9/28/2023 0 Comments Cult of the lamb natural burial![]() ![]() Several traditional funerary practices - such as the customs of viewing the dead, kissing or touching the body, placing refreshments beside the body, watching the body during the period between death and burial, waking (celebrating the funeral with food and drink), placing personal objects in the coffin, and tending graves - possessed a multipotent character: practical for mourners, respectful to the dead, and solicitous towards the soul. Although the traditional desirability of linen has long since waned, most mass-produced ‘coffin-sets’ (matching shrouds and coffin linings) currently provided by undertakers are nevertheless white. The emblematic whiteness of grave-clothes dates back at least to the Jacobean period, when the epigraph to John Donne's poem Death's Duell stated: ‘just as the body is shrouded in white linen, may be the soul’. A woman interviewed in 1980 in a Suffolk village told me ‘the washing is so that you're spotless to meet the Lamb of God’. Washing cleansed not only the sweat of death, but the sins of the earthly life, a sort of lay absolution. The corpse also had ambiguous spiritual status: the care it received was thought somehow to influence the future life of the soul. Old British customs and beliefs - such as the belief that a signature taken while the corpse is still warm had the same status as in life, that a corpse could indicate displeasure if a will read before it was false, or that it would bleed if a murderer came into its vicinity - seem to attribute sentience to the dead body. British funeral practices reveal that there existed a conception, said by anthropologists also to operate in many other societies, of a transitional period between death and burial in which the body was regarded as ‘neither alive nor fully dead’ In a physical sense, of course, we are all familiar with this notion - in the currently continuing difficulty in defining the precise moment of death, the possibility of resuscitation, and in the phenomenon of organs, which, though extracted from corpses, are yet sufficiently alive to support life again in the body of another. While the corpse retains identity, personality is absent. Part of this effect derives from its embodiment of the power of death, part from the strangeness death works upon it. The dead body is an object of great potency, with a powerful presence of its own. Yet even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, relatives of victims of murder or accident - including drowning at sea - continue to do all they can to retrieve lost bodies in order to give them decent disposal. Funerary practices altered a great deal in the twentieth century, and the meanings which attached to them in past ages have become attenuated. A corpse whose eyes refused to close was traditionally believed to presage further deaths, so closing the eyes was imperative to forestall the omen, and to prevent survivors' unease. The eyelids are generally the first part of the body to set in rigor mortis, just before the jaw, hours after death. ![]() Multipotent custom In the past, each aspect of lay funerary ritual had multiple levels of practical justification and traditional meaning. However, in cases of death at home undertakers are now generally swiftly called to remove the body, and the process of laying-out is done by available staff - male or female - away from the location of death or mourning. Today the female tradition is continued to some extent inasmuch as most hospital, hospice, and district nurses who do the job are women. ![]() It involved undressing and washing the body, plugging its orifices, if necessary placing coins (traditionally pennies) on the eyelids, and a bandage under the chin, to hold these parts closed, dressing the body in its grave clothes, and holding limbs straight (with bandages or ribbons around the body at the elbows, wrists, and ankles, and sometimes a thread around the big toes) ready for placing in the coffin. The ‘laying-out’ of the body - or ‘rendering the last offices’ was in the past a job traditionally done by women, often the local midwife. Corpse care In Britain, funerary practices begin with the lay or official declaration of death, and consist of small attentions to the body itself, such as closing the eyes and covering the face. In times of exigency such as war, disaster, pestilence, or in cases of violent death where the imperatives of pathology and judicial rules take precedence over family wishes for the care of the body, norms of funerary behaviour are often breached, adding to the trauma of events. Funeral practices: British customs Funerary practices are observed in every culture when a dead body is to be disposed of.
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