Augustine, accepting Platonic dualism, believed that there is an escape from such potential misery. Augustine believed that the soul was the true person and can exist apart from the body which is endemic to earthly life, but only with God’s help and grace. As a theological anthropologist, Augustine saw the human being as a perfect unity of two substances, the soul and the body. Augustine’s favorite figure to describe this body-soul unity was marriage, caro tua, coniunx tua (your body is your wife). Initially, the two elements were in perfect harmony. However, after the fall of humanity 

they began experiencing a dramatic combat as two categorically different things in which the body became a three-dimensional object composed of the four elements, whereas the soul developed no spatial dimensions. 

The later Middle Ages saw the intellect of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) find acquiescence with the Aristotelian system which concerned the soul. This system had clear consequences for the denial of the mind-body dualism. For Aristotle, the soul was not trapped in a body but was naturally allied with it. Although this concept discouraged speculation on separation of the immortal soul from the mortal body at death, Aquinas elicits from it support for the notion of an afterlife. Since the soul is united with a particular body, at death this natural unity will be restored through a resurrection that reunites body with soul. Later, during the Renaissance, the Frenchman René Descartes (1596–1650), the father of modern philosophy, provides support for belief in an afterlife. In Discourse on Method he writes, 

Next to the error of those who deny God…there is none which is more effectual in leading feeble minds from the straight path of virtue than to imagine that…after this life we have nothing to fear or to hope for, any more than the flies or the ants. 

Descartes’s major work, the Meditations provides an argument for the immortality of the soul by suggesting a radical difference between the two substances, mind and body, noting that the mind is in no way dependent on the body for its existence. Mortality was also a consideration of the French thinker Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) who argued in his Pensées that the human being is unique in having a knowledge of death. An entirely different approach was taken later by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who provided what has come to be known as the moral argument for the immortality of the soul. Kant acknowledged that humankind cannot demonstrate, as a matter of certainty, things like the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. However, in his Critique of Practical Reason, he writes, “It is morally necessary to assume the existence of God” and that morality requires humanity to pursue a state of complete virtue (summum bonum), which is “only possible on the supposition of the immortality of the soul.” 

The twentieth century saw the rise of existentialism which tended to follow earlier theories such as those of the German Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), who had referred to death as the muse of philosophy. As such, several modern thinkers saw the human race as the product of causes which held no prevision of the end it was achieving. The origin, growth, hopes and fears, loves and beliefs, are but the result of an accidental collocations of atoms. No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave. Many contemporary thinkers appear to view all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the brightness of human genius, as being destined to extinction in a vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of human achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. The French religious existentialist Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) challenged this point of view. In Homo Viator Marcel states, “If death is the ultimate reality, value is annihilated in mere scandal, reality is pierced to the heart.” Marcel speaks of the death of man as following upon the heels of Nietzsche’s death of God. Marcel does not refer to the death of humanity as a result of a catastrophe such as a nuclear war. Rather, he refers to a radical change stemming from what he calls techniques of degradation, wherein a mortal is degraded, dehumanized, and treated as a thing or an object rather than as a person. Under this system of depersonalization, the person is already dead. However, in Being and Having, Marcel finds the possibility for optimism noting that death can be “considered as the springboard of an absolute hope.” But how can death provide hope? An essential part of one’s personhood, argued Marcel, lies in an individual’s relationship with others, for humans are intersubjective beings. While other current thinkers had focused on what death signifies to the individual, Marcel explored what death may imply as an approach to a fuller relationships with others—in particular, those that we love. For Marcel, loving transcends the world of things, and nothing that can happen to this world of things, including death, can affect the person. 

In treating the subject of death, Polynesian religions are based on experience rather than faith. Among those experiences are encounters with many different types of gods and spirits. These include human beings who have died and assumed one of several diverse forms. As such, miscarried or aborted fetuses can be transmuted into vicious demons. Neglected souls may become wandering, homeless ghosts. Respected relatives may, after death, be transformed into family gods. In Polynesia the diversity of experiences stimulates a variety of beliefs in life after death because the border between the living and the dead is more permeable than in western culture. When a person is about to die, one of his or her souls can warn the immediate family. Shortly after dying, the deceased can visit relatives and friends. Although the family of the departed prays for the soul’s successful journey to the land of the dead, the dead can linger around the living to whom they were especially attached. Elderly couples continue to converse long after one of them has died with the survivor being directed toward the new abode of the deceased beloved. According to the Polynesian belief system, the world of the living is in continual communion with the dead in which family and friends often establish methods for both detachment and attachment with the departed. The clothes and belongings of the deceased can be destroyed if they are not needed. At the wake of the deceased, the New Zealand Mâori stomp through the house to reclaim it for the living. In formal oratory, they call upon the ancestors for their blessing and reveal the existence of any unfinished business that must be resolved before the soul can depart in peace. The positive relation to the ancestors and the recently expired is one of the strengths of Polynesian culture. Genealogy provides an identity to individuals upon whom the living can call for help. An elder who has been revered as a family leader does not lose his or her love of family after death. If the family feels the need for his or her continuing care, they can strengthen the soul’s presence with offerings and prayer. Hawaiian families conduct ceremonies to transform the deceased into the body of the animal to whom the family is related. A fisherman of the shark family is guarded by his embodied relative. Children of the owl family can be protected from danger by the bird who appears to help them. Similarly, family and even friends can use body parts of the dead to create servant spirits, which lack the full personality of a family god but are obedient servants for simple tasks. Polynesian spiritual practices assure the living that souls are physical. Polynesians believe in life after death, but not necessarily immortality. At death, a soul is believed to exit the body from a tear duct and begin a journey to the place on each island where souls jump off into the land of the dead. If a soul expert feels the person should not have died, they can locate the soul and capture it between cupped hands. The soul is then reinserted under the big toe of the deceased, and massaged up the body until the person revives. On the other hand, an enemy can capture the soul and destroy it, thus annihilating the deceased. 

Belief in metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls into other living beings is ancient. In some western traditions, one of the most common location for a formerly human soul to inhabit is that of a bird. Such birds are often considered both ominous and prophetic, the rationale being that the dead, as spirits which inhabit the birds, know both past and future. At sea, such soul birds include the storm petrel (hydrobates pelagicus) which, as their name suggests, were taken as a sign of approaching bad weather, so sailors saw them as helpful and considered it unlucky to shoot one. Moreover, into the nineteenth century, many seamen believed that petrels should be spared because they harbored dead sailors’ souls. Seagulls (laridae), too, warned of an approaching storm with the belief that they cried before a disaster. As with petrels, in many European fishing communities it was thought unlucky to kill a gull and, as with petrels, some said they embodied the souls of fishermen and sailors, especially those who had drowned. Belief in gulls as soul-birds was still active in coastal districts of Great Britain and Ireland up to the late nineteenth century. Other birds were also thought to house souls. Among East Anglian fishermen, the spirits of the drowned were believed to migrate to the gannet (morus bassanus). From the eastern seaboard of the United States comes the story of a waterman on Chesapeake Bay who shot three ducks as they flew in to land. They fell into the marsh, and he could not find them. That night, a gale sprang up and blew for three days. When it was over, he returned to the marsh and in the water, where the ducks fell, lay three drowned sailors. Aboard French ships both storm petrels and shearwaters were known as âmes damnées (souls of the damned). Like some ghosts, part of their punishment after death was to continue to haunt the earth. Muslim seafarers in the nineteenth century likewise said that the Manx and Mediterranean shearwaters (puffinus puffinus and puffinus yelkouan) of the eastern Mediterranean were inhabited by damned souls, a belief suggested by their dark plumage. Deep-sea sailors believed that the albatross brought bad weather and that killing one was unlucky because the souls of sailors reposed in them. Such a fable is found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798): 

At length did cross an Albatross, Through the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God’s name. 

Coleridge is said to have based the poem on the mariner Simon Hatley’s shooting of the albatross, an act that brought doom on his ship in an episode of Captain George Shelvocke’s A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea. Although the superstition against shooting albatrosses began with Coleridge, it was never widespread as they were regularly shot at by ships’ crews, who, among other things, made their webbed feet into tobacco pouches. On land, the themes of ominousness and transmigration are attached to corvids, specifically crows and ravens, which were not always distinguished as separate birds. From classical times to the present day, the raven (corvus corax) and crow (corvus corone) have been thought birds of ill omen. A document written in England between 680 and 714 C.E. reported that once, when King Edwin (585–633 C.E. ) was on his way to church, a crow sang with an evil omen. The king stopped to listen until Bishop Paulinus had a servant shoot the bird. He later showed it to the catechumens in the church to prove that such superstitions were worthless, since the bird did not know it was its own death that it was prophesying. Elsewhere in Europe, the souls of the unbaptized were supposed to transmigrate into ravens. In Languedoc, France, it was wicked priests who turned into ravens when they died, suggested perhaps by their black garments. In Britain, traditions of metempsychosis were attached to both the raven and the red-legged crow or chough (pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) suggested in the folkloric belief that King Arthur had not died but had been enchanted into a crow or raven. Cervantes’ incurably romantic Don Quixote had heard the Arthurian legend and asked: 

Have you not read…the famous exploits of King Arthur…of whom there goes an old tradition…that this king did not die, but that by magic art he was turned into a raven; and that…he shall reign again…for which reason it cannot be proved, that, from that time to this, any Englishman has killed a raven? 

The taboo against killing ravens was still current in the English city of Cornwall at the end of the eighteenth century, when a young man with a fowling piece on his shoulder, saw a raven and fired. An old man nearby immediately rebuked him, saying that he should not have shot at the raven because Arthur lived on in that form. There is a custom of keeping six ravens at the Tower of London, instituted by King Charles II (1630–1685). The ravens are considered a palladium or national talisman assuring that, so long as there are ravens at the Tower, Britain cannot be conquered. Some anxiety was caused during World War II by rumors that the ravens had fallen silent and had not croaked for five whole days. In a biological symbiosis one organism typically shores up some weakness or deficiency of the other(s). As in such a symbiosis, the Norse god Odin, the father of all humans and gods, though in human form was imperfect by himself. A völva is a shamanic seeress in Norse paganism. In the poem Völuspá, a völva tells Odin of numerous events reaching far into the past and future, including his own doom. Amongst various earlier events, the völva mentions the self-sacrifice of Odin’s eye. Being one-eyed, although a god, he lacked depth perception, and was apparently also uninformed and forgetful. But his weaknesses were compensated by his ravens, Hugin (mind) and Munin (memory). They perched on his shoulders and reconnoitered to the ends of the earth each day to return in the evening and tell him of any news. In an collection of Old Norse poems, the Poetic Edda, Odin expresses fears that the ravens may not return from their daily flights, a possible portend of his impending death. Additionally, he also had two wolves at his side, and the man-god-raven-wolf association was like one single organism in which the ravens were the eyes, mind, and memory, and the wolves the providers of nourishment.! 

Perhaps the best place to find vampires is in the darker recesses of the human imagination. There is something about the image of the vampire that has historically both attracted and fascinated as well as frightened and repelled. Fears of being buried alive were widespread in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and understanding the vampire is a way of understanding some of the mysteries of the human psyche which have not been constructed entirely of fantasy. There is a practical aspect of the vampire that defies the exclusive categories of being dead or alive. A vampire’s biography begins with death and for much of history, it was the vampire who daringly crossed the boundaries between the living and the dead. Vampires are sometimes referred to as the undead and as revenants, reanimated corpses that drink the blood of the living to preserve their own existence. The term vampire was known in England in the late seventeenth century and entered other European languages early in the eighteenth century. Separating fact from fantasy became increasingly difficult as popular literary and theatrical vampires distanced themselves from their roots in anxiety-ridden folklore. Vampirism had a secure place in Slavic superstitions for many years before it became a household word and given the veneer of Victorian culture. To shed light on these dwellers in darkness necessitates the study of the folk vampire which precedes the the literary and commercial vampire. The folk vampire is simpler, cruder, and less appealing than his urbane relative. Folk vampires are seldom cunning or sexy. Many are just thirsty, and not always particular about their sources of nutrition. Rural vampires have been accused of rising from their graves to filch the blood of cows and other livestock. Unlike the elegant characters of the post-industrial imagination, these revenants are foul-smelling and repulsive, as might be expected from those who, partially decomposed, spend much of their time in a grave. A common feature of folk vampires is that they are rarely seen in action. The myth of the local vampire was built upon something inimical happening in the night which lead to the discovery of a corpse in its grave that did not appear sufficiently dead. The corpse might have flecks of blood on its face, especially the lips, and might seem to have changed position. An important distinction can be made among folk vampires. Some are simple, brutish, and unfortunate creatures while others are corpses that have either been vampirized by evil forces or who have willed themselves to return and wreak vengeance on those they believe have wronged them. It is this more dangerous and evil form that has attracted the most attention. Vampire hunters, accompanied by a brave representative of the church, opened suspect graves and took measures to ensure that the inhabitants would henceforth remain in place. Decapitation and driving a stake through the heart were among the more specific remedies. Literary vampires are generally more sophisticated and take better care of their appearances while among the living but their prowess is mostly an embellishment which resulted from the nineteenth century imagination. Most people have little knowledge about the normal course of postmortem changes, resulting in natural events given supernatural explanations. Some corpses decompose slowly for various reasons such as cold temperature or death by poison. Similarly, porphyria is a medical condition which produces a pale bloodless appearance. The victims are highly sensitive to sunlight and therefore are likely to adopt lifestyles resembling those of the nocturnal vampire. The vampire provides an image and focal point for all the organic recycling that occurs in nature through season after season and, perhaps, life after life. 

The phenomenon of zombies, the living dead, is an aspect of Haitian voodoo. Voodoo is more than sorcery or magic. Voodoo is a religion, cult, healing process, and body of spiritual customs. In voodoo practice, the bokor is a sorcerer who may use forces to bewitch and change a human being into a zombie. The hougan is a voodoo priest, a doctor, and the intermediary between the community and the spirit world, and also a bokor. The major difference between a hougan and a bokor is the nature of the bewitchment he or she performs. To understand the theory of zombies requires understanding the Haitian conception of the duality of the soul. The n’âmm (soul) is principally divided into two distinctive parts. These two parts are the gro bonanj (big guardian angel) and the ti bonanj (little guardian angel). The gro bonanj, which represents the consciousness and the personality, is a spiritual substance connected with the world of the living. When the individual passes away, the gro bonanj survives and joins the world of lwa (spirit) to eventually become a lwa itself. The second part of the soul, the ti bonanj, is the conscience or the spiritual energy of the person. The ti bonanj corresponds to the individuality of each human being and also corresponds to the the fear that an individual might become one of them. In Haiti, a country that had a long period of slavery with the Spanish and French colonizations, the fear of becoming enslaved has remained a terrifying part of the collective consciousness. South Africa is home to the legend of the tokoloshe, a nasty golem capable of all sorts of vicious behavior. A tokoloshe is created through a form of necromancy and occult arts by the design of a sorcerer. The sorcerer can use the new servant for whatever purposes are desired. The tokoloshe is popularly depicted as a short, zombie-like creature with a hole in its head, and all kinds of horrifying powers are attributed to it. The tokoloshe can make itself invisible either by swallowing a pebble or drinking water, and it is said to be incredibly strong and poisonous. The strangest part about the tokoloshe legend is that while just seeing one is bad luck, telling anyone else about the sighting invites certain doom. Zombification, in its many forms, represents the physical aspects of the undead. These corporeal undead are perhaps best described in the words of the writer T. S. Eliot: 

Death has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways. 

Researchers have begun exploring possible evidence for reincarnation. In 1961 Ian Stevenson, then the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, began investigating cases of young children who claimed to remember previous lives. In a typical case, a child at the age of two or three would begin to speak spontaneously about another life. Some children described the life of a stranger while others talked about a deceased individual known to the child’s family. In the cases involving a stranger, the child would often persist with the claims until the child’s family eventually made efforts to locate the family of the the person whose life the child was describing. In many cases, their efforts were successful, and the child would then meet the family. At these meetings, the child would often be said to identify members of the previous family as well as items belonging to the deceased individual. Stevenson discovered that such cases were fairly easy to find in many parts of the world, particularly in cultures with a dominant belief in reincarnation, such as Asia. Children who report past lives generally describe a life as someone in their own culture. Even the exceptions usually show some geographical connection, such as Burmese children who describe the lives of Japanese soldiers killed in Burma during World War II. The lives described are usually ordinary, as the children describe typical family life and routine occupations, with claims to have been a famous person or royalty essentially nonexistent in the majority of such child cases. The children also tend to describe recent lives with the average interval between the death of the previous personality and the birth of the child being around fifteen months. One extraordinary part of the lives described is the percentage of violent deaths reported. Stevenson found that approximately sixty percent of the children who talk about the mode of death of the previous personality describe a violent one. Compared to cases with a nonviolent mode of death, the cases that involve violence have a shorter interval on average between the death of the former personality and the birth of the subject. The children studied almost always start talking about the previous lives between the ages of two and five years. 

Some children with exceptional verbal skills may make statements earlier, and some make gestures earlier that are not understood until the child develops the verbal skills to make statements that connect the gestures to a previous life. They almost always stop talking about the previous life between the ages of five and eight, which is generally the age when children branch out from the family and begin school, and also the age when children tend to lose early childhood memories. The children in the studies generally talked about events from the end of the previous life and almost three-quarters of the subjects describe the mode of death of the previous personality. They are also much more likely to talk about people from the end of that life than about people from earlier in the life. Thus, a child who describes the life of an adult tends to talk about a spouse or children rather than parents. Few subjects talk about any time between lives. Of those that do, some describe staying near their homes or the site of their deaths, and they may describe seeing their funerals or other events that occurred after their deaths. Others report going to a discarnate realm, at times describing meetings with other beings such as sages or guides. In about thirty-five percent of the cases, the child bears a birthmark or birth defect that matches a fatal wound of the previous personality. The birthmarks tend to be unusual ones, often being puckered scarred areas, and some of them are said to have oozed or bled for some time after the child was born. The birth defects are often ones that are extremely rare. In the late 1990s Stevenson published a series of over two hundred such cases in which he documented the correspondence of the marks to wounds on the previous personality, using postmortem reports whenever possible. Examples include cases in which children had birthmarks that matched a bullet entrance and exit wounds on the previous personality and others with multiple marks matching the wounds from the shotgun blasts that killed the former individuals. Many of the children in these studies show behaviors that suggest a connection to the previous individual. They often show emotions toward the various members of the previous family that are appropriate. Many of the children show phobias related to the mode of death with half of those describing a violent death exhibiting a phobia of the instrument of that death. At times, the phobia will be present long before the child talks about the previous life such as a baby showing an intense fear of water, and later reporting a memory of having drowned in the previous life. Many of the children show connections to the previous life in their amusements. For example, some act out the occupation of the previous personality. Others repetitively act out the death that they describe in what appears to be post-traumatic play. Many of the children who report previous lives as members of the opposite sex show behaviors appropriate to that sex. They may dress, play, and think of themselves as members of the opposite sex. A possible way to explain these cases would be that the children gain knowledge of the previous personality through extrasensory perception. This, however, seems unlikely because most of these children show no other extrasensory ability and because the cases involve multiple features such as birthmarks, identification with the precursory personality and other characteristics linking to the previous life. Another more plausible explanation is reincarnation suggesting that memories, emotions, a sense of identification, and even physical features can carry over from one life to the next. 

In Elizabethan London, death was a ruthlessly perceptible presence. The gates of the city were festooned with the boiled heads of traitors and criminals. Public executions formed a consistent commodity for entertainment in which the corpses of the condemned were conveniently available for public dissection. The tenuousness of life in London at this time was constantly repeated by devastating epidemics that swept away thousands of residents at a stroke. Extravagant processions embellished the funeral processions of nobility while all the churches in the kingdom contained a charnel house where the miasma of putrefaction was a constant reminder of the grim facts of mortality. Under such circumstances it is not surprising that the drama of the period was greatly affected by death and the struggle to tame its menace. “Death is a consummation devoutly to be wished,” Hamlet declares in the most famous of all his soliloquies (Hamlet 3.1.62). He seeks to persuade himself that dying is no mere ending, but marks the perfection of mortal life. More typical than the calm resolve of Hamlet’s final moments is the panorama of decay in the graveyard where the prospect of mortality is seldom so reassuring for Shakespeare’s other characters. In Measure for Measure (3.1.117–27) it is the material realities of death, as much as its metaphysical uncertainties, that galvanize Claudio’s terror as he awaits execution: 

Aye, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod. . . . To be imprisoned in the viewless winds And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling —’tis too horrible! 

Like Cordelia in Lear’s despairing phrase, “dead as earth” (King Lear, 5.6.262), Claudio’s apparent imperviousness to the promises of religion, and the existential prospect of annihilation reveal his horror to an utterly chaotic condition which underlies the sardonic humor of Hamlet and the gravediggers as a specific anxiety concerning the social menace of death and its arbitrary cancellation of the system of differences on which the hierarchical order of Renaissance society depended. Thus Macbeth, defying the chaotic wrack of the storm that he himself has invoked, prepares to die with harness on [his] back (Macbeth, 5.5.50–51). Othello reasserts his martial Venetian identity by transforming his suicide into a triumph over the Turkish enemy, while Coriolanus requests the Volscian mob to cut me to pieces (Coriolanus, 5.6.115). The ending of Hamlet, with its wordplay on stage and audience (5.2.378, 387, 396), is a heroic attempt by drama and theatrical art to overcome the power of death in which theatrical convention sought to impose order upon the final panorama of desolation. Even in the bleak world of King Lear, there is an ordered hierarchical assertion (“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all?” 5.3.307–308). The concluding stage direction, exeunt with a dead march, is a reminder of the extent to which the social gradations of Renaissance tragedy with its industrious scenes and acts of death (King John, 2.1.376) mimicked the arts of the funeral. Tragedy served as an instrument for probing the painful mystery of life’s ending by leveling the assaults of death. The fear of mortality became fantasies in which the moment of dying was transformed into a supreme demonstration of distinction. Cleopatra carefully stages her death in a royal monument. Claiming her suicide as that which shackles accidents and bolts up change (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.6) she is transformed into spiritual fire and air and eternal marble (5.2.240, 289). Comedy, likewise, is deeply preoccupied with mortality, like the somber travesty of burial rites which the repentant Claudio must perform at Hero’s family monument in Much Ado About Nothing, or the mock deaths on which the plots of Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale depend. Love’s Labours Lost begins with a meditation on brazen tombs and the disgrace of death, and even A Midsummer Night’s Dream follows the mock deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe with Puck chanting 

…the screech-owl, screeching loud
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
In remembrance of a shroud (5.1.376–378) 

The cemeteries of the Elizabethan era, with their parade of identically grinning skulls and parables of equalizing indifference are especially apparent in iconic representations of universal mortality. Such imagery is found in the Dance of Death, whose grinning cadavers scour representatives of all ranks to their common end, or the Triumph of Death, in which the corpses of monarch and peasant, merchant and pauper lie grotesquely heaped together beneath the chariot wheels of King Death. As with his dramas, Shakespeare’s sonnets similarly describe death as a leveling churl (Sonnet 32) or wretch (Sonnet 74) who renders its victims base (Sonnet 74) by consigning them to anonymous dust (Sonnet 32) and the degradations of vilest worms (Sonnet 71) while death’s mortal rage (Sonnet 64) reduces even the loftiest memorials to unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time (Sonnet 55). Yet Shakespeare insists that his own powerful rhyme, by its capacity to outlast death, can confer an endurance to which the gilded monuments of princes aspire in vain (Sonnet 55). Like the Roman poet Horace, who confidently predicted his enduring fame through his lyrics, asserting exegi monumentum aere perennius (I have raised a monument more permanent than bronze), Shakespeare likewise declares that his gentle verse will be his immortal shrine (Sonnets 74, 81). 

Traditional accounts of the origin of death extend back to the earliest hunter- gatherer cultures. Usually these stories are morality tales about the ethical and natural balance of the elements of the world. According to an African Asante myth, people did not like the experience of death but were nevertheless forced to embrace it when, upon experiencing their first visitation of death, pleaded with God to stop it. God granted this wish, and for three years there were no deaths. But there were also no births during that time. Unwilling to endure the absence of children, the people beseeched God to return death to them as long as they could have children again. There exists an African proverb, when death finds you, may it find you alive. The image of death as a being in its own right is common in both modern and old folklore. In many old myths, death is a sentient being, often an animal or monster. Sometimes death is disguised, sometimes not. Death enters the world to steal and silence people’s lives. In Europe during the Middle Ages death was widely viewed as a being who came in the night to take children away. Death was a dark, hooded, grim reaper with an insatiable thirst for the lives of children. Children were frequently dressed as adults as soon as possible to trick death into looking elsewhere for prey. Interestingly, psychologists have shown that children perceive death as masculine whereas in the ancient world, life and death were perceived as two forces of the Great Mother, the oneness of everything. Life was associated with the Good Mother, and death with the Evil Mother, often perceived as the hungry earth, devouring its own children. As the Irish poet George William Russell lamented, 

Unto the deep the deep heart goes,
It lays its sadness nigh the breast: Only the Mighty Mother knows
The wounds that quiver unconfessed. It seeks a deeper silence still; It folds itself around with peace, Where thoughts alike of good or ill In quietness unfostered cease.
It feels in the unwounding vast For comfort for its hopes and fears: The Mighty Mother bows at last; She listens to her children’s tears. Where the last anguish deepens––there The fire of beauty smites through pain: A glory moves amid despair,
The Mother takes her child again. 

Through the ages people have tried to personify death by giving it an anthropomorphic form. Viewed in this way, death personifications can be considered cultural channels to transfer invisible phenomena into external patterns. The idea of death as a humanlike being is characteristic of traditional folktales that dramatize human anguish about mortality. By contrast, in the realm of religious ideas, death is regarded less as an identifiable personal being than as an abstract state of being. In the world of myth and legend, this state appears to collide with the human experience of life. The cycles of life and death are not merely hermeneutic paradoxes across different human cultures, but are also the narrative templates upon which all the great religions explain how death entered the world. In Greek mythology Hypnos, the god of sleep, and Thanatos, the god of death, are twin brothers. Life is portrayed as a forgetfulness that requires the living to recollect the structures of a reality found in the sedative of death. Similarly, the Gnostics often referred to earthly life as drunkenness or oblivion whereas Buddhism requires a recollection of past lives where such remembrance of personal history is the only hope of breaking the cycle of eternal return. Chao Khun Bodhinyana Thera, also known as Achaan Chah, was an influential teacher of the Buddhism and a founder of two major monasteries in the Thai Forest Tradition. In his poem, “Our Real Home,” he describes the relationship between life and death: 

As soon as we are born, we are dead.
Our birth and death are just one thing.
It is like a tree: when there is a root there must be twigs.
When there are twigs, there must be a root.
You cannot have one without the other.
It is a little funny to see how at a death people are so grief-stricken and distracted, tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and delighted. It is delusion; nobody has ever looked at this clearly.
I think if you really want to cry,
then it would be better to do so when someone’s born.
For actually birth is death, death is birth, the root is the twig, and the twig is the root. If you’ve got to cry, cry at the root, cry at the birth. Look closely: if there were no birth there would be no death. Can you understand this? 

As a human attribute, sleep, as a living phenomena, converges with death. Through such negotiation the living can awaken and, through this awakening, be born into eternal life. The deliberate invoking of a state mimicking death has been reported from India where yogis are able to reduce their respiratory and pulse rates and then be buried for several days before being brought out alive. Such death impressions generate creation myths that invert the material reality of death to better control the anxiety associated with the extinction of personality and relationships. But the assumptions underlying these concepts are not open to empirical examination. The cemetery is merely a consorted partnership that seeks to analyze, or test, these assumptions as data for the demise of sentience. Conceptual postulations assert a transition between two halves of existence—life and death. Depending on the culture, travel between these two halves is sometimes undertaken as an initiation or part of a shamanic rite, elsewhere such otherworldly journeys have been part of ascetic practices. Such is the case of the charnel grounds (Sanskrit smashana, Tibetan dur khrod) of south Asia and the Himalayas, which are considered to be important locations for sadhana (spiritual practice) and ritual activities of the Indo-Tibetan traditions. Such sadhanas are practiced by the aghori kapalikas of the Hindu Shaivite sects as well as by certain Tibetan Buddhists yogins and yoginis. These practices are believed to assist the practitioner overcome attachment (upadana, len pa), craving (trishna, sred pa), and aversion (dvesha, zhe sdang) as well as the fear of death (abhinivesha). The charnel ground becomes a hermitage revealing terrifying environments where practitioners find themselves facing a very true, but grim, reality. The great Tibetan Buddhist saint and magician Padmasambhava (regarded by Tibetans as a second Buddha) is believed to have gained many of his powers by practicing in the charnel ground of the cool grove (bsil ba’i tshal). One of his manifestations is the skull- garlanded-one (thod phreng rtsal). In Tibetan Buddhism, there are eight such charnel grounds. These include The Most Fierce (gtum drag), Dense Thicket (tshang tshing ‘khrigs pa), Dense Blaze (‘bar ‘khrigs pa), Endowed with Skeletons (keng rus can), Cool Forest (bsil ba’i tshal), Black Darkness (mun pa nag po), Resonant with Kilikili (ki li ki lir sgra sgrog pa), and Wild Cries of Ha-Ha (ha ha rgod pa). The charnel ground, like the cemetery, provides the taphophile with otherworldly journeys into mental universes and spaces where cultures grope with the meaning of death and its relationship to life. 

The very naming of a necropolis, whether charnel ground or lawn cemetery, along with the attendant stories, is an attempt to somehow define and thus master many refractory mysteries. There is no way to determine how death will be portrayed in the future. Although new technologies like the internet and virtual reality introduce new ways of thinking in philosophy, theology, and the mind, humanity will continue to identify death as a humanlike entity. Some imagery of death, even in a binary or digital form, tends to make its qualities more palpable, more ad hominem, and less terrifying. Yet “decay is inherent in all compounded things, so continue in watchfulness.” These were the last recorded words of Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. From its inception, Buddhism stressed the importance of death because awareness of death is what prompted the Buddha to perceive the ultimate futility of worldly concerns and pleasures. A prince of the Shakya family in what is now Nepal, Gautama became dissatisfied with a life of royalty after witnessing suffering in the nearby city of Kapilavastu. According to traditional stories, the Buddha decided to leave his father’s palace and seek enlightenment after encountering a sick person, an old person, a corpse, and someone who had renounced the world. The first three epitomized the sufferings to which ordinary beings were and are subject, and the last indicates that one can transcend them through meditation and practice. The greatest problem of all is death, the final cessation of all of life’s hopes and dreams. At the age of twenty-nine, Gautama renounced his princely life, cut off his hair and started to wear the yellow robes of a religious mendicant. Buddhism, the faith he created through his teaching, thus originated in his observation of suffering, and begins with the fundamental fact of suffering (dukkha) as the human predicament. The Buddhist faith originated in India in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. with the enlightenment of Gauatama (c. 566–486 B.C.E. ). The teaching of the Buddha is summarized in the Four Noble Truths. These include the truth of suffering (existence is suffering); the truth of suffering’s cause (suffering is caused by desire); the truth of stopping suffering (stop the cause of suffering, desire, and the suffering will cease to arise); and the truth of the way, the Eightfold Path, which leads to the release from desire and extinguishes suffering. The Eightfold Path requires right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. There is also a twelve-step chain of cause. This chain of conditions consists of spiritual ignorance; leading to constructing activities; which leads to consciousness; which leads to mind- and-body; which leads to the six sense-bases; which leads to sensory stimulation; which leads to feeling; which leads to craving; which leads to grasping; which leads to existence; which leads to birth; which leads to aging, death, and despair. This chain of cause, known as the doctrine of Dependent Origination, explains the dukka that one experiences in life. Disillusioned with the ascetic path, Gautama adhered to what he called the middle way. He chose to sit beneath the now esteemed Bodhi Tree, concentrating on and passing through four stages of progressive insight (jnana), which led to enlightenment. The rest of his life was spent wandering in the area of the Ganges basin, gaining adherents and spending the rainy months in a community of followers which became the beginning of the Buddhist monastic establishment (vihara). The Buddha is said to have made no other claim for himself than that he was a teacher of transience or suffering, the foundation of his Four Noble Truths. Two and a half centuries after the Buddha’s death, a council of Buddhist monks collected his teachings and oral traditions of the faith into written form, called the Tripitaka. This included a very large collection of commentaries and doctrines called Sutras (discourses). Some twelve centuries after the Buddha’s death, the faith spread from India into Tibet and from the early seventh century C.E. onward, Buddhism became firmly entrenched in all aspects of Tibetan society. The significance of the conversion of Tibet lies in the exceptionally rich early literature that survives. The original Sanskrit texts of the Sutra On Rebirth and the Sutra on Death and the Transmigration of Souls (Bhavasamkrantisutra, srid pa ‘pho ba’i mdo) are no longer extant and are known only through their Tibetan versions. The Bhavasamkrantisutra relates that during the Buddha’s stay in the town of Rajagriha a king named Bimbisara questioned him on the transitory nature of action (karma) and how rebirth can be effected by thoughts and actions, which are by their very nature momentary and fleeting. In these sutras the Buddha teaches, 

Nothing passes from this world to another world, and yet there is death and birth. The disappearance of the last consciousness associated with a form, we call ‘death’, and the appearance of the first consciousness associated with the new form, we call ‘birth.’ 

For the Buddhist, an individual’s past thoughts and actions appear before the mind at the time of death in the same way that a previous night’s dreams are recalled while awake. Neither the dreams nor past karma have any solid and substantial reality in themselves, but both can, and do, produce real effects. An individual’s past karma appears before the mind at the final moment of death and causes the first moment of rebirth. This new life is a new sphere of consciousness in one of the six realms of rebirth (the realms of the gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell-beings) wherein the person experiences the fruits of his or her previous actions. 

Although meditation plays an essential role in Buddhist practice which seeks enlightenment, in Tibet there are said to be five methods for attaining enlightenment at the time of death without meditation. These methods include seeing a great master or sacred object, on wearing specially blessed drawings (yantra, srung ‘khor) of mandalas with sacred mantras (btags grol) which can also be placed on a deceased person’s body after death and either buried or burned with the body in order to alleviate suffering during the intermediate state between life and death, and on tasting sacred nectars (amrita, myong grol) consecrated by lamas. Additionally, on remembering the transferal of consciousness (Tibetan ‘pho ba) at the moment of death which can involve the transference of entering the sphere of clear light (‘od gsal sbubs ‘jug gi ‘pho ba) or the transference of consciousness riding the subtle energy (rnam shes rlung zhon gyi ‘pho ba). Finally, at death, one should hear certain profound teachings, such as the Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bar do. 

As a funerary discourse, The Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bar do (bar do thos grol) is a series of instructions on six types of liberation from the six spheres of suffering, or samsara. These six types include liberation through hearing, wearing, seeing, remembering, tasting, and touching. The discourse is a supreme example of the Tibetan esoteric teaching on how to assist in the ejection of consciousness after death if this liberation has not happened spontaneously. If the body is present, the guru or lama should read this text close to the deceased’s ear three or seven times. Additionally, the lama may exhibit a series of cards (tsa ka li) portraying the beings and realms in which those beings reside along with an image of the deceased (sbyang bu) to guide the consciousness through the intermediate state. The first bar do, or intermediate state between life and death, is called the luminosity of the essence of reality (dharmata) and includes a direct perception of the sacredness of life. According to Tibetan tradition, the Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State was composed in the eighth century by Padmasambhava, known as Guru Rinpoche (the Precious Teacher), written down by his primary student, Yeshe Tsogyal, buried in the Gampo hills of central Tibet and subsequently discovered by a Tibetan treasure finder (gter ton), Karma Lingpa, in the fourteenth century. Karma Lingpa’s text was titled The Peaceful and Wrathful Deities, The Profound Dharma of Self-liberated Wisdom Mind (zab chos zhi khro dgongs pa rang grol), which contains the Great Liberation through Hearing in the Bar do (bar do thos grol chen mo). In the text, Padmasambhava describes in detail the six bar dos, or intermediate states which include three which comprise the period between death and rebirth and three which relate to this life. The states relating to this life include the bar do of birth (jatyantarabhava, rang bzhin skye gnas kyi bar do); the bar do of dreams (svapanantarabhava, rmi lam bar do); and the bar do of meditation (samadhyantarabhava, bsam gtan bar do) in which the distinction between subject and object disappears (samadhi). The states between incarnations include the bar do of the moment before death (mumurshantarabhava, ‘chi kha’i bar do) that covers the dissolution of the elements of earth, water, fire, and air that make up the physical body as the deceased experiences the clear light of their innate buddha-nature thus allowing the possibility to attain enlightenment and liberation from the wheel of rebirth; the bar do of the essence of reality (dharmatantarabhava, chos nyid bar do) an intermediate state in which the deceased encounters the nature of phenomena; and the bar do of becoming (bhavantarabhava, srid pa’i bar do) which is the period from an arising of confusion and the emergence of a mental body leading to accessing the womb of the next life. Often inappropriately entitled the Tibetan Book of the Dead , the bar do thos grol is an example of a form of yoga praxis which maintains the premise that karmically laden awareness outlasts the earthly life span of the individual. Such awareness incorporates the concept of voidness (śūnyatā, stong-pa nyid) as a clarity of imageless intensity. The bar do thos grol proclaims the nature of the buddhas to be only illusory images of the individual’s consciousness in contrast to the pure world within which needs no images of external form. Pure awareness is the essence of reality and is therefore absolute. Because nothing is imaginable without the mind, it is called the absolute emptiness, or voidness, which is nirvana. Although seemingly a manual for the guidance of human awareness after death, the bar do thos grol is primarily a treatise on life in which the path through the bar do must be acquired on the side of the living if it is to be put into practice on the other side. The bar do experience is an active part of every human being’s basic psychological makeup. The total time of the intermediate state between two successive earthly incarnations is forty-nine days. During this seven week period the mind of the deceased perceives illusory emanations of the deities which divide this time into intervals of seven days. From the fourth to the eleventh day of the chos nyid bar do there are emanations of the forty-two peaceful bar do deities emerging from the fivefold buddha families. From the twelfth until the nineteenth day fifty-eight wrathful deities manifest among flames, carrying skulls, corpses and other fearsome objects. Finally, this journey, through the srid-pa’i bar do, manifests the force of the individual’s karma to propel a rebirth in samsara. The last seven days are dedicated to the search for the place of rebirth which is supposed to take place on the following eighth day. In Tibet, ‘das log means returned from death, and refers to people who have died and found themselves travelling in the bar do. They may visit the hells, where they witness the judgement of the dead and the sufferings of hell, and likewise they may go to paradises and buddha realms. They may also be accompanied by a protector who explains what is happening. After a period of about a week the ‘das log is sent back to their body with a message from the Lord of Death for the living, urging them to spiritual practice and a beneficial way of life. 

Buddhism spread also to central and southeast Asia, China, and from there into Korea (c. 350–668 C.E.) and Japan (c. 538 C.E.). A central concept of these regions is that nirvana may be found in samsara, that is, in this life and this world. This view has thus made Buddhism more appealing to the Chinese and Japanese. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Buddhists are less than clear about their belief in the cycle of rebirth and are inclined to perceive life in linear terms. Accounts of samsara include the presupposition of a wandering soul, which is not in accord with strict Buddhist teaching, and equates nirvana with the Pure Land (Sukhavati) Buddhist paradise this side of nirvana, presided over by the Buddha Amitabha, with further disparities existing between the buddhas and bodhisattvas. Japanese Buddhism is so closely associated with the memory of the dead and the ancestral cult that the family shrines dedicated to the ancestors and occupying a place of honor in homes, are popularly called the butsudan, literally the Buddhist altars. The abstraction of death in Japan can be found in Zen poems which portray the Japanese regard for Buddhism as a funerary religion. The poet Minamoto Yorimasa (1104-1180 C.E.) lamented, 

Like a rotten log
half buried in the ground—
my life, which has not flowered, comes to this sad end. 

Ota Dokan (1432-1486) considered himself in decline already by the time of death, 

Had I not known
that I was dead already
I would have mourned my loss of life. 

The poet Hojo Ujimasa (1538-1590) created the monody of life’s illusory qualities over death’s reality, 

Autumn wind of eve,
blow away the clouds that mass over the moon’s pure light
and the mists that cloud our mind, do thou sweep away as well.
Now we disappear,
well, what must we think of it? From the sky we came.
Now we may go back again. 

The Zen death poems exemplify an eternal loneliness that is found at the heart of Zen. Such poems search for a different viewpoint of life and death to serve as an explanation for enlightenment (Japanese satori, Chinese wu). As the scholar Daisetz Suzuki notes
“. . . there is no Zen without satori, which is indeed the alpha and omega of Zen Buddhism.” 

Mummies saw varying levels of popularity throughout the twentieth c entury. In 1992, the First World Congress on Mummy Studies was held in Puerto de la Cruz in the Canary Islands. More than three hundred scientists attended the Congress to share nearly a century of collected data on mummies. The term mummy, referring to preserved corpses, is derived from the ingredient mummia. Ancient Egyptian mummy- making often utilized asphaltum, known in Persian as mumiya, as an ingredient for filling the empty body cavities of a corpse once the organs were removed. In the Middle Ages, the resin that had been used on ancient Egyptian mummies was believed to have superior medicinal and chemical value to regular asphaltum, and the resulting demand for the ingredient caused the term to be applied to the dead bodies required to harvest it as much as to the ingredient itself. It became common practice to grind Egyptian mummies into a powder to be sold and used as medicine. While Egyptian mummies were traditionally the source for mummia, as demand increased throughout the Renaissance, other types of corpses came to be used including non-Egyptian mummies and bodies of the recently deceased that were specially prepared. This was sometimes called mumia falsa. When actual mummies became unavailable, the sun-desiccated corpses of criminals, slaves, and suicides were substituted by mendacious merchants. The practice developed into a wide-scale business that flourished until the late sixteenth century. Two centuries ago, mummies were still believed to have medicinal properties to stop bleeding, and were sold in a powdered form known as mellified man (created by steeping a human cadaver in honey). Medieval Europe, which used mummies for medication, saw travel writer Richard Hakluyt in 1599 complaining that 

“these dead bodies are the Mummy which the Phisistians and Apothecaries doe against our willes make us to swallow.” 

Artists also made use of Egyptian mummies to create a brownish pigment known as “Mummy Brown.” Mummia was offered for sale medicinally as late as 1908 in the catalogue of E. Merck. Asphaltum was an ingredient in Plutarch’s treatise on kyphi (incense) and is still sometimes used as incense by occultists and magical practitioners. The earliest reference to kyphi is found in the Pyramid Texts where it is listed among the goods that a king will enjoy in the afterlife. Along with kyphi, the spells, or utterances, of the Pyramid Texts, are primarily concerned with protecting the pharaoh’s remains and reanimating his body after death. Instructions for the preparation of kyphi with the lists of ingredients are found among the wall inscriptions at the temples of Edfu and Dendera in Upper Egypt. The Egyptian priest Manetho is known to have written a treatise called Preparation of Kyphi-Recipes, but no copy of this work survives. Greek physicians studying the Egyptian pharmacopeia took interest in kyphi’s reputation as a medicine and Dioscorides set forth the preparation of kyphi in his Materia Medica, thought to be the first Greek description of the material. In Isis and Osiris, Plutarch comments that Egyptian priests burned incense three times a day: frankincense at dawn, myrrh at mid-day, and kyphi at dusk. The Coffin Texts are a collection of ancient Egyptian funerary spells written on coffins. The texts are derived from the earlier Pyramid Texts, reserved for royal use only, but later ordinary Egyptians who could afford to have a coffin had access to these funerary spells with the pharaoh no longer having exclusive rights to the afterlife. Although these grimoires contained some 1,185 spells, the collection was often abbreviated, and this gave rise to long and short versions of some of the spells, a number of which were later copied in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. In contrast to the Pyramid Texts which focused on the celestial realm, the Coffin Texts emphasized the subterranean elements of the afterlife ruled by Osiris and allowed the deceased to protect themselves against the dangers of dying a second death. The earliest Egyptian mummies were created naturally due to the environment in which they were buried. Prior to 3500 B.C.E. Egyptians buried the dead in pit graves, without regard to social status. Pit graves were often shallow which allowed for the hot, dry sand of the desert to dehydrate the bodies, leading to natural mummification. This natural preservation of the dead had a profound effect on Egyptian society. Deliberate mummification became an integral part of the rituals for the dead beginning as early as the second dynasty (about 3400 B.C.E.). Egyptians saw the preservation of the body after death as an important step to living well in the afterlife. About 2600 B.C.E. Egyptian embalmers began to achieve true mummification through a process of evisceration, followed by preserving the body in various minerals and oils. First, the brain was removed by passing an iron hook through the nose into the cranium and retracting it by the same pathway, with the gray matter being discarded. It was a delicate operation which could easily disfigure the face. The embalmers then rinsed the skull with certain drugs that cleared any residue of brain tissue while also killing bacteria. Finally came evisceration, or the removal, of some or all of the organs of the gastrointestinal tract. The majority of the papyri that have survived only describe the ceremonial and religious rituals involved in embalming, not the actual surgical processes involved. An existing text, known as The Ritual of Embalming, does describe some of the utilitarian and logistical aspects of embalming, however there are only two known extant copies and each is incomplete. Herodotus’s Histories (Book 2) is one of the most detailed descriptions of the Egyptian mummification process, including the mention of using natron (an early form of salty soap which softens water while removing oil and grease) in order to dehydrate corpses for preservation. However, even these descriptions are short and fairly vague. The first and most important step for the embalmer was to halt the process of decomposition by removing the internal organs and washing out the body with a mix of spices and palm wine. The only organ left behind was the heart, believed to be the seat of thought and feeling and therefore still needed in the afterlife. After cleansing, the body was then dried using natron inside the empty body cavity as well as outside on the skin. The body did not stay in the natron longer than seventy days––any shorter time and the body would not be completely dehydrated while any longer time would leave the body too stiff to move into position for wrapping. The internal organs were also dried and either sealed in individual canopic jars, or wrapped to be replaced within the body. The jars were often placed in canopic chests which were brightly painted and had a falcon, representing the funerary god Sokar, crouching on top. Images on the sides of the chest show the chest’s owner worshiping Osiris, god of the afterlife; Ra-Horakhty, a combination of the gods Horus and Ra; four sons of Horus, each of whom guards one of the viscera traditionally removed during mummification; the dyed pillar, which represents Osiris, and the tyet, an amulet which represents Isis. The entire mummification process typically took forty days. After dehydration, the mummy was wrapped in layers of linen cloth in which Egyptian priests placed small talismans to guard the decedent from evil. Each mummy needed hundreds of yards of linen. The priests carefully wound these long strips of linen around the body, sometimes even wrapping each finger and toe separately before wrapping the entire hand or foot. Often the priests placed a mask of the person’s face between the layers of head bandages. Once the mummy was completely wrapped, it was coated in a resin as a protection to keep moist air away. Resin was later applied to the coffin in order to seal it. The poison aspergillus niger was sometimes used in the embalming of mummies for protection from disturbance, causing an assailant, thief, or in some cases insects and other pests, to die from inhalation of the poison. As part of the funeral, priests performed special religious rites at the tomb’s entrance. The most important part of the ceremony was called the opening of the mouth. A priest touched various parts of the mummy with a special instrument to open those parts of the body to the senses enjoyed in life and needed in the afterlife. By touching the instrument to the mouth, the dead person could now speak and eat and was ready for the journey to the afterlife. The mummy was placed in his coffin in the burial chamber and the entrance sealed up. But why preserve the body? The Egyptians believed that the mummified body was the home for the spirit. If the body was destroyed, the spirit might be lost. The spirit was a complex tripartite of the ka, ba, and akh. The ka, a doppelganger of the person, would remain in the tomb and needed the offerings and objects there. The ba, or soul, was free to fly out of the tomb and return to it. But it was the akh, the most important aspect of the spirit, which had to travel through the underworld to a final judgment and entrance to the afterlife. To the Egyptian, all three were essential. The Italian anatomist Girolamo Segato, born in 1792, was rather obsessed with Egyptian funerary practices. He went on several archaeological expeditions to Egypt, where he became intimately acquainted with the process of mummification. Upon his return to Italy, Segato unveiled an extraordinary technique of preserving flesh—artificial petrifaction. According to pioneering American surgeon Valentine Mott, who spent some time in Europe in the company of Segato, the Italian 

“had discovered a chemical process by which he could actually petrify, in very short time, every animal substance, preserving permanently, and with minute accuracy, its form and internal texture, and in such a state of stony hardness that it could be sawed into slabs and elegantly polished!” 

Despite the mummy’s usual association with ancient Egypt, mummfication was a feature of several ancient cultures in areas of South America and Asia which have very dry climates. The oldest known deliberate mummy was a child, one of the Chinchorro mummies found in the Camarones Valley, Chile, which dates around 5050 B.C.E. A prehistoric fishing culture that lived along the arid coast, the Chinchorro practiced mummification long before the Egyptians began their practice. The mummified remains of an infant, wrapped in animal skin and wearing a necklace made of ostrich egg shell beads, was discovered in Libya during the winter of 1958–1959 in the natural cave structure of Uan Muhuggiag. The mummies of Asia are usually considered to be accidental with the decedents buried in just the right place where the environment acted as an agent for preservation. This is particularly common in the desert areas of the Tarim Basin and Iran. The dry desert climate of the Tarim Basin proved to be an excellent agent for desiccation. For this reason, over two hundred Tarim mummies, which are over four thousand years old, were excavated from a cemetery in the present-day Xinjiang region. The mummies were found buried in upside-down boats with hundreds of thirteen foot long wooden poles in place of tombstones. As of 2012, at least eight mummified human remains have been recovered from the Douzlakh Salt Mine at Chehrabad in northwestern Iran. Due to their salt preservation, these bodies are known as salt men. Mummies have also been discovered in more humid Asian climates, however these are subject to rapid decay after being removed from the grave. In Tana Toraja, on Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island, locals ritually exhume their ancestors’ mummified bodies every few years, cleaning out their graves and giving them a fresh new outfit to wear before taking them for a walk around the village and putting them back in the ground. Mummies from various dynasties throughout China’s history have been discovered in several locations across the country. They are almost exclusively considered to be unintentional mummifications. Many areas in which mummies have been uncovered are difficult for preservation, due to their warm, moist climates. This makes the recovery of mummies a challenge, as exposure to the outside world can cause the bodies to decay in a matter of hours. An example of a Chinese mummy that was preserved despite being buried in an environment not conducive to mummification is Xin Zhui. Also known as Lady Dai, she was discovered in the early 1970s at the Mawangdui archaeological site in Changsha. She was the wife of the marquis of Dai during the Han dynasty, who was also buried with her alongside another young man considered to be a close relative. However, Xin Zhui’s body was the only one of the three to be mummified. Her corpse was so well-preserved that surgeons from the Hunan Provincial Medical Institute were able to perform an autopsy. The exact reason why her body was so completely preserved has yet to be determined. In 1993, a team of Russian archaeologists discovered the Siberian Ice Maiden, a Scytho-Siberian woman from the fifth century B.C.E., on the kurgan (burial mound) of the Ukok Plateau in the Altai Mountains near the Mongolian border. The mummy was naturally frozen due to the severe climatic conditions of the Siberian steppe. Also known as Princess Ukok, the mummy was dressed in finely detailed clothing and wore an elaborate headdress and jewelry. Alongside her body were buried six decorated horses and a symbolic meal for her last journey. Her left arm and hand were tattooed with animal figures, including a highly stylized deer. Another Siberian mummy, a man, was discovered much earlier in 1929. His skin was also marked with tattoos of two monsters resembling griffins decorating his chest, along with three partially obliterated images which seem to represent two deer and a mountain goat on his left arm. 

The European continent is home to a diverse spectrum of spontaneous and anthropogenic mummies. The Capuchin monks that inhabited the European continent left behind hundreds of intentionally preserved bodies, although not necessarily mummified, in the crypt of Cimitero dei Cappuccini. The crypt, or ossuary, contains the remains of four thousand friars buried between 1500–1870, during which time the Roman Catholic Church permitted burial in and under churches. The underground crypt is divided into five chapels, lit only by dim natural light seeping in through cracks, and small fluorescent lamps. The crypt walls are decorated extensively with the remains, depicting various religious themes. Some of the skeletons are intact and draped with Franciscan habits, but for the most part, individual bones are used to create elaborate ornamental designs. A plaque in the chapel reads, What you are now, we used to be. What we are now, you will be. The Capuchin Crypt in Brno, Czechoslovakia contains three hundred years of mummified remains directly below the main altar. Beginning in the eighteenth century when the crypt was opened, and continuing until the practice was discontinued in 1787, the Capuchin monks of the monastery would lay the deceased on a pillow of bricks on the ground. The unique air quality and topsoil within the crypt naturally preserved the bodies over time. Approximately fifty mummies were discovered in an abandoned crypt beneath the Church of St. Procopius of Sázava in Vamberk in the mid-1980s. Workers digging a trench accidentally broke into the crypt, which began to fill with waste water. The mummies quickly began to deteriorate, though thirty-four were able to be rescued and returned to the monastery in 2000. The mummies ranged in age and social status, with at least two children and one priest mostly dating from the eighteenth century. The Klatovy catacombs currently house an exhibition of Jesuit mummies, alongside some aristocrats, that were originally interred between 1674–1783. Europe also produced a number of bog bodies, mummies of people deposited in sphagnum bogs, apparently as a result of murder or ritual sacrifices. The acidity of the water, low temperature and lack of oxygen combined to tan the body’s skin and soft tissues, but the skeleton typically disintegrated over time. Such mummies are remarkably well preserved on emerging from the bog, with skin and internal organs intact. It is even possible to determine the decedent’s last meal by examining stomach contents. A famous case is that of the Haraldskær Woman, who was discovered by laborers in a bog in Jutland, Denmark in 1835. She was, perhaps erroneously, identified as an early medieval Danish queen and was placed in a royal sarcophagus at the Saint Nicolai Church, Vejle, where she currently remains. The mummies of the Canary Islands belong to the indigenous Guanche people and date to the time before fourteenth century Spanish explorers settled in the area. All deceased people within the Guanche culture were mummified, though the level of care taken with embalming and burial varied depending on individual social status. Embalming was carried out by specialized groups, organized according to gender, who were considered unclean by the rest of the community. The techniques for embalming were similar to those of the ancient Egyptians involving evisceration, preservation, and stuffing of the evacuated bodily cavities, but the body was wrapped in animal skins instead of linen. 

Buddhist monks whose bodies remain incorrupt without any traces of deliberate mummification are venerated by many Buddhists who believe they successfully were able to mortify their flesh to death. Self-mummification was practiced until the late 1800s in Japan. Many Mahayana Buddhist monks were reported to know their time of death and their students accordingly buried them sitting in lotus position, put into a vessel with drying agents (such as wood, paper, or lime) and surrounded by bricks, to be exhumed later, usually after three years. The preserved bodies would then be decorated with paint and adorned with gold. Bodies purported to be those of self- mummified monks are exhibited in several Japanese shrines, and it has been claimed that the monks, prior to their death, stuck to a sparse diet made up of salt, nuts, seeds, roots, pine bark, and urushi tea. Urushi is a toxin used in making lacquer. Sokushinbutsu refers to a practice of Buddhist monks observing austerity to the point of death and mummification. This process of self-mummification was mainly practiced in Yamagata in Northern Japan between the eleventh and nineteenth century, by members of the Shingon (True Word) Japanese Vajrayana school of Buddhism. The practitioners of sokushinbutsu did not view this practice as an act of suicide, but rather as a form of further enlightenment. Those who succeeded were revered, while those who failed were nevertheless respected for the effort. It is believed that many hundreds of monks tried, but only twenty-four such mummifications have actually been discovered. Japan’s kodokushi, or lonely deaths, are senior citizens who die and go undiscovered for long periods of time. This happens frequently in Japan, which has the most elderly population in the world. Perhaps the body to go longest undiscovered belonged to Sogen Kato, born on July 22, 1899. In 2010, officials tried to contact Kato, wishing to honor him for his extreme longevity. His family rejected their advances, offering various excuses, including that Kato had become brain dead or that he was undergoing the Buddhist sokushinbutsu, starving himself to death on the path to enlightenment. Authorities persisted in trying to contact Kato. Police eventually broke into his home, discovering his mummified corpse lying in bed. Newspapers in the room indicated that Kato had likely died around November 1978, meaning that his body had been there for thirty-two years. The Shingon school’s founder, Kukai, brought the practice of self- mummification from Tang China as part of the secret tantric practices he learned there. The self-mummification of a Tibetan Buddhist monk, who died ca. 1475 and whose body was retrieved relatively incorrupt in the 1990s, was achieved by sophisticated practices of meditation. The mummified body of this monk was discovered purely by chance, when two Indian border patrol officers were sent to repair a Himalayan road in the Spiti Valley which had been damaged by an earthquake. Later, when a team of researchers, led by Professor Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania, finally reached the remote spirit house in Spiti and saw the mummy for the first time, they were amazed at how well preserved the body appeared to be as there was no evidence of traditional embalming techniques. Prior to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, there were hundreds of such mummies, but when the Chinese leaders ordered their desecration, the Tibetan people chose, instead, to cremate them. Gtum mo (Sanskrit candali) is an ancient Tibetan practice of inner heat meditation. When the body temperature drops, blood is pumped to internal organs which provide the feeling of fire in the belly. Using this technique, Tibetan monks can make wet freezing blankets go up in steam. Traditionally Tibetan monks can sit a whole night on frozen ice in meditation. If these monks can dry an icy wet sheet with heat visualisation techniques, then it is assumed that the the Tibetan mummies had sufficient power to do the same and dry out their bodies. A mummified monk was recently found wrapped in cattle skins in north-central Mongolia. Senior Buddhists say the monk, found sitting in the lotus position, is in a deep meditative trance and not dead. Scientists have yet to determine how the monk is so well-preserved, though some think Mongolia’s cold weather could be the reason. 

Dr. Barry Kerzin, a physician to Tibetan spiritual leader H.H. the Dalai Lama, told the Siberian Times that the monk was in a rare state of meditation called thugs dam: 

“If the meditator can continue to stay in this meditative state, he can become a Buddha…I had the privilege to take care of some meditators who were in a thugs dam state…If the person is able to remain in this state for more than three weeks––which rarely happens–– his body gradually shrinks, and in the end all that remains from the person is his hair, nails, and clothes. Usually in this case, people who live next to the monk see a rainbow that glows in the sky for several days. This means that he has found a ‘rainbow body’. This is the highest state close to the state of Buddha…If the meditator can continue to stay in this meditative state, he can become a Buddha. Reaching such a high spiritual level the meditator will also help others, and all the people around will feel a deep sense of joy.” 

The monk was discovered after being stolen by a man hoping to sell him on the black market. Mongolian police arrested the culprit and the monk is now being guarded at the National Centre of Forensic Expertise. The identity of the monk is unclear, though there is speculation that he is the teacher of Lama Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov, who was also found mummified. Born in 1852, Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov was a Buddhist lama of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, best known for the lifelike state of his body. In 1927, Itigilov, from neighboring Buryatia in the then Soviet Union, supposedly told his students he was going to die and that they should exhume his body in thirty years.The lama sat in the lotus position, began meditating and died. When he was dug up, legend has it that his body was still preserved. Fearing interference by the Soviet authorities, his followers re-buried him and he remained at rest until 2002 when he was again dug up to great fanfare and found still well preserved. The lama was then placed in a Buddhist temple to be worshipped. Ganhugiyn Purevbata, the founder of the Mongolian Institute of Buddhist Art at Ulaanbaatar Buddhist University, said the “lama is sitting in the vajra lotus position, the left hand is opened, and the right hand symbolizes the preaching of a Sutra…This is a sign that the Lama is not dead, but is in a very deep meditation according to the ancient tradition of Buddhist lamas.” In April 2013, Russian president Vladimir Putin went to Buryatia to “hold a conversation” with Itigilov and other lamas. 

Adipocere, or corpse wax, is a fatty substance that occasionally forms during the decomposition of humans and animals. When a corpse is left in moist, airless conditions, corpse wax can encase the remains in a brittle shell. Corpses encased in adipocere were quite an inconvenience for the owners of early graveyards because the wax prevented the recycling of the bodies in grave plots. On the other hand, it can aid forensic scientists and archaeologists during autopsies of very old remains. In 1825, the Italian physician Augustus Granville autopsied the well-preserved remains of a woman called Irtyersenu. His autopsy was as much a theatrical event as it was genuine science. To enhance the mood of the event, Granville lit the lecture hall with candles made from what he believed to be a form of beeswax or bitumen used to preserve the body. Later studies showed that the wax was nothing of the sort but was part of the remains of the unlucky corpse itself. A more recent form of body preservation is plastination in which the water and fat of the corpse are replaced by certain plastics, yielding specimens that can be touched, do not smell or decay, and even retain most of the microscopic properties of the original human. In the 1830s, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, left instructions that upon his death his body was to be preserved in the creation of a modern-day mummy. He asked that his body be displayed and lectured about and that his body parts be preserved, including his skeleton (minus his skull) which were to be dressed in the clothes he usually wore and seated in a chair. His body, outfitted with a wax head, is currently on open display in the University College London. During the early twentieth century the Russian movement of Cosmism envisioned a scientific resurrection of dead people. The idea was so popular that after Vladimir Lenin’s death it was suggested to cryonically preserve his body and brain in order to revive him in the future. Instead his body was embalmed and placed on permanent exhibition in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow, where it is displayed to this day. In 2010, a team led by forensic archaeologist Stephen Buckley, mummified the taxi driver Alan Billis using techniques based on research of Egyptian mummification. The process was filmed for television and the body of Billis now resides at London’s Gordon Museum. In 1975, the esoteric organization Summum introduced modern mummification, a service that utilizes modern techniques along with aspects of ancient methods of mummification. The first person to formally undergo Summum’s process of mummification was the organization’s founder, Claude Nowell known as Summum Bonum Amen Ra, who died in January 2008. His body is encased inside a bronze casket that is covered in gold and stands inside the group’s pyramid in Utah. Summum is currently considered to be the only “commercial mummification business” in the world. The service is available to anyone and is also offered for pets. Several exhibitions in museums all over the world display the skinless, preserved bodies of human cadavers. These exhibitions pose various ethical dilemmas with promoters describing the exhibits as educational, while other groups call such exhibits indecent. The archdiocese of Vancouver has called these exhibitions an indignity to the human body. The superintendent of Vancouver schools set a district-wide ban in place in response to planned field trips to see one such exhibition, questioning the effect skinless corpses would have on children. Despite public outcry, the body display industry is quite successful. One exhibition, Body Worlds, has raked in over two hundred million dollars in the past decade. The industry is, however, tainted with ghastly rumors. More than ten Chinese body factories supply some of the demand for the displayed cadavers but with little government oversight, it is uncertain where the bodies originate. Museums displaying these exhibitions are refusing to reveal their sources, and both police and universities are suspected of supplying bodies for the shows. In response, the Chinese government has created new laws banning the import, export, and purchase of human bodies except for research. 

The term taphophile refers to individuals who are cemetery enthusiasts. Often these individuals have a passion for epitaphs, gravestone rubbings, photography, art, and history of famous deaths or the historical relevance of the cemetery’s inhabitants. Additionally, genealogists make considerable effort to search out cemeteries to include verification of grave records, and ancestral burial locations. Making gravestone rubbings was in practice for centuries as a way of providing genealogical documentation as well as developing a connoisseurship for the carvings on the tombstones. Among genealogists, scouring cemeteries looking for the graves of dead ancestors is a common and longstanding practice with individuals who must often rely on limited and outdated information to find burial sites. Many cemetery transcribers and ancestor hunters have been using GPS (global positioning system) digital navigation to locate the area where a graveyard containing a grave is reputed to be. Rarely do taphophiles find that cemeteries are emotionally neutral. Graveyards always have a history of meaning and context within a constellation of stories, the presence of which can be felt upon entering such a locale. The cemetery is always different from any other place. The stories that arise in a cemetery refer not only to the histories of the people buried there, but also to the lives of the people who frequent such a necropolis. Although most visitors, or tourists, to cemeteries are simply seeking a quiet walk among very quiet people, there is often a feeling perchance described as Gothic that enters the imagination during such a perambulation. Something like a story that is deeply buried offers the viewer of the cemetery much more intrigue than the average ramble through, say, a shopping mall. 

” During its prime, Gothic literature dealt with the theme of death by challenging the moral certainties of life in the eighteenth century. In addition to dealing with the subject of death, the literature began to develop a group of antagonists to provide a plot which includes themes of adversarial creatures associated historically with death. By exploring the dark romance of the past with its graveyards, castles, abbeys, its wild landscapes and fascination with the supernatural, Gothic writers placed imagination firmly at the heart of their work and the culture in which they lived. The term haunting means to remain in the consciousness and not quickly forgotten. There is haunting music and there are haunting memories. Thus the memorials found in cemeteries, may create haunting recollections that society collectively does not easily forget. The necropolis in many instances became seen as a place characterized by desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents, even when the locale was quite urban. The Gothic revival, which appeared in the landscape of English gardens and much of the architecture of cemeteries before it got into literature, was the work of a handful of literary visionaries. The most important of these quixotic writers was Horace Walpole (1717–1797), novelist, letter writer, and son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. When the Gothic made its appearance in literature, Walpole was a chief initiator, publishing The Castle of Otranto (1764), a short novel in which the ingredients are a haunted castle, mysterious deaths, supernatural happenings, and violent emotions of terror, anguish, and love. The work was tremendously popular, and imitations followed in such numbers that the Gothic novel (or romance) was probably the most prevalent type of fiction in England for the next half century. Possibly the most famous Gothic novel was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein written in 1818. The novel was inspired, as Shelley explains in her introduction to the edition of 1831, by a communal reading of German ghost stories with her husband, writer Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poet Lord George Gordon Byron during bad weather on the shores of Lake Geneva. Frankenstein is possibly the single most important product of the Gothic tradition, considerably transcending its sources. Its numerous thematic resonances relate to science, poetry, psychology, alienation, politics, education, family relationships, while simultaneously narrating a tale of a reanimated, or perhaps resurrected, corpse along with the attendant grave robbers and charnel houses. These themes likewise resonate in the cemetery. Despite the secular opposition to the Gothic suggestion in the existence of ghouls, vampires, the lycanthrope, ghosts or witches as a reality, the cemetery provides a backdrop for a narrative of intrigue that begs to conjecture the truth of such a presumption. The creature(s), as the prime antagonist(s) become central to the Gothic plot which centers heavily on cemeteries and venues associated with death. Despite the hegemony of the normal human race, such plots seek to extrapolate that there is real evidence that other, abnormally human, creatures exist. Witches, the most human of the creatures associated with death and cemeteries, have certainly existed and many still exist. Most witches in literature are actual humans, mostly women, but others are the spirits of the deceased. Witches will seldom have any funerary memorials which chronicle their profession, though their existence, like ghouls, ghosts, vampires and other such creatures, continue to resonate in the imagination. 

A remarkable occurrence, which attracted wide-spread interest, was connected with the family of John Bell, who settled near what is now Adams Station, Tennessee about 1804. People came from hundreds of miles to witness the manifestations of what was popularly known as the Bell Witch. This witch, whose name was Kate Batts, was supposedly a spiritual being having the voice and attributes of a woman. A type of poltergeist, she was invisible to the eye, yet would hold conversation and even shake hands with certain individuals. The feats Batts performed were quite sensational but designed to annoy the Bell family. The witch would take the sugar from the bowls, spill the milk, take the quilts from the beds, slap and pinch the children, and then laugh at the discomfort of her victims. At first she was believed to be a good spirit, but her subsequent acts proved the contrary. The concept of witchcraft––whether a physical human being, or like the Bell witch, discarnate––has existed since the dawn of human history. It has been present or central at various times, and in many diverse forms, among cultures and worldwide, positing a conflict between good and evil, where witchcraft was generally viewed as evil and often associated with the Devil and Devil worship. The word witchcraft derives from the Old English wiccecræft, a compound of witch and craft, with craft meaning a form of expertise. A witch differs from a sorcerer in that their maleficium is perceived as extending from some intangible inner quality, and occasionally may result in the person being unaware that they are a witch. The folk magic used to identify or protect against malicious magic users is often indistinguishable from that used by the witches themselves. There has also existed in popular belief the concept of white witches and white witchcraft, which is strictly benevolent. Many neopagan witches strongly identify with this concept, and profess ethical codes that prevent them from performing magic on a person without the subject’s consent. White witches are the varient, often along with their (animal) familiars, that most frequent certain present day cemeteries. Often the familiar will live in the cemetery and is contacted when the witch arrives. 

Witch trials were often no more than a blood-lust entertainment on scale with earlier gladiator spectacles. The judges at the trials were mainly males who sought to subjugate, dominate, tyrannize, persecute, and bind women to a male dominated yoke. During the witch trials of early modern Europe, many practitioners of folk magic that did not see themselves as witches but as healers or seers, were nonetheless convicted of witchcraft. Over half the accused witches in Hungary seem to have been such healers. The most obvious characteristic of a witch is the ability to cast a spell, being the word used to signify the means employed to carry out a magical action. A spell could consist of a set of words, a formula or verse, or a ritual action, or any combination of these. Spells traditionally were cast by many methods, such as by the inscription of runes or sigils on an object, such as a tombstone, to give it magical powers; by the immolation or binding of a wax or clay image of a person to affect him or her magically; by the recitation of incantations; by the performance of physical rituals; by the employment of magical herbs, often grown near a gravesite, as amulets or potions; or by gazing at mirrors, swords or other specula (scrying) for purposes of divination. Strictly speaking, necromancy is the practice of conjuring the spirits of the dead for divination or prophecy although the term has also been applied to raising the dead for other purposes. Necromancy is among the witchcraft practices condemned by the tenth century English Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham who, like many other early Church Fathers held that witchcraft was a delusion and denounced its practice. Because witchcraft was believed to involve demonic possession, it was associated with heresy and thus came within the scope of the Inquisition. In the witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European courts frequently regarded both witches and sorcerers as candidates for burning. Although estimates of the number killed vary widely, it is likely that between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed and many more were tortured and imprisoned during these witch-hunts. Witch burning alleviated the cost of a burial or the consumption of space within a cemetery. The majority of those accused were women, though in some regions the majority were men. Accusations of witchcraft were frequently combined with other charges of heresy against such groups as the
Cathars and Waldensians. The Malleus Maleficarum, sometimes called the witches hammer, was a famous witch-hunting manual used by both Roman Catholics and Protestants outlining how to identify a witch, what makes a woman more likely to be a witch, how to put a witch to trial and how to punish a witch who is always defined as evil. 

The trials of the Pendle witches in 1612 are among the most famous witch trials in English history, and some of the best recorded of the seventeenth century. The twelve accused lived in the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire, and were charged with the murders of ten people by the use of witchcraft. All but two were tried at Lancaster Assizes during August 1612, along with the Samlesbury witches and others, in a series of trials that have become known as the Lancashire witch trials. Of the eleven who went to trial, nine women and two men, ten were found guilty and executed by hanging and the other died in prison. Six of the Pendle witches came from one of two families, each at the time headed by a woman in her eighties. One family was headed by Elizabeth Southerns (called Demdike), her daughter Elizabeth Device, and her grandchildren James and Alizon Device. The other family was headed by Anne Whittle (called Chattox), and her daughter Anne Redferne. The others accused were Jane Bulcock and her son John Bulcock, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, Alice Gray, and Jennet Preston. The outbreaks of witchcraft in and around Pendle further demonstrates the extent to which people could make a living by posing as witches. Many of the allegations resulted from accusations that members of the Demdike and Chattox families made against each other, perhaps because they were in competition, with both families trying to make a living from healing, begging, and extortion. Pendle Hill in Lancashire was a county which, at the end of the sixteenth century, was regarded by the authorities as a wild and lawless region and an area fabled for its theft, violence and sexual laxity. The county was also a place where the Catholic Church was honored without much understanding of its doctrines. The nearby Cistercian abbey at Whalley had been dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537, a move strongly resisted by the local people, over whose lives the abbey had until then exerted a powerful influence. Perhaps because witches were often grave robbers, Henry VIII’s Act of 1542 defined witchcraft as a felony, a crime punishable by death and the forfeiture of the convicted felon’s goods and chattels. It was forbidden to: 

… use devise practise or exercise, or cause to be devysed practised or exercised, any Invovacons or cojuracons of Sprites witchecraftes enchauntementes or sorceries to thentent to fynde money or treasure or to waste consume or destroy any persone in his bodie membres, or to pvoke any persone to unlawfull love, or for any other unlawfull intente or purpose…or for dispite of Cryste, or for lucre of money, dygge up or pull downe any Crosse or Crosses or by such Invovacons or cojuracons of Sprites witchecraftes enchauntementes or sorceries or any of them take upon them to tell or declare where goodes stollen or lost shall become… 

When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, Catholic priests had gone into hiding, but in remote areas such as Pendle they continued to celebrate Mass in secret. In 1562, early in her reign, Elizabeth passed a law in the form of An Act Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts. This demanded the death penalty for witches, but only where harm had been caused. James I, Elizabeth’s successor, attended the trial of North Berwick witches, who were convicted of using witchcraft to send a storm against the ship that carried James and his wife Anne back to Scotland from Denmark. In 1597 he wrote a book, Daemonologie, instructing his followers that they must denounce and prosecute any supporters or practitioners of witchcraft. One year after James acceded to the English throne, a law was enacted imposing the death penalty in cases where it was proven that harm had been caused through the use of magic, or corpses had been exhumed from cemeteries for magical purposes. James was, however, skeptical of the evidence presented in witch trials, even to the extent of personally exposing discrepancies in the testimonies presented against some of the accused. In early 1612, the year of the Pende trials, every magistrate in Lancashire was ordered to compile a list of recusants in their area to include those who refused to attend the English Church and to take communion which was a criminal offense at that time. Roger Nowell was the magistrate for Pendle. In March 1612, Nowell investigated a complaint made to him by the family of John Law, a peddler, who claimed to have been injured by witchcraft. Many of those who subsequently became implicated as the investigation progressed did consider themselves to be witches, in the sense of being village healers who practiced magic, probably in return for payment. Such men and women were common in sixteenth century rural England, and accepted as part of village life. It was difficult for the judges charged with hearing the trials to understand King James’s attitude towards witchcraft. One of the judges had been accused of a miscarriage of justice which had resulted in a woman being sentenced to death by hanging. The judges were uncertain whether the best way to gain the king’s favor was by encouraging convictions, or by skeptically testing the witnesses to destruction. Torture was one such test, and seemed to always guarantee a confession. One of the accused, Demdike, had been regarded in the area as a witch for fifty years, and some of the deaths of which the witches were accused happened many years before Roger Nowell started to take an interest in 1612. The event that seems to have triggered Nowell’s investigation, culminating in the Pendle witch trials, occurred in March 1612. On her way to Trawden Forest in Lancashire, Demdike’s granddaughter, Alizon Device, encountered the peddler John Law and asked him for some pins. Seventeenth century metal pins were handmade and relatively expensive, but they were frequently needed for magical purposes, such as in healing, particularly for treating warts, as well as for the practice of divination, and for love potions. Shortly after their encounter Alizon saw Law stumble and fall, perhaps because he suffered a stroke. Law managed to regain his balance and reach a nearby inn. Initially Law made no accusations against Alizon, but she appears to have been convinced of her own powers and when she went to visit Law a few days after the incident, she reportedly confessed to using magic and asked for his forgiveness. As a result Alizon Device, her mother Elizabeth, and her brother James were summoned to appear before Nowell. Alizon confessed that she had sold her soul to the Devil, and that she had told him to lame John Law after he had called her a thief. Her brother, James, stated that his sister had also confessed to bewitching a local child. Elizabeth was more reticent, admitting only that her mother, Demdike, had a mark on her body, something that many, including Nowell, would have regarded as having been left by the Devil after he had sucked her blood. When questioned about Anne Whittle (Chattox), the matriarch of the other family reputedly involved in witchcraft in and around Pendle, Alizon perhaps saw an opportunity for longstanding revenge. There had been strong resentments between the two families, possibly dating from 1601, when a member of Chattox’s family broke into Malkin Tower, the home of the Devices and a supposed witch coven, and stole goods. Alizon accused Chattox of murdering four men by witchcraft, and of killing her father, John Device, who had died in 1601. She claimed that her father had been so frightened of the elderly Chattox matron that he had agreed to give her eight pounds of oatmeal each year in return for her promise not to hurt his family. The meal was handed over annually until the year before John’s death. On his deathbed John claimed that his sickness had been caused by Chattox because they had not paid for protection that year. During April 1612, Demdike, Chattox, and Chattox’s daughter Anne Redferne, were summoned to appear before Nowell. Both Demdike and Chattox were by then blind and in their eighties, and both provided Nowell with damaging confessions, most likely as a result of torture. Demdike claimed that she had given her soul to the Devil twenty years previously, and Chattox that she had given her soul to “a thing like a Christian man,” on his promise that “she would not lack anything and would get any revenge she desired.” Although Anne Redferne made no confession, Demdike said that she had seen her making clay figures. Margaret Crooke, another witness seen by Nowell that day, claimed that her brother had fallen sick and died after having had a disagreement with Redferne, and that he had frequently blamed her for his illness. Based on the evidence and confessions obtained, Nowell committed Demdike, Chattox, Anne Redferne and Alizon Device to Lancaster Gaol, to be tried for maleficium. The committal and subsequent trial of the four women might have been the end of the matter, had it not been for a meeting organized by Elizabeth Device at Malkin Tower held on Good Friday, April 10, 1612. To feed the party, James Device stole a neighbor’s sheep. Friends and others sympathetic to the family attended, and when word of it reached Roger Nowell, he decided to investigate. On April 27, 1612, an inquiry was held before Nowell and another magistrate to determine the purpose of the meeting at Malkin Tower, who had attended, and what had transpired there. As a result of the inquiry, eight more people were accused of witchcraft and committed for trial including Elizabeth Device, James Device, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock, Jane Bulcock, Alice Gray and Jennet Preston. Preston lived across the border in Yorkshire, so already imprisoned there. Malkin Tower is believed to have been near the village of Newchurch in Pendle, and to have been demolished soon after the trials. The Pendle witches were tried in a group that also included the Samlesbury witches, Jane Southworth, Jennet Brierley, and Ellen Brierley, the charges against whom included child murder and cannibalism. Additionally, Margaret Pearson, the so-called Padiham witch, was facing her third trial for witchcraft, this time for killing a horse, and Isobel Robey from Windle, were both accused of using witchcraft to cause sickness. Some of the accused Pendle witches, such as Alizon Device, seem to have genuinely believed in their guilt, but others protested their innocence to the end. Jennet Preston was the first to be tried, being charged with the murder by witchcraft of a local landowner to which she pleaded not guilty. She had already been accused of murdering a child by witchcraft, but had been found not guilty. The most damning evidence given against her was when she had been taken to see the corpse and had “bled fresh bloud presently, in the presence of all that were there present” after she touched the deceased. According to a statement made to Nowell by James Device on April 27, Jennet had attended the Malkin Tower meeting to seek help with the murder. She was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. All the other accused lived in Lancashire, so they were sent to Lancaster Assizes for trial. Nine-year-old Jennet Device was a key witness for the prosecution and gave evidence against her mother, brother, and sister. Nine of the accused including Alizon Device, Elizabeth Device, James Device, Anne Whittle, Anne Redferne, Alice Nutter, Katherine Hewitt, John Bulcock and Jane Bulcock were found guilty during the two-day trial and hanged at Gallows Hill. Elizabeth Southerns died while awaiting trial. Only one of the accused, Alice Grey, was found not guilty. Anne Whittle (Chattox) was accused of the murder of Robert Nutter. She pleaded not guilty, but the confession she had made to Nowell was read out in court, and evidence against her was presented by James Robinson, who had lived with the Chattox family twenty years earlier. He claimed to remember that Nutter had accused Chattox of turning his beer sour, and that she was commonly believed to be a witch. Chattox broke down and admitted her guilt, calling on God for forgiveness and the judges to be merciful to her daughter, Anne Redferne. Elizabeth Device was charged with the murders of James Robinson, John Robinson and, together with Alice Nutter and Demdike, the murder of Henry Mitton. The records state that “this odious witch” suffered from a facial deformity resulting in her left eye being set lower than her right. The main witness against Device was her daughter, Jennet. When Jennet was asked to stand up and give evidence against her mother, Elizabeth began to scream and curse her daughter, forcing the judges to have her removed from the courtroom before the evidence could be heard. Jennet was placed on a table and stated that she believed her mother had been a witch for three or four years. She also said her mother had a familiar called Ball, who appeared in the shape of a brown dog. Jennet claimed to have witnessed conversations between Ball and her mother, in which Ball had been asked to help with various murders. James Device also gave evidence against his mother, saying he had seen her making a clay figure of one of her victims. Elizabeth Device was found guilty. James Device pleaded not guilty to the murders of Anne Townley and John Duckworth. However he, like Chattox, had earlier made a confession to Nowell, which was read in court. That, and the evidence presented against him by his sister Jennet, who said that she had seen her brother asking a black dog he had conjured up to help him kill Townley, was sufficient to persuade the jury to find him guilty. The trials of the three Samlesbury witches were heard before Anne Redferne’s first appearance in court, late in the afternoon, charged with the murder of Robert Nutter. The evidence against her was considered unsatisfactory, and she was acquitted. However, Anne Redferne was not so fortunate the following day, when she faced her second trial, for the murder of Robert Nutter’s father, Christopher, to which she pleaded not guilty. Demdike’s statement to Nowell, which accused Anne of having made clay figures of the Nutter family, was read out in court. Witnesses were called to testify that Anne was a witch “more dangerous than her Mother.” But she refused to admit her guilt to the end, and had given no evidence against any others of the accused. Nonetheless, Anne Redferne was found guilty. Jane Bulcock and her son John Bulcock, were accused and found guilty of the murder by witchcraft of Jennet Deane. Both denied that they had attended the meeting at Malkin Tower, but Jennet Device identified Jane as having been one of those present, and John as having turned the spit to roast the stolen sheep. Alice Nutter was unusual among the accused in being comparatively wealthy, the widow of a tenant farmer. She made no statement either before or during her trial, except to enter her plea of not guilty to the charge of murdering Henry Mitton by witchcraft. The prosecution alleged that she, together with Demdike and Elizabeth Device, had caused Mitton’s death after he had refused to give Demdike a penny she had begged from him. The only evidence against Alice seems to have been that James Device claimed Demdike had told him of the murder, and Jennet Device in her statement said that Alice had been present at the Malkin Tower meeting. Alice may have called in on the meeting at Malkin Tower on her way to a secret (and illegal) Good Friday Catholic service, and refused to speak for fear of incriminating her fellow Catholics. Katherine Hewitt was charged and found guilty of the murder of the child Anne Foulds. Hewitt was the wife of a clothier from Colne and had attended the meeting at Malkin Tower with Alice Grey. According to the evidence given by James Device, both Hewitt and Grey told the others at that meeting that they had indeed killed Anne Foulds, a child from Colne. Jennet Device also picked Katherine out of a line-up, and confirmed her attendance at the Malkin Tower meeting. Alizon Device, whose encounter with John Law had triggered the events leading up to the trials, was charged with causing harm by witchcraft. Uniquely among the accused, Alizon was confronted in court by her alleged victim, John Law. She seems to have genuinely believed in her own guilt and when Law was brought into court Alizon fell to her knees in tears and confessed. She was found guilty. Although destroyed, the lost Malkin Tower was discovered in December 2011, after engineers unearthed a seventeenth century cottage with a mummified cat sealed in the walls. The frenzy of the witch trials provided much of the only entertainment, although gruesome, of seventeenth century England and served as an ongoing “soap opera” for the local populations. 

Extant cemetery memorials for witches are filled with legends, although seldom as well documented as the witch trials. In Trumbull, Connecticut lies the grave of Hannah Hovey. Hannah’s husband died a very mysterious death in the early nineteenth century, and the villagers started wondering if perhaps Hannah was a witch. According to Hannah, her husband awoke one morning to go for a walk, but while walking became disoriented and somehow walked right off a cliff. Additionally, Hannah had a habit of stopping at neighbors’ homes and scaring them into offering her free food and firewood, just to get her to leave. One farmer’s wife dared to deny Hannah the largest pie on her table, instead offering a much smaller one. Hannah left in a huff and allegedly cast an evil spell on the farmer’s wife who subsequently was never able to bake again. A similar fate befell a fisherman caught fishing on Hannah’s property. After she scolded him and threw him off her land, he never caught another fish. Those who truly believed in Hannah’s impressive abilities were duly rewarded with good spells, while those who mocked her in disbelief were punished with bad spells. Hannah lived on top of a hill, in a house said to be guarded by snakes of every type and size. She had a pet rooster, Old Boreas, whom some believed was actually her familiar. When Old Boreas died, Hannah knew that her time was likewise quite limited. She told a neighbor that she would soon die and wished to have her coffin carried by foot, not by wagon, to the cemetery. When she died the next day, a snowstorm hampered efforts to carry her casket through the knee-deep snow. The pallbearers decided to load her casket on a wagon, but it kept rolling off. The men finally decided to honor Hannah’s wish and brought her casket to the cemetery by foot. When they finished their grim task and headed back to town, they learned that Hannah’s house had gone up in flames shortly after they took her body away. Today, some people think that Hannah’s spirit haunts the local cemetery. A local legend claims that at least once a year, a driver passing by Gregory’s Four Corners Burial Ground swerves to avoid a woman in the middle of the road, and crashes into Hannah’s tombstone. In places such as Salem, Massachusetts, for years after witches were hanged and buried and the community thought they were rid of these troublesome characters, they neither preserved the accused’s execution site nor where their bodies were interred. Often witch trials in the colonial era were performed to appease the courts of England and made the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Sir William Phips, look tough to the King back in England who had given Phips power over the region. Of the 1,200 pages of records that have survived from the Salem trials, not one document conveys the whereabouts of the victims’ bodies. Samuel Sewell, one witch trial judge, kept a diary for the last forty years of his life. But, the summer of 1692 is blank, most likely as a willful amnesia, brought about by the collective guilt of the community. These theocratic persecutions had mostly killed the truly pious of the town by executing the most Christian of them all. Nobody who confessed to being a witch was executed. Only those so devoted to their religious convictions that they would not lie to save their lives paid with their lives. Now the victims of these trials have spent over three centuries buried in unconsecrated graves and unknown to their descendants. The burial of witches was often with the body lying face-down, thus further punishing the accused. Shaming a person in death, or taking measures against the possibility of supernatural retribution from beyond the grave to ensure that the dead remained dead, included such acts as putting a brick in the mouth of the skull, and nailing the bones to the ground. In some cases, a victim of this treatment was buried face-down while still alive. The macabre remains of an eight hundred year old witch was recently found during an archeological dig close to the sea at Piombino near Lucca in Italy’s Tuscany region. The woman had seven nails through her jaw as well as another thirteen nails surrounding her skeleton. A second skeleton in the same region was found buried in a similar fashion but included seventeen dice around the corpse. Seventeen was an unlucky number in Italy and dice was a game that women were forbidden to play. 

Another feature of an eldritch manifestation in cemeteries is the ghoul. A ghoul is a folkloric spirit, usually classified as undead, associated with graveyards and the consumption of human flesh. The oldest surviving literature that mention ghouls is One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales compiled in Arabic. The term ghoul is from the Arabic ghala (to seize). Aside from the cemetery, a ghoul is also a desert dwelling, shapeshifting, demon that can assume the guise of an animal, especially a hyena. It lures unwary people into the desert wastelands or abandoned places such as the cemetery to slay and devour them. The creature also preys on young children, drinks blood, steals coins, and eats the dead, then taking the form of the person most recently devoured. In Japan ghouls (gūru) are believed to be a carnivorous and cannibalistic species that feed on humans and other ghouls. They are as close to humans as possible, having the same physical appearance and intelligence as a human with the exception of diet, mentality and inner biology. If certain rare conditions are met, a Japanese ghoul’s organs can be successfully transplanted into a human. In Japan, ghouls can not eat normal food, but they are able to drink coffee and are also able to drink plain water. Ghouls do not need to eat in the short term, like humans, and can survive for one or two months just feeding on one body. However, some ghouls eat merely for pleasure. When a Japanese ghoul enters an extreme state of hunger, they will suffer very painful headaches and lose all reason, causing them to become driven by instinct alone. They will feed on any available source of human meat to end this state. Although ghouls can go for up to two months without human flesh, some ghouls can feed on more than eleven people in just a few days. Ghouls have great physical capability and are much stronger than the average human. They are able to send the average human flying if they strike with enough force and can penetrate a human body with their bare hands. Additionally, Japanese ghouls have better senses than humans. They can smell people or meat from afar and can differentiate humans from other ghouls by their smell. A heightened sense of hearing allows the ghoul to discern individual footsteps from far away. Although usually existing as isolated hermits, some ghouls attempt to assimilate with humans. Such ghouls pretend to eat food in order to create the impression they are human. However they must make themselves vomit soon afterwards, or become sick. Because they can only consume human flesh, they are very territorial when it comes to their hunting grounds. Human consumption may demand that the ghoul becomes a scavenger who only feeds on the recently deceased. Thus a cemetery is the ideal abode of such creatures. 

The Yanomami people of the Amazon have no custom of burial. They cremate their dead and then eat their ashes. This practice is done to save the deceased’s soul. The Yanomami believe that once a person dies their soul goes into a kind of limbo. It can then migrate to a different kind of being, which is why certain birds, which are likely candidates for reincarnated souls, are not killed. The Yanomami believe that a soul can only leave the state of limbo if it is cremated, mixed with banana paste, and eaten—preferably by its relatives. Once inside a human body, the soul can be freed and reach salvation. However, the ritual is not carried out immediately. The Yanomami usually wait until a day of festivity to consume the ashes, leaving the dead’s soul in limbo and their ashes in the house until then. The custom of eating old human ashes might sound unappetizing to most, but to the Yanomami it is taken quite seriously. They are a nomadic people who often go to war with neighboring tribes over space. Thus one of the most serious threats a warrior can give is that the victors will not eat their enemies, which would trap their soul in limbo forever. 

A belief in the manifestations of the spirits of the dead is widespread throughout the world, dating back to animism and ancestor worship in pre-literate cultures. Certain religious practices including funeral rites, exorcisms, and some practices of spiritualism and ritual magic are specifically designed to rest the spirits of the dead. Ghosts are generally described as solitary essences that haunt particular locations such as a cemetery, objects, or the people with whom they were associated in life. However, accounts of phantom armies, ghost trains, phantom ships, and even ghost animals have also been reported. A revenant is a deceased person returning from the dead to haunt the living, either as a disembodied ghost, or alternately, as an animated or undead corpse. Strategies for preventing revenants may either include sacrifice, which includes giving the dead food and drink to pacify them, or magical banishment of the deceased to force them not to return. The appearance of a ghost has often been regarded as an omen or portent of death. Seeing one’s own ghostly double, or fetch, is a related omen of death. The badb is a Celtic phantom. A pale woman with a blood-stained mouth, the babd is often associated with two other phantom queens, the morrigan and macha. The badb is a forerunner to the banshee. Legend says she hovers over the battlefield, shrieking encouragement to her allies and cursing her foes. She has the ability to speak from the mouths of corpses on the battlefield and inhabit the bodies of cows, eels, wolves, and crows. Rarely is she depicted taking part in the battle itself, but instead provokes men to fight from the sidelines as a harbinger of doom. Seeing her seldom augers good for those engaged in combat. Outside of battle, the badb has more subtle ways of striking fear, where she is rumored to stand over a nearby stream and wash the bloodied rags of those who will soon die in battle. Similar to the babd are ghosts known as white ladies that have been reported in many areas. Such apparitions, although not related necessarily to the battlefield, are believed to be women who have died tragically or suffered trauma in life. White Lady legends are found around the world, notably for example in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tale of Adelgunda in his Die Automate. 

Common to many of these White Ladies is the theme of losing or being betrayed by a husband or fiancé. They are often associated with an individual family line or regarded as a harbinger of death, similar to a banshee. A White Lady is fabled to appear by day as well as by night in a house in which a family member is soon to die. These spirits are often regarded as the ghosts of deceased ancestresses. In the United Kingdom, a White Lady is believed to reside on a stretch of road between Beeford and Brandesburton. Motorists have reported her apparition running across the Beeford Straight. Anecdotal tales also report a motorcyclist picking up a female hitchhiker on the same stretch of road. A few miles later the motorcyclist, upon turning around, noticed the passenger had vanished. In another instance, a car travelling on the road crashed into a tree killing six people. The accident was rumored to be the White Lady’s curse. Another legend tells of a White Lady jumping off the Portchester Castle while she was carrying a child she didn’t want. Her spirit is said to haunt the castle to this day. In the United States, the White Lady of Acra, New York, is a ghost of a young woman dressed in all white seen at night along the road she last traveled or near the cemetery not far from her fatal accident. Newark, New Jersey, is home to the legend of the White Lady of Branch Brook Park. Two conflicting stories are told about this ghost. In one version, the lady was a newlywed who was killed along with her husband on her wedding night when their automobile skidded out of control and crashed into a tree in the park. In another version, a couple were on their way to a prom when their limousine crashed. While the boy lived, the girl died, and is allegedly still looking for her prom date. For many years the tree in question was along a sharp curve in the park road and part of its trunk was painted white. It is said that on rainy or misty nights passing headlights produce a ghostly image crossing the road. Tolamato Cemetery in St. Augustine, Florida, has since the nineteenth century been home to stories of a haunting by a lady in white. Legend states that the ghost is the spirit of a young woman who died suddenly on her way to be married, and who was buried in her wedding dress. In Madisonville, Louisiana there is a legend about a woman called the Silk Lady. Her story states that back in the mid-1800s there was a woman who was riding back from town after seeing her lover off. She was riding down an old logging trail when a snake spooked her horse. She fell and died as a result of the injury. Several people have reported seeing her ghost as a woman dressed in a silky dress whose feet do not touch the ground. When she sees someone she is said to cackle like a banshee. In Germany, a White Woman was first reported to be seen in the Berlin City Palace in 1625 and sightings were reported until 1790. This castle was the residence of the kings of Prussia, so the Lady has been linked to either the guilt-ridden countess Kunigunda of Orlamünde who murdered her two young children because she believed they stood in the way of her marriage to Albert of Nuremberg, or the unfortunate widow Bertha of Rosenberg from Bohemia. The Netherlands tell of farmers stories about the Witte Wieven (White Ladies) who change babies, abduct women and bring disaster to people. In Slavic Mythology, a White Lady was the ghost of a girl or young woman that died violently, who committed suicide, or was murdered or died while imprisoned. The ghost is usually bound to a specific location and is often identified as a specific person such as Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, a countess from the renowned Báthory family of Hungary. 

Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed has been labelled the most prolific female serial killer in history, though the precise number of her victims is debated. Báthory and four collaborators were accused of torturing and killing hundreds of girls between 1585 and 1610. The highest number of victims cited during Báthory’s judicial proceedings was 650. Despite the evidence against Elizabeth, her family’s influence kept her from actually facing trial. She was imprisoned in December 1610 within Csejte Castle, now in Slovakia, where she remained immured in a set of rooms until her death four years later. The stories of her serial murders and brutality are verified by the testimony of more than three hundred witnesses and survivors as well as physical evidence which included the presence of horribly mutilated dead, dying and imprisoned girls found at the time of her arrest. Stories ascribed to her vampire-like tendencies include, most famously, the tale that she bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth. Elizabeth was the cousin of the Hungarian Duke of Transylvania. Despite her notoriety, Elizabeth was an educated woman who could read and write in four languages. There were even several instances where she intervened on behalf of destitute women, including a woman whose husband was captured by the Turks and a woman whose daughter was raped and impregnated. Elizabeth was engaged at age ten to Ferenc Nádasdy, the son of Baron Tamás Nádasdy de Nádasd et Fogarasföld and his wife, Orsolya Kanizsay in what was likely a political arrangement within the circles of the aristocracy. The couple married in 1575 with approximately 4,500 guests invited to the wedding. Ferenc, unlike his wife, could barely read or write in his mother tongue. Two years after the arrangement of their marriage, Elizabeth, at thirteen years old, became pregnant by one of the servants. Ferenc, infuriated, had the servant castrated and thrown to a pack of dogs. Elizabeth was taken to another castle, where she gave birth in 1574, in secret, to a daughter named Anastasia Báthory. No documentation on the infant has ever been recovered leading to the belief that Ferenc had the baby killed. Ferenc occasionally joined in some of Elizabeth’s sadistic behavior and actually taught his wife some new varieties of punishment. One example states that Ferenc had a woman stripped, covered with honey, then left outside to be bitten by numerous insects. The trial records of Elizabeth include the testimony of four defendants, as well as thirteen witnesses. Priests, noblemen and commoners were questioned. According to all testimony, Elizabeth’s initial victims were the adolescent daughters of local peasants, many of whom were lured to the castle by offers of well paid work as maidservants. Later, Elizabeth is said to have killed daughters of the lesser gentry, who were sent to her gynaeceum by their parents to learn courtly etiquette. Abductions were said to have occurred as well. The atrocities described most consistently included severe beatings, burning or mutilation of hands, biting the flesh off the faces, arms and other body parts, freezing or starving to death. The use of needles was also mentioned by the collaborators in court. Some witnesses named relatives who died while at the gynaeceum. Others reported having seen traces of torture on dead bodies, some of which were buried in graveyards, and others in unmarked locations. However, two witnesses who were court officials, actually saw the Countess torture and kill young servant girls. According to the testimony of the defendants, Elizabeth Báthory tortured and killed her victims at several of her properties including in Vienna, and elsewhere. In addition to the defendants, several people were named for supplying Elizabeth Báthory with young women, procured either by deception or by force. A little-known figure named Anna Darvulia, a suspected witch, was rumored to have influenced Báthory, but Darvulia was dead long before the trial. In 1609, Darvulia became ill, so Elizabeth turned to Erzsi Majorova, the widow of one of the local tenant farmers, as her new cohort. Majorova, also a suspected witch, is noted as being the one mainly responsible for Bathory’s eventual downfall, by advising her to include a few women of noble birth amongst her victims. Elizabeth began having troubles in obtaining servant girls willing to work for her as rumors of her hobbies spread throughout the countryside. She soon followed Majorva’s encouragement sometime in 1609. She killed a young noble woman, but was able to cover up the act with charges of suicide. Eventually, Báthory was imprisoned in Csejte Castle and placed in solitary confinement. She was kept bricked-up in a set of rooms, with only small slits left open for ventilation and the passing of food. She remained there for four years, until her death. On the evening of August 21, 1614 her Ladyship complained to her bodyguard that her hands were cold. She went to sleep and was found dead the following morning. She was buried in the church of Csejte on November 25, but due to the villagers’ uproar over having “the Tigress of Csejte” buried in their church cemetery, her body was moved to her birth home at Ecsed, where it is interred at the Báthory family crypt. The 1970 movie Countess Dracula was loosely based on Báthory. It may be that her imprisonment is what led to the appearance in the region of the White Lady. 

Although vampiric entities have been recorded in most cultures, the term vampire was not popularized until the early eighteenth century, after an influx of vampire superstition into western Europe from areas where vampire legends were frequent, such as the Balkans and eastern Europe. Local variants were also known by different names, such as vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania. This increased level of vampire superstition in Europe led to mass hysteria and in some cases resulted in corpses actually being staked and people being accused of vampirism. The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of The Vampyre by John Polidori. The story was highly successful and arguably the most influential vampire work of the early nineteenth century. However, it is Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula which is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and provided the basis of the modern vampire legend. The first appearance of the English word vampire (as vampyre) in English was from 1734, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen, although an even earlier example is found in the re-telling the famous case of Arnold Paole. In Austria in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and killing vampires. Arnold Paole was a Serbian hajduk (outlaw) who was believed to have become a vampire after his death, initiating an epidemic of supposed vampirism that killed at least sixteen people in his native village of Meduegna. Paole’s case became famous because of the direct involvement by Austrian physicians and officers, who consequently confirmed the reality of vampires. Their report of the case was distributed in western Europe and contributed to the spread of vampire belief among educated Europeans. The report and its significance for the subsequent eighteenth century vampire controversy are nowadays explained as a poor understanding of the process of corpse decomposition at the time. Around the same time was the case of Petar Blagojevich, a Serbian peasant who was believed to have become a vampire after his death and to have killed nine of his fellow villagers. The case was one of the earliest, most sensational and most well documented cases of vampire hysteria. Blagojevich died in 1725, and his death was followed by a spate of other sudden deaths. Within eight days, nine persons had perished. On their death- beds, the victims allegedly claimed to have been throttled by Blagojevich at night. The villagers decided to disinter Blagojevich’s body and examine it for signs of vampirism, such as growing hair, beard and nails, and the absence of decomposition. The local inhabitants demanded that an official of the Austrian administration, the Imperial Provisor Frombald, along with the local priest, should be present at the procedure as a representative of the administration. Frombald tried to convince the villagers that permission from the Austrian authorities in Belgrade should be sought first. However, the locals declined the suggestion because they feared that by the time the permission came, the whole community could be exterminated by vampires, which they claimed had already happened in Turkish times (i.e. when the village was still in the Ottoman- controlled part of Serbia). They demanded that Frombald himself should immediately permit the procedure or else they would abandon the village to save their lives. Frombald was forced to consent. Together with the local priest, Frombald viewed the already exhumed body and was astonished to find that the characteristics associated with vampires were indeed present. The body was undecomposed, the hair and beard had grown, there were “new skin and nails” (while the old ones had peeled away), and blood could be seen in the mouth. After that, the people, who “grew more outraged than distressed”, proceeded to stake the body through the heart, which caused a great amount of “completely fresh” blood to flow through the ears and mouth of the corpse. Finally, the body was burned. Frombald concludes his report on the case with the request that, if these actions were found to be wrong, he should not be blamed for them, as the villagers were “beside themselves with fear.” The authorities apparently did not consider it necessary to take any measures regarding the incident. The report on this event was among the first documented testimonies about vampire beliefs in eastern Europe. It was published by Wienerisches Diarium, a Viennese newspaper along with the report of the very similar Arnold Paole case of 1726-1732. The article was widely translated and contributed to the vampire craze of the eighteenth century in Germany, France and England. About five years later, in the winter of 1731, a new epidemic occurred, with more than ten people dying within several weeks, some of them in just two or three days without any previous illness. The sick had complained of stabs in their sides and pains in their chests, prolonged fever and jerks of their limbs. The reports stated that the locals considered two women to have started the vampire epidemic. One of the women, Milica, had come to the village from the Ottoman-controlled territories six years before. The locals’ testimony indicated that she had always been a good neighbor and that, to the best of their knowledge, she had never “believed or practiced something diabolic.” However, she had once mentioned to them that, while still in Ottoman lands, she had eaten two sheep that had been killed by vampires. The other woman, Stana, admitted that when she was in Ottoman-controlled lands, she had smeared herself with vampire blood as a protection against vampires which had been very active there. According to local belief, both things would cause the women to become vampires after death. Concurrent to another report, by the seventh of January, seventeen people had died. The report states that Stana, then a twenty year-old woman, died in childbirth after a three- day illness, reportedly stating that she had smeared herself with vampire blood as well as her stillborn child who had been half-eaten by dogs due to a slovenly burial. Her father-in-law stated that Stana had gone to bed healthy fifteen days previous, but had woken at midnight in terrible fear and cried that she had been throttled by a vampire. The report claims that Stana, before her death, had admitted having smeared herself with blood to protect herself from vampires and would therefore become a vampire herself, as would her child. Together with the village elders and some local Gypsies, residents opened the graves of the deceased. Their reports contained abundant anatomical detail and established that, while five of the corpses were decomposed, the remaining twelve were “quite complete and undecayed” and exhibited the traits that were commonly associated with vampirism. Their chests and in some cases other organs were filled with fresh blood, while the viscera were estimated to be “in good condition.” Various corpses looked plump and their skin had a “red and vivid” (rather than pale) color, and in several cases, “the skin on the hands and feet, along with the old nails, fell away on their own, but on the other hand completely new nails were evident, along with a fresh and vivid skin.” In the case of Milica, the witnesses of the dissection were very surprised at her plumpness, stating that they had known her since childhood, and that she had always been very “lean and dried-up” but it was only in the grave she had attained this corpulence. The authorities summarized all these phenomena by stating that the bodies were in the vampiric condition (das vampyrenstand). After the examination had been completed, the Gypsies cut off the heads of the supposed vampires and burned both their heads and their bodies, the ashes being thrown in the Morava river in contrast to the decomposed bodies which were laid back into their graves.! 

The causes of vampiric generation were varied in folklore. In Slavic and Chinese traditions, any corpse that was jumped over by an animal, particularly a dog or a cat, was feared to become one of the undead. A body with a wound that had not been treated with boiling water was also at risk. In Russian folklore, vampires were said to have once been witches or people who had rebelled against the Russian Orthodox Church while they were alive. Cultural practices often arose that were intended to prevent a recently deceased loved one from turning into an undead revenant. Burying a corpse upside-down was widespread, as was placing earthly objects, such as scythes or sickles, near the grave to satisfy any demons entering the body or appease the dead so that it would not wish to arise from its coffin. Other methods commonly practiced in Europe included severing the tendons at the knees or placing poppy seeds, millet, or sand on the ground at the grave site of a presumed vampire. This was intended to keep the vampire occupied all night by counting the fallen grains, indicating an association of vampires with arithmomania. Similar Chinese narratives state that if a vampire-like being came across a sack of rice, it would have to count every grain. This theme is also encountered in the Indian subcontinent, as well as in South American tales of witches and other evil or mischievous spirits or beings. Arithmomania is an obsessive– compulsive disorder in which individuals have a strong need to count their actions or the articles in their surroundings. On the television series Sesame Street, the vampire Count von Count is always shown counting various objects. One method of finding a vampire’s grave involved leading a virgin boy through a graveyard or church grounds on a virgin stallion. The horse would supposedly balk at the grave in question. Apotropaics, items able to ward off revenants, are common in vampire folklore. Garlic is a common example, a branch of wild rose or hawthorn are likewise said to harm vampires. In Europe, sprinkling mustard seeds on the roof of a house was said to keep vampires away. Other apotropaics include sacred items such as a crucifix, rosary, or holy water. Similarly, vampires are said to be unable to walk on consecrated ground, such as that of churches or temples, or cross running water. Although not traditionally regarded as an apotropaic, mirrors, capable of both reflection and shadow, have been used to ward off vampires as a manifestation of the vampire’s lack of a soul. Some traditions also hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless invited by the owner, although after the first invitation they can come and go as they please. 

Methods of destroying suspected vampires varied, with staking the most commonly cited method, particularly in southern Slavic cultures. Ash was the preferred wood for stakes in Russia and the Baltic states, hawthorn wood was used in Serbia, and oak in Silesia. Potential vampires were most often staked through the heart, though the mouth was targeted in Russia and northern Germany and the stomach in north-eastern Serbia. Piercing the skin of the chest was a way of deflating the bloated vampire. Such piercing is similar to the act of burying sharp objects, such as sickles, in with the corpse, so that they may penetrate the skin if the body bloats sufficiently while transforming into a revenant. Decapitation was the preferred method of vampire destruction in Germany, with the head buried between the feet or away from the body. These measures were seen as a way of hastening the departure of the soul, which in some cultures, was said to linger in the corpse. The vampire’s head, body, or clothes could also be spiked and pinned to the earth to prevent rising. The Romani drove steel or iron needles into a corpse’s heart and placed bits of steel in the mouth, over the eyes, ears and between the fingers at the time of burial. They also placed hawthorn in the corpse’s sock or drove a hawthorn stake through the legs. Further measures included pouring boiling water over the grave or complete incineration of the body. In the Balkans, a vampire could also be killed by being shot or drowned, by repeating the funeral service, by sprinkling holy water on the body, or by exorcism. In Romania, garlic could be placed in the mouth, and as recently as the nineteenth century, the precaution of shooting a bullet through the coffin was taken. For resistant cases, the body was dismembered and the pieces burned, mixed with water, and administered to family members as a cure. In Saxon regions of Germany, a lemon was placed in the mouth of suspected vampires. 

Tales of supernatural beings consuming the blood or flesh of the living have been found in nearly every culture around the world for many centuries. The term vampire did not exist in ancient times. Blood drinking and similar activities were attributed to demons or spirits who would eat flesh and drink blood and even the Devil was considered synonymous with the vampire. Almost every nation has associated blood drinking with some kind of revenant or demon, or in some cases a deity. In India, for example, there are tales of vetālas, ghoul-like beings that inhabit corpses. The Indian piśāca, the returned spirits of evil-doers or those who died insane, also bear vampiric attributes. The Persians were one of the first civilizations to have tales of demons as creatures attempting to drink blood from humans. Ancient Babylonia and Assyria had tales of the mythical Lilitu, synonymous with Lilith (Hebrew לילית) and her daughters the Lilu. Lilitu was considered a demon and was often depicted as subsisting on the blood of babies. The Estries, female shape changing, blood drinking demons, were said to roam the night among the population, seeking victims. Estries were creatures created in the twilight hours before God rested. Ancient Greek and Roman mythology described the Empusae, the Lamia, and the striges. Over time the first two terms became general words to describe witches and demons respectively. Empusa was the daughter of the goddess Hecate and was described as a demonic, bronze-footed creature. She feasted on blood by transforming into a young woman and seduced men as they slept before drinking their blood. The Lamia preyed on young children in their beds at night, sucking their blood, as did the gelloudes or Gello. Like the Lamia, the striges feasted on children, but also preyed on young men. They were described as having the bodies of crows or birds in general, and were later incorporated into Roman mythology as strix, a kind of nocturnal bird that fed on human flesh and blood. Dom Augustine Calmet, a well-respected French Benedictine monk and scholar, put together a two volume comprehensive treatise in 1746, concerning the existence of vampires. Calmet amassed reports of vampire incidents from numerous sources, including both Voltaire and supportive demonologists claiming that vampires existed. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire wrote: 

These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. 

The eighteenth century vampire controversy only ceased when Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate the claims of vampiric entities. Van Swieten’s 1768 report, Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster (Discourse on the Existence of Ghosts), offered an entirely natural explanation for the belief in vampires. He explained the unusual state in the graves, including the processes of fermentation and lack of oxygen for preventing decomposition. Characteristic of this opinion is the preface to his essay in which he states, “that all the fuss doesn’t come from anything else than a vain fear, a superstitious credulity, a dark and eventful imagination, simplicity and ignorance among the people.” 

Van Swieten’s conclusion that vampires did not exist culminated in the Empress passing laws prohibiting the opening of graves and desecration of bodies, thus resulting in the end of the vampire epidemics. Nonethelesss, despite this castigation, the vampire lived on in artistic works and in local superstition. 

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the belief in vampires was widespread in parts of New England, particularly in Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. There are many documented cases of families disinterring loved ones and removing their hearts in the belief that the deceased was a vampire responsible for sickness and death in the family, although the term vampire was never actually used to describe the deceased. The deadly disease tuberculosis, or consumption as it was known at the time, was believed to be caused by nightly visitations on the part of a dead family member who had died of consumption themselves. The most famous, and most recently recorded, case of suspected vampirism is that of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown, who died in Exeter, Rhode Island in 1892. Mercy’s mother, Mary, was the first to die of consumption, followed in 1888 by the eldest daughter, Mary Olive. Friends and neighbors of the family believed that one of the dead family members was a vampire, although they did not use that designation. This was in accordance with the regional folklore linking multiple deaths in one family to undead activity. Consumption was a poorly understood condition at the time and the subject of much superstition. George Brown, Mercy’s father, was persuaded by the local townspeople to give permission to exhume several bodies of his family members. Villagers, the local doctor and a newspaper reporter exhumed the bodies on March 17, 1892. While the bodies of both Mary and Mary Olive had undergone significant decomposition over the years, the more recently deceased Mercy was still relatively unchanged and had blood in the heart and liver. This was taken as a sign that the young woman was undead. Her father, assisted by the family physician, removed her from her tomb, had her heart burned, mixed with water and given to her sick brother Edwin to drink in order to stop the influence of the undead. It was commonly thought that giving the victim of consumption ashes of the vampire’s heart would heal them. But despite the cure, the young man died two months later. A similar incident occurred in Romania during February 2004. Several relatives of the deceased Toma Petre feared that he had become a vampire. They dug up his corpse, tore out his heart, burned it, and mixed the ashes with water in order to drink it. 

The vampire or revenant first appeared in literature and poetry in such works as The Vampire by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, Lenore by Gottfried August Bürger, Die Braut von Corinth (The Bride of Corinth) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, John Stagg’s “The Vampyre”, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Spectral Horseman” and Lord Byron’s The Giaour. Although the true author was Polidori, Byron was credited with the first prose fiction piece concerned with vampires, The Vampyre, which was highly successful and the most influential vampire work of the early nineteenth century. Varney the Vampire was a popular mid-Victorian era gothic horror story by James Malcolm Rymer (alternatively attributed to Thomas Preskett Prest), which first appeared from 1845 to 1847 in a series of pamphlets generally referred to as penny dreadfuls because of their inexpensive price and typically gruesome contents. Another important addition to the genre was Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire story Carmilla of 1871. However, no effort to depict vampires in popular fiction was as influential or as definitive as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease of contagious demonic possession struck a chord in Victorian Europe where diseases like tuberculosis were common. The vampiric traits described in Stoker’s work merged with folkloric tradition, eventually evolving into the modern fictional vampire. Yet today’s vampire is often a more sympathetic creature in which the dead might find its best description in the Edgar Allan Poe’s “Spirits of the Dead”: 

Thy soul shall find itself alone
’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone— Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy. 

Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness—for then The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee—and their will Shall overshadow thee: be still. 

The emergence of such an attitude, as a stillness or tranquility, brings the imagination away from the malefic creatures associated with death and the cemetery to create a human quality about death that is neither frightening, macabre, nor remorseful. Today’s undead are often successful, glamorous and heroic (or antiheroic) such as Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt. Modern death seems more of a heavenly and relaxing experience, with angels that are incredibly contemporary than the hellish brutes of yore… suggesting perhaps that death is merely a retirement from an overworked life. 

Angels are another motif often found on tombstones, replacing the earlier skulls and crossbones. Often depicted with bird-like wings on their back, a halo, robes and various forms of glowing light, angels are supernatural beings or spirits found in various religions and mythologies. In Zoroastrianism and the Abrahamic religions they are usually depicted as benevolent celestial beings who act as intermediaries between Heaven and Earth, or as guardian spirits or guiding influences. Other roles of angels include protecting and guiding human beings, especially at the time of death. Daniel (9:21) is the first biblical figure to refer to individual angels by name, mentioning Gabriel as God’s primary messenger: 

Yea, whiles I was speaking in prayer, even the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me about the time of the evening oblation. 

The concept of angels is best understood in contrast to demons which were influenced by the ancient Persian religious tradition of Zoroastrianism, which viewed the world as a battleground between forces of good and forces of evil, between light and darkness. Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 B.C.E. – A.D. 50) identifies the angel with the Logos as far as the angel is the immaterial voice of God. The angel is something different from God, but is conceived as God’s instrument. Philo further distinguished between logos prophorikos (the uttered word) and the logos endiathetos (the word remaining within) to describe these instruments of God. Certain angels also took on a particular significance and developed unique personalities and roles. Archangels were believed to rank among the heavenly host. Metatron is considered one of the highest of the angels in Merkabah and Kabbalistic mysticism and often serves as a scribe. Metatron is briefly mentioned in the Talmud and figures prominently in Merkabah mystical texts where heavenly chariots are driven by four hayyot (living creatures) with six wings. Isaiah (6:2) describes the hayyot as seraphim: 

Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. 

There is no evidence in Judaism for the worship of angels, but there is evidence for the invocation and sometimes even conjuration of angels. The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides explained his view of angels in his Guide for the Perplexed: 

God burns things by means of fire; fire is moved by the motion of the sphere; the sphere is moved by means of a disembodied intellect, these intellects being the ‘angels which are near to Him’, through whose mediation the spheres move…thus totally disembodied minds exist which emanate from God and are the intermediaries between God and all the bodies here in this world. 

Elsewhere Maimonides, in his Yad ha-Chazakah: Yesodei ha-Torah, mentions ten ranks of an angelic hierarchy. According to Kabbalah, angels are an extension of God to produce effects in this world. After an angel has completed its task, it ceases to exist. The angel is, in effect, the task. This is derived from the book of Genesis when Abraham meets with three angels and Lot meets with two. The task of one of the angels was to inform Abraham of his coming child. The other two were to save Lot and to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Names of angels signify a particular angelic function rather than an individual being. Individual angels include Michael who represents the kindness of God; the archangel Gabriel who performs acts of justice and power; Raphael who performs God’s healing force; Uriel leads humanity to its destiny; Samael is the angel of death; Sandalphon battles Samael and brings humanity together; and Jophiel who expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, holds a flaming sword and punishes those who transgress against God. Christianity characterized the angel as a messenger of God with later identification of individual angelic messengers. By the late fourth century, the Church Fathers agreed that there were different categories of angels, with appropriate missions and activities assigned to them. There was, however, some disagreement regarding the nature of angels. Some argued that angels had physical bodies, while some maintained that they were entirely spiritual. Psalms (8:4-5) describes angels: 

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. 

The Bible describes the function of angels as messengers but does not indicate when the creation of angels occurred. Some Christians believe that angels are created beings, based on Psalms (148:2-5): 

Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts. Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light. Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord: for he commanded, and they were created. 

The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 in the decree Firmiter Credimus declared both that angels were created and that men were created after them. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas related angels to Aristotle’s metaphysics in the Prima Secundai of his Summa Theologica, and in De Substantiis Separatis, a treatise on angelology. Although angels have greater knowledge than men, they are not omniscient, as Matthew 24:36 points out, “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” Yet humanity can maintain an interaction with angels as described in Hebrews (13:2): “Forget not to show love unto strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Similarly, the New Testament includes many interactions and conversations between angels and humans. Three separate cases of angelic interaction deal with the births of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ. In Luke (1:11) an angel appears to Zechariah to inform him that he will have a child despite his old age, thus proclaiming the birth of John the Baptist. Elsewhere in Luke (1:26) the Archangel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation to foretell the birth of Jesus Christ. Angels then proclaim the birth of Jesus during the adoration of the shepherds in Luke (2:10). According to Matthew (4:11), after Jesus spent forty days in the desert, “…the devil left him and, behold, angels came and ministered to him.” In Luke ( 22:43) an angel comforts Jesus during the agony in the garden. In Matthew (28:5) an angel speaks at the empty tomb, following the resurrection and the rolling back of the stone by angels. 

Later, in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, angels were perceived in human form with a spiritual body, and not just minds without form. Similarly, there are different orders of angels residing in three heavens, with each angel dwelling in one of innumerable societies of angels. All angels were believed to originate from the human race, and there is not an angel in heaven who first did not initially live in a human body. Moreover, all children who die not only enter heaven but eventually become angels. The life of angels is that of usefulness, and their functions are so many that they cannot be enumerated. However, each angel will enter a service according to the use that they had performed in their earthly life. Thus, while living in a human body, an individual has conjunction with heaven through the angels. Each person within the human realm has at least two evil spirits and two angels. Temptation or pains of conscience originates from a conflict between the evil spirits and angels. Due to humanity’s sinful nature it is dangerous to have open direct communication with angels who can only be seen when one’s spiritual sight has been opened.Thus from moment to moment angels attempt to lead each person to what is tacitly good by using the the individual’s own thoughts. 

Mormons view angels as the messengers of God. Angels are sent to mankind to deliver messages, minister to humanity, teach doctrines of salvation, call mankind to repentance, save individuals in perilous times, and guide humankind. Latter Day Saints believe that angels are either the spirits of humans who are deceased or who have yet to be born, or are humans who have been resurrected, or translated, and have physical bodies of flesh and bones. Mormon angels do not have wings. Accordingly, the Mormon founder Joseph Smith taught that “there are no angels who minister to this earth but those that do belong or have belonged to it.” As such, Mormons believe that Adam, the first man, was, and is now, the archangel Michael, while the angel Gabriel lived on the earth as Noah. Likewise the Mormon angel Moroni first lived in a pre-Columbian American civilization as a fifth-century prophet. Joseph Smith described his first angelic encounter thus: 

While I was thus in the act of calling upon God, I discovered a light appearing in my room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday, when immediately a personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor. 

He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness. It was a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen; nor do I believe that any earthly thing could be made to appear so exceedingly white and brilliant … 

Not only was his robe exceedingly white, but his whole person was glorious beyond description, and his countenance truly like lightning. The room was exceedingly light, but not so very bright as immediately around his person. When I first looked upon him, I was afraid; but the fear soon left me. 

The Cotard Syndrome or Walking Corpse Syndrome is a rare mental illness, in which the afflicted person holds the delusion that he or she is dead, either figuratively or literally. In 1880, the neurologist Jules Cotard, described the condition as le délire des négations (the delirium of negation), a psychiatric syndrome of varied severity. A mild case is characterized by despair and self-loathing, and a severe case is characterized by intense delusions of negation and chronic psychiatric depression. Cotard described the case of a woman who denied the existence of parts of her body, of her need to eat, and said that she was condemned to eternal damnation, and so could not die a natural death. In the course of her suffering this delirium of negation, the unfortunate woman died of starvation. As a mental illness, Cotard’s Syndrome also includes the patient’s delusion that he or she does not exist as a person and is putrefying, having lost blood or internal organs, or both. A patient afflicted with this illness usually denies their existence, or the existence of a certain body part, or the existence of a portion of their body. Cotard’s Syndrome withdraws the afflicted person from other people causing the affected to neglect their personal hygiene and physical health. The delusion of negation of the self prevents the patient from making sense of external reality, thus producing a distorted view of the external world. Although not classified as a mental disorder until a century later, in 1788 the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet reported one of the earliest cases of Cotard’s Syndrome in which an elderly woman was preparing a meal when she felt a draft and then became paralyzed on one side of her body. When feeling, movement, and the ability to speak came back to her, she told her daughters to dress her in a shroud and place her in a coffin. For days she continued to demand that her daughters, friends, and maid treat her as though she were dead. They finally gave in, putting her in a shroud and laying her out so they could mourn her. Even at the wake, the lady continued to fuss with her shroud and complain about its color. When she finally fell asleep, her family undressed her and put her to bed. After she was treated with a “powder of precious stones and opium,” her delusions went away, only to return every few months. In 2008, New York psychiatrists reported on a fifty-three year old patient, Ms. Lee, who complained that she was dead and smelled like rotting flesh. She asked her family to take her to a morgue so that she could be with other dead people. They dialed 911 instead. Ms. Lee was admitted to a hospital psychiatric unit, where she accused paramedics of trying to burn her house down. In 2009, Belgian psychiatrists reported the case of an eighty-eight year old man who came to their hospital with symptoms of depression. The man explained that he was dead, and was concerned and anxious that no one had buried him yet. His delusions subsided with treatment. The same doctors also treated a forty-six year old woman who claimed to have not eaten nor gone to the bathroom in months, nor slept in years. She explained that all her organs had rotted, that she had no blood and that doctors who monitored her heart or took her blood pressure were deceiving her because her heart did not beat. After multiple admissions to the hospital and taking medication over the next ten months, her condition gradually improved. In 2012, Japanese doctors described a sixty-nine year old patient who declared to one of the doctors, “I guess I am dead. I’d like to ask for your opinion.” When the doctor asked him whether a dead man could speak, the patient recognized that his condition defied logic, but could not shake his conviction that he was deceased. After a year, his delusion passed, but he insisted on the truth of what happened during that period. “Now I am alive. But I was once dead at that time,” he said. He also believed that Kim Jong-il was a patient at the same hospital. In 2005, Iranian doctors at the Kerman Psychiatric Hospital described what may be the most unusual case recorded. A thirty- two year old man arrived at their hospital saying that not only was he dead, but that he had been turned into a dog. He said that his wife had suffered the same fate. His three daughters, he believed, had also died and had turned into sheep. He said that his relatives had tried to poison him, but that nothing could hurt him because God protected him even in death. He was diagnosed with Cotard’s Syndrome and clinical lycanthropy, treated with electro-convulsive therapy and relieved of his major symptoms. Recently a teenager, Haley Smith, diagnosed with Cotard’s Syndrome, confessed that prior to her convalescence, “I’d fantasize about having picnics in graveyards and I’d spend a lot of time watching horror films because seeing the zombies made me feel relaxed, like I was with family.” 

Some modern researchers have tried to explain the reports of werewolf behavior with recognized medical conditions. Dr. Lee Illis of Guy’s Hospital in London wrote a paper in 1963 entitled On Porphyria and the Aetiology of Werewolves, in which he argues that historical accounts of werewolves could have in fact been referring to victims of congenital porphyria, stating how the symptoms of photosensitivity, reddish teeth and psychosis could have been grounds for accusing a sufferer of being a werewolf. Others have pointed out the possibility of historical werewolves having been sufferers of hypertrichosis, a hereditary condition manifesting itself in excessive hair growth. The idea that being bitten by a werewolf and result in the victim turning into one, suggest the idea of a transmittable disease like rabies. However, the idea that lycanthropy could be transmitted in this way was not part of the original myths and legends. The beliefs classed together under lycanthropy are far from uniform, and the term is somewhat capriciously applied. The transformation from human to animal may be temporary or permanent. The were-animal may be the human metamorphosed; may be a double whose activity leaves the actual human to all appearance unchanged; may be the soul, which goes forth seeking whom it may devour, leaving its body in a state of trance; or it may be no more than the messenger of a human being, a real animal or a familiar spirit, whose intimate connection with its owner is shown by the fact that any injury to it is believed, by a phenomenon known as repercussion, to cause a corresponding injury to the human being. In European folklore of the Medieval period, familiar spirits, referred to simply as familiars or animal guides, were supernatural entities believed to assist witches in their practice of magic. According to the records of the time, they would appear in numerous guises, often as an animal, but also at times as a human or humanoid figure, and were described as clearly defined and three- dimensional, unlike descriptions of ghosts who had less defined forms. When they served witches, the were-animals were thought to be malevolent, but when working for cunning-folk they were often thought of as benevolent. The former were usually categorized as demons, while the latter were more commonly described as fairies. In modern times a number of magical practitioners, including adherents of the neopagan religion of Wicca, have begun to utilise familiars, due to their association with older forms of magic. These contemporary practitioners utilize pets or wildlife and believe that invisible spirit versions of familiars, often found in cemeteries, act as magical aids.
A familiar spirit is the double and the alter-ego of an individual person or animal. It does not necessarily look like the individual concerned. Although it may have an independent life of its own, it remains closely linked to the individual, whether living or deceased. The symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, a cat fancier, occultist and possibly Satanist, describes his familiar: 

My beautiful cat, come onto my heart full of love; Hold back the claws of your paw,
And let me plunge into your adorable eyes Mixed with metal and agate. 

When my fingers lazily fondle
Your head and your elastic back,
And my hand gets drunk with the pleasure Of feeling your electric body, 

I see in spirit my personal lady. Her glance, Like yours, dear creature,
Deep and cold, slits and splits like a dart, 

And from her feet to her head,
A subtle atmosphere, a dangerous perfume, Swim around her brown body. 

(Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux; Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d’agate. 

Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir Ta tête et ton dos élastique, Et que ma main s’enivre du plaisir De palper ton corps électrique, 

Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard, Comme le tien, aimable bête
Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard, 

Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum Nagent autour de son corps brun.) 

Amongst those accused witches and cunning-folk who described their familiar spirits, there were commonly certain unifying features. Familiars were mostly described for their ordinariness, despite the fact that they were supernatural entities. Familiar spirits sometimes even had affectionate nicknames. Matthew Hopkins was a “witchfinder general” in the town of Manningtree, Essex, England. Hopkins claimed he spied on the witches as they held their meeting near his house, and heard them mention the name of a local woman, Jane Wallis. Wallis was then arrested and deprived of sleep for four nights, at the end of which she confessed and called out the names of her familiars, describing the forms in which they should appear. They were: 

Holt, who came in like a white kittling
Jarmara, who came in like a fat Spaniel without any legs at all
Vinegar Tom, who was like a long-legg’d greyhound, with a head like an Ox.        Sacke and Sugar, like a black Rabbet
Newes, like a Polecat
Elemanzer, Pyewacket, Peck in the Crown, Grizzel, Greedigut, described as imps.

Hopkins claims he and nine other witnesses saw the first five of these, which appeared in the forms described by the witch. The first of these was in the form of a cat, the next two were dogs, and the others were a black rabbit and a polecat. As for the other familiars, Hopkins says only that they were such that “no mortall could invent.” The incident is described in Hopkin’s pamphlet “The Discovery of Witches” (1647). The manner in which the familiar spirit commonly appeared to magical practitioners in Britain was that they would be given to a person by a pre-existing individual, who was sometimes a family member and at other times a more powerful spirit. The alleged witch Margaret Ley from Liverpool claimed, in 1667, that she had been given her familiar spirit by her mother when she died, while the Leicestershire cunning-woman Joan Willimot related, in 1618, that a mysterious figure whom she only referred to as her “master,” 

willed her to open her mouth and he would blow into her a fairy which should do her good. And that she open her mouth, and that presently after blowing, there came out of her mouth a spirit which stood upon the ground in the shape and form of a woman. 

In a number of accounts, the cunning person or witch was experiencing difficulty prior to the appearance of the familiar, who offered to aid them. During the English Civil War, the Royalist general Prince Rupert was in the habit of taking his large poodle, named Boye, into battle with him. Throughout the war the dog was greatly feared among the Parliamentarian forces and credited with supernatural powers, apparently considered a kind of familiar. At the end of the war the dog was shot, allegedly with a silver bullet. The phenomenon of repercussion, the power of animal metamorphosis, or of sending out a familiar, real or spiritual, as a messenger, and the supernormal powers conferred by association with such a familiar, are attributed to both magician and witch. The curse of lycanthropy was sometimes considered as being a divine punishment. The power of transforming others into wild beasts was attributed not only to malignant sorcerers, but to Christian saints as well. Omnes angeli, boni et Mali, ex virtute naturali habent potestatem transmutandi corpora nostra (“All angels, good and bad have the power of transmutating our bodies”) was the dictum of St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Patrick was said to have transformed the Welsh king Vereticus into a wolf. Natalis of Ulster (St. Naile) supposedly cursed an illustrious Irish family whose members were each doomed to be a wolf for seven years. In Russia, however, men supposedly became werewolves when incurring the wrath of the Devil. A notable exception to the association of lycanthropy and the Devil, comes from an account of an eighty year old man named Thiess. In 1692, in Jürgensburg, Livonia, Thiess testified under oath that he and other werewolves were the Hounds of God. He claimed they were warriors who went down into hell to do battle with witches and demons. Their efforts ensured that the Devil and his minions did not carry off to hell the grain from local failed crops. Thiess was steadfast in his assertions, claiming that werewolves in Germany, like those in Russia, also did battle with the devil’s sycophants in their own versions of hell, and insisted that when werewolves died, their souls were welcomed into heaven as a reward for their service. Thiess was ultimately sentenced to ten lashes for idolatry and superstitious belief. 

Circe, the Greek enchantress and goddess of magic, was renowned for her vast knowledge of potions and herbs. Through the use of magical potions and a staff, she transformed her enemies, or those who offended her, into animals. In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe is described as living in a palace that stood in the middle of a clearing in a dense wood. Around the palace prowled strangely docile lions and wolves, the drugged victims of her magic. Strangely, these beasts were not dangerous, and fawned on all newcomers. Circe invited Odysseus’ crew to a feast with wine. The wine was laced with one of her magical potions, and consumed from an enchanted cup. Thus imbibed, the crew turned into swine after they gorged themselves on the magic potion. Only Eurylochus, suspecting treachery from the outset, escaped to warn Odysseus and the others who had stayed behind on the ships. Odysseus set out to rescue his men, but was intercepted by the messenger god, Hermes, who had been sent by Athena. Hermes told Odysseus to use the holy herb moly to protect himself from Circe’s potion. Odysseus followed Hermes’s advice, freeing his men and then remained on the island for one year, feasting and drinking (disenchanted) wine. Vase paintings from the period suggest that Odysseus’ transformed animal-men formed a chorus in place of the usual Satyrs. Fragments of Anaxilas also mention this transformation and one of the characters complains of the impossibility of scratching his face now that he is a pig. The theme of turning men into a variety of animals was elaborated by later writers, especially in Latin. In the Aeneid, Aeneas skirts the Italian island where Circe now dwells, and hears the cries of her many victims, who now number more than the pigs of earlier accounts: 

The roars of lions that refuse the chain,
The grunts of bristled boars, and groans of bears,
And herds of howling wolves that stun the sailors’ ears. 

In botany the Circaea are plants belonging to the enchanter’s nightshade genus. The name was given by botanists in the late sixteenth century in the belief that this was the herb used by Circe to charm Odysseus’ companions. Medical historians have speculated that the transformation to pigs was not intended literally but refers to anticholinergic intoxication. Symptoms include amnesia, hallucinations, and delusions. Marcellus Sidetes in the second century wrote a long medical poem consisting of forty- two books. The work was held in such estimation, that it was ordered by the emperors to be placed in the public libraries at Rome. Of this work one of the two remaining fragments is entitled De Lycanthropia. Elsewhere, in Herodotus’s Histories, he states that the Neuri were a northern European tribe driven from their land by an invasion of serpents. He also reports a Scythian tale that the Neuri changed once a year into wolves. The tale was told to Herodotus by the Scythians and Greeks of Olbia, a legend which still lingers among the people of Volhynia and White Russia. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, tells of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, who, entertaining Jupiter one day, set before him a dish of human flesh, to prove his omniscience, whereupon the god transformed him into a wolf: 

In vain he attempted to speak; from that very instant
His jaws were bespluttered with foam, and only he thirsted For blood, as he raged amongst flocks and panted for slaughter. His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs became crooked; A wolf,––he retains yet large trace of his ancient expression, Hoary he is as afore, his countenance rabid, His eyes glitter savagely still, the picture of fury. 

Soranus was a Sabine god adopted into ancient Roman religion. He was worshipped on Mt. Soracte in Etruria, an area sacred to underworld gods, such as Dis Pater. The worshippers of Apollo Soranus, after his cult had been subsumed by Apollo, were called Hirpi Sorani (wolves of Soranus). They were firewalkers and carried about the entrails of their victims during ceremonies. Legends state that during a sacrifice offered to Soranus, wolves snatched away the entrails of the victims from the altar, and that the shepherds pursuing the wolves came to a cave imbued with poisonous vapors which caused a pestilence among them. An oracle then ordered them to live, like wolves, on prey, and hence those people are called Hirpini, from the Sabine word hirpus, or wolf. Various methods have existed for curing a werewolf. In antiquity, the ancient Greeks and Romans believed in the power of exhaustion in curing people of lycanthropy. The victim would be subjected to long periods of physical activity in the hope of being purged of the malady. This practice stemmed from the belief that many alleged werewolves would be left feeling weak and debilitated after committing depredations, and thus too tired to seek human flesh. In medieval Europe, traditionally, there were three methods used to cure a victim of lycanthropy. Cures included those used medicinally (e.g. the use of wolfsbane), surgically or by exorcism. However, many of the cures advocated by medieval medical practitioners proved fatal to the patients. A Sicilian belief of Arabic origin holds that a werewolf can be cured of its ailment by striking it on the forehead or scalp with a knife. Another belief from the same culture involves the piercing of the werewolf’s hands with nails. Less extreme methods were used in other parts of Europe. In the German lowland of Schleswig-Holstein, a werewolf could be cured if one were to simply address it three times by its Christian name, while one Danish belief holds that simply scolding a werewolf will cure it. Conversion to Christianity was also believed to be a common method of curing lycanthropy in the medieval period. A devotion to St. Hubert, the patron saint of hunters, has also been cited as both cure for and protection from lycanthropes. Hubert had a religious vision which resulted in his holding animals in high regard and having compassion for them as God’s creatures. 

Life and death are considered opposites. Yet both are a phenomenon that require a tripartite perception of being to include the living, the dead, and possibly the undead, with parallels in terms of their location within a cosmos. Likewise Earth may have parallels with Heaven and Hell, in which all three are the dwellings of some form of assumed sentience. Although such an assumption may be a result of a hegemonic human presumption, such beliefs exist as a place for individuals to define their actuality––a residence for consciousness and perception. Life and death are two sides of the same coin, with both requiring accommodations for the other. Death can not occur without life, and finality can not occur without exhaustion. A cemetery is the resting place, an abode, offered after life’s long, or short, peregrination in which death is the ultimate conclusion. In this way, life is but the travelogue of an odyssey, with all journeys having a destiny. The Edo period master of Japanese haiku, Matsuo Bashō, describes this inevitable pilgrimage of consciousness, which offers itself as a shelter: 

                      Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age.                          leading a horse, each day is a journey and the journey itself is home. 

FINIS