Cremation

• 1. Introduction

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  Cremation leaves behind an average of 2.4 kilograms of remains, and almost none of it is ash. Sweep out a cremator after the fire has done its work and what you find is not powder but bone, dry mineral fragments that survive temperatures hot enough to melt steel. Those fragments get fed into a machine and ground to a sand-like grain. Then they are handed back, scattered, buried, or kept on a shelf. This is how a body becomes cremated remains, the disintegration of a corpse through burning, used as an alternative to burial.

  The oldest evidence of this practice is staggeringly old. The Mungo Lady, a partly cremated body found at Lake Mungo in Australia, dates back at least 17,000 years. Yet for long stretches of history, whole civilizations banned the same act outright. Why did the ancient Egyptians forbid it while Hindus prescribed it? Why was a dead man's body dug up to be burned as a punishment? How did a Welsh priest on trial turn an open legal question into a precedent that opened the door to industrial cremation? And once a furnace could reduce a person to two kilograms of bone, what did the living decide to do with what was left?

• 2. Periods Of Preference

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  Both burial and cremation appear in the archaeological record of the Middle East and Europe as far back as the Neolithic era. Cultural groups picked sides. The ancient Egyptians built an intricate transmigration-of-soul theology that prohibited burning the dead, a prohibition widely adopted by Semitic peoples. According to Herodotus, the Babylonians embalmed their dead, while the Phoenicians practiced both cremation and burial.

  Greeks favored burial from the Cycladic civilization around 3000 BCE through the Sub-Mycenaean era of 1200 to 1100 BCE. Cremation appeared around the 12th century BCE, probably influenced by Anatolia, and both methods alternated by era and location until the Christian era brought inhumation back as the only practice. Homer's account of the burial of Patroclus describes cremation followed by burial in a tumulus, the earliest description of cremation rites, though it may be an anachronism reflecting custom from when the Iliad was written rather than Mycenaean times.

  Rome ran a similar cycle. In its earliest history both inhumation and cremation were common across all classes. Around the mid-Republic, cremation almost entirely replaced burial, and it stayed dominant until the middle of the Empire, when inhumation took over again. Cicero considered burial the more archaic of the two rites.

  In Europe, traces of cremation reach back to the Early Bronze Age around 2000 BCE in the Pannonian Plain and along the middle Danube. The custom became dominant with the Urnfield culture from around 1300 BCE, then receded in the Iron Age while persisting in the Villanovan culture. In early Roman Britain cremation was usual but had diminished by the 4th century, only to reappear in the 5th and 6th centuries during the migration era. Then mourners sometimes placed sacrificed animals on the pyre and dressed the dead in costume and ornaments, with the ashes deposited afterward in clay or bronze vessels in an urn cemetery.

• 3. Burned As Punishment

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  The body of John Wycliff was exhumed years after his death and burned to ashes, the remains thrown into a river. This was an explicit posthumous punishment for his denial of the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. In parts of Europe, cremation was forbidden by law and even punishable by death if combined with Heathen rites, and Catholic authorities used burning at the stake as part of the penalty for accused heretics.

  Against that backdrop, the physician Sir Thomas Browne became the first to advocate the practice in Urne Buriall in 1658, interpreting cremation as a means of oblivion and noting that there is no antidote against the Opium of time. More than a century later, Honoretta Brooks Pratt became the first recorded cremated European individual in modern times. She died on the 26th of September 1769 and was illegally cremated at the burial ground on Hanover Square in London.

• 4. The Furnace Breakthrough

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  In the 1850s, Sir Charles William Siemens developed a regenerative furnace that pumped exhaust gases into a chamber of bricks, then reversed the flow so incoming fuel and air were heated by those bricks. An open-hearth furnace built this way could reach temperatures high enough to melt steel. His nephew, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, perfected its use for incinerating organic material at his factory in Dresden. The radical politician Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke took the corpse of his dead wife there to be cremated in 1874, and the cheap, complete incineration made industrial cremation a practical possibility.

  The groundwork was already being laid in the lecture halls. In 1869 the idea was presented to the Medical International Congress of Florence by Professors Coletti and Castiglioni in the name of public health and civilization. In 1873 Professor Paolo Gorini of Lodi and Professor Ludovico Brunetti of Padua published reports of practical work, and a model of Brunetti's cremating apparatus, with the resulting ashes, drew great attention at the Vienna Exposition that year. Many proponents believed the miasma theory, that cremation would reduce the bad air that caused disease, and the movement gathered in secular, cultural, and intellectual circles. In Italy it tied to anti-clericalism and Freemasonry; in Britain those were not major themes.

  The first crematorium in the Western world opened in Milan in 1876, a Crematorium Temple built in the Monumental Cemetery. The building still stands but ceased operating in 1992. The first modern crematory in the United States was built the same year by Francis Julius LeMoyne after he heard of its use in Europe; before it closed in 1901 it had performed 42 cremations.

• 5. A Trial In Wales

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  On the 17th of March 1879, the Cremation Society of Great Britain first tested its new cremator at Woking with the body of a horse. The Society had formed in 1874 around Sir Henry Thompson, a surgeon and Physician to Queen Victoria who had seen Gorini's cremator at the Vienna Exhibition. Thompson argued cremation was a necessary sanitary precaution against disease in a growing population, and that it would also prevent premature burial, reduce funeral costs, spare mourners exposure to the weather, and protect urns from vandalism. After protests and an intervention by the Home Secretary, Sir Richard Cross, the plans stalled.

  In 1884 the Welsh Neo-Druidic priest William Price was arrested and tried for attempting to cremate his son's body. Price argued in court that while the law did not state cremation was legal, it also did not state it was illegal. The court accepted this, and the precedent let the Cremation Society proceed.

  The first official cremation in the United Kingdom took place at Woking in 1885. The deceased was Jeanette Pickersgill, a well-known figure in literary and scientific circles. By year's end the Society had overseen three cremations out of 597,357 deaths in the UK. The number climbed to 28 cremations at the venue in 1888. In 1891 Woking added a chapel, pioneering the idea of a crematorium as a venue for funerals as well as cremation. Other early European crematoria followed in Gotha in Germany in 1878 and Heidelberg in 1891, while Sweden opened its first in Stockholm in 1887, Switzerland in Zurich in 1889, and France at Père Lachaise in Paris in 1889. The French actor Jean Gabin was cremated at Père-Lachaise in 1976 for anti-cleric motivations, his ashes scattered at sea and honored by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

• 6. From Sinister Movement To Norm

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  In 1905, Westminster Abbey interred ashes for the first time, and by 1911 the Abbey expressed a preference for interring ashes. The 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia called the development a sinister movement and tied it to Freemasonry, though it conceded there was nothing directly opposed to any dogma of the Church in the practice. William Temple, the most senior bishop in the Church of England, was cremated after his death in office in 1944.

  The Roman Catholic Church moved more slowly. In 1963, at the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI lifted the ban on cremation, and in 1966 allowed Catholic priests to officiate at cremation ceremonies, on condition that the ashes be buried or interred rather than scattered. Acceptance reshaped where the dead went around the world. Australia got its first purpose-built modern crematorium and chapel at the West Terrace Cemetery in Adelaide in 1901, resembling the buildings at Woking and running until the late 1950s, while the oldest operating Australian crematorium at Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney opened in 1925. In the Netherlands, laws against cremation were challenged and invalidated in 1915, two years after the country's first crematorium was built, though cremation was not legally recognised until 1955.

  Starting in the 1960s, cremation became more common than burial in several countries where burial was traditional: the United Kingdom in 1968, Czechoslovakia in 1980, Canada in the early 2000s, the United States in 2016, and Finland in 2017. Cited factors include cheaper costs, especially after the 2008 recession, growing secular attitudes, and declining opposition in some Christian denominations. The contrast between countries remains stark. Japan reported a 99.97% cremation rate, while Romania reported 0.5% in 2018, and the United Kingdom rate rose from 34.70% in 1960 to 78.10% in 2019.

• 7. Camps And Furnaces

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  During World War II, Nazi Germany used specially built furnaces in at least six extermination camps across occupied Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where the bodies of those murdered by gassing were disposed of through incineration. The industrialised killing of Operation Reinhard produced too many corpses for ordinary disposal, so crematoria built to SS specifications ran around the clock.

  The Vrba-Wetzler report described four crematoria operating at Birkenau, two large and two smaller. Each large one held a furnace room, large halls, and a gas chamber, with nine furnaces grouped around a huge chimney, each furnace holding four openings. Every opening could take three normal corpses at once, fully burned after an hour and a half, giving a daily capacity of about 2,000 bodies. The report put the total capacity of the four plants at about 6,000 daily.

  The furnaces came from several manufacturers. The best known were Topf and Sons and the Kori Company of Berlin, whose ovens were elongated to hold two bodies slid in from the back, with the ashes taken out from the front.

• 8. Inside The Cremator

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  A modern cremator generates temperatures of 871 to 982 degrees Celsius to ensure the disintegration of the corpse, burning fuels such as oil, natural gas, propane, and, in Hong Kong, coal gas. The chamber where the body is placed is called a retort, lined with heat-resistant refractory bricks built in layers, with the innermost fire bricks replaced from time to time as the combustion wears them down. The average cremation of an adult body takes about 90 minutes, and operators watch through a spyhole while the cremator monitors itself to tell when the process is complete.

  Practice varies by country. In the United States, federal law dictates no container requirements, though some states require an opaque container, anything from a corrugated cardboard box to a wooden casket. In the United Kingdom the body is cremated in the same combustible coffin it was placed in at the undertaker's, the Code of Cremation Practice forbids opening the coffin once it arrives, and rules require cremation within 72 hours of the funeral service. Jewelry is recommended to be removed before the coffin is sealed, and pacemakers and other implanted devices must come out because they can cause large, dangerous explosions.

  What the fire leaves is mostly dry calcium phosphates with minor salts of sodium and potassium, while sulfur and most carbon escape as oxidized gases. The dry bone fragments are swept from the retort and fed into a machine called a Cremulator, a high-speed pulverizer, in a grinding process that typically takes about 20 seconds. In most Asian countries the bones are not pulverised unless requested, and the family collects them instead. The mean weight of an adult's remains is 2.4 kilograms, with adult males averaging about a kilogram more than females, and the figure tracks skeletal mass so closely that height and sex predict it better than body weight does. Adult ashes can range from 876 to 3784 grams.

  In the United States the cremated remains are almost always sealed in a thick watertight polyethylene bag inside a hard snap-top plastic container, labeled with a printed paper label, accompanied by an official certificate of cremation. The Cremation Association of North America prefers that the word cremains not be used, arguing it has less connection to the deceased than the phrase cremated remains. The default container at most crematoria, when nothing more expensive is chosen, is a hinged, snap-locking plastic box.

  Bone is not all that survives the fire. After the remains are processed, sieving pulls out smaller bits of metal known as gleanings, such as tooth fillings and rings, which may be interred in consecrated ground or sold as precious metal scrap. Larger items like titanium hip replacements, which tarnish but do not melt, are removed before processing because they are far too durable to grind, and breast implants do not have to be removed before cremation.

  The choices for the remains run remarkably wide. They can rest in an urn, sit in a columbarium, be buried, or be scattered at sea, on a mountain, or in a special field. Services will scatter them by helium balloon, fireworks, shotgun shells, boat, aeroplane, or drone, and one sends a lipstick-tube sized sample into low earth orbit, where it stays for years before reentering the atmosphere. Some companies turn part of the remains into synthetic diamonds for cremation jewelry, others mix them into paint for a portrait, into tattoo ink, into glass orbs, or into the cement of an artificial reef.

  Religion shapes the final destination. Hinduism obliges the closest male relative to immerse the remains in the holy river Ganges, preferably at Triveni Sangam, Allahabad, Varanasi, or Haridwar, while Sikhs immerse them in the Sutlej at Kiratpur Sahib. The ashes themselves are alkaline, and in places such as Snowdon in Wales, environmental authorities have warned that frequent scattering can change the soil and affect the ecology.

  Each cremation requires about 28 US gallons of fuel and releases about 540 pounds of carbon dioxide. The roughly one million bodies cremated annually in the United States produce about 270,000 short tons of carbon dioxide, more than 22,000 average American homes generate in a year. Studies by Elisabeth Keijzer for the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Research nonetheless found that cremation has less environmental impact than a traditional burial, and that the newer method of alkaline hydrolysis, sometimes called green cremation or resomation, has less impact than both.

  Keijzer's work also found that a cremation or burial accounts for only about a quarter of a funeral's environmental footprint, with the carbon emissions of people travelling to the funeral far greater. Burial carries its own contaminants, chiefly formaldehyde and the coffin itself, while cremation can release mercury from dental fillings, which is why countries such as the United Kingdom now require cremators to be fitted with abatement filters. Burial also takes space, and cemeteries in Japan and Europe and in larger cities have run out of it. In Tokyo plots are scarce and expensive, in London a space crisis led politician Harriet Harman to propose reopening old graves for double-decker burials, and in Singapore burial is limited to 15 years, which is why most Singaporeans prefer cremation.