Funeral

• 1. Introduction

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  A funeral is a ceremony connected with the final disposition of a corpse, and humans have performed some version of it for a very long time. Funeral rites pre-date modern Homo sapiens. They date to at least 300,000 years ago. In the Shanidar Cave in Iraq, in Pontnewydd Cave in Wales, and at other sites across Europe and the Near East, archaeologists found Neanderthal skeletons. The skeletons carried a characteristic layer of flower pollen. Some have read this as evidence that Neanderthals held religious beliefs. The evidence is not unequivocal. The dead were apparently buried deliberately, but burrowing rodents could have introduced the flowers. The word funeral itself comes from the Latin funus, a term that meant both the corpse and the rites performed over it. How does one ceremony stretch from a Tibetan mountaintop to a New Orleans street parade? Why do some traditions destroy the body and others guard it from the earth? And what makes a single human gathering so stable that researchers describe it as one of the most predictable forces in a community? The answers run through fire and water, through dogs and vultures, through silk shrouds and cardboard coffins.

• 2. Five Anchors

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  Cross-cultural and historical research documents funeral customs as a highly predictable, stable force in communities. The patterns recur whether the rite happens in a synagogue, a church, a funeral home, or a crematorium. Scholars describe five anchors that hold funeral customs together. The first is significant symbols. The second is gathered community. The third is ritual action. The fourth is cultural heritage. The fifth is the transition of the dead body, the corpse itself. Funerals carry both normative and legal components. Common secular motivations include mourning the deceased, celebrating their life, and offering support to the bereaved. Religious aspects may aim to help the soul reach an afterlife, resurrection, or reincarnation. The ritual at the center delivers the body to its final disposition. Differing beliefs about cleanliness and the relationship between body and soul shape how each culture handles the corpse, and that single question divides the world's traditions more sharply than almost any other.

• 3. Destroy Or Preserve

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  Cremation, sky burial, decomposition, disintegration, dissolution, mummification. The final disposition of a body falls into two broad choices: destroy it or preserve it. Funerary practice splits along that line, and religion often decides which side a community stands on. In the Baha'i Faith, burial law precludes cremation, and it is forbidden to carry the body more than one hour's journey away from the place of death. Before interment the body is wrapped in a shroud of silk or cotton, and a ring is placed on its finger 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 of crystal, stone, or hard fine wood. Burial has been the traditional Christian practice because of belief in the resurrection of the body. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops states that the Church earnestly recommends burying the bodies of the deceased, yet does not prohibit cremation unless it was chosen for reasons contrary to Christian doctrine, under canon 1176.3. In Islam, sharia calls for burial of the body, and neither cremation nor embalming is allowed. Judaism's traditional law and practice forbid cremation, while the Reform movement generally discourages it without an outright ban. For those who preserve the body, the question becomes where, and for those who destroy it, the question becomes how, and few traditions answer the how as dramatically as the ones that feed the dead to animals.

• 4. Fed To The Animals

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  Vultures circle a mountaintop in Tibet while the rogyapas, the body breakers, laugh as if doing farm work. Buddhists in Tibet perform sky burials, where the body is exposed to be eaten by vultures. The body is dissected with a blade on the mountain top before exposure. Crying and wailing is discouraged. Tibetan Buddhists believe a lighthearted atmosphere helps the soul reach a better afterlife. After the vultures consume all the flesh, the rogyapas smash the bones and mix them with tsampa to feed back to the birds. Zoroastrian rites turned on the belief that bodies are infested by Nasu upon death. Burial and cremation were both prohibited, since each would defile the sacred creations of earth and fire. Towers of Silence were developed, open air structures where corpses were placed for carrion-eating birds. A ritual called Sagdid, meaning seen by a dog, had to be performed as promptly as possible after death. The dog could calculate the degree of evil within the corpse and entrap the contamination. To banish Nasu from a path traveled by a funeral procession, a yellow dog with four eyes, or a white dog with yellow ears, was walked through it three times. If the dog went unwillingly, it might be walked back and forth up to nine times. The mid-5th century BCE writer Herodotus observed exposure customs among Iranian expatriates in Asia Minor, recording in Histories i.140 that the rites were secret. Towers themselves are a much later invention, first documented in the early 9th century CE, with the surrounding customs dating to the Sassanid era of the 3rd to 7th centuries CE.

• 5. The Hindu Last Rites

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  Antyesti, literally last rites or last sacrifice, refers to the funeral rite-of-passage in Hinduism. A dead adult Hindu is cremated, while a dead child is typically buried. The soul, the Atman, is believed to be the immortal essence released at the ritual, while the body returns to five elements: air, water, fire, earth, and space. The roots of this belief are found in the Vedas, including the hymns of Rigveda section 10.16. For the untimely death of a child, Rigveda section 10.18 mourns the loss, praying to the deity Mrityu to neither harm our girls nor our boys, and pleading for the earth to cover the child as soft wool. A typical Hindu funeral runs through three main stages: a gathering or wake in the home, the cremation called the mukhagni, and a follow-up ritual called the shraddha ceremony. The body is washed and wrapped in white cloth for a man or a widow and red for a married woman, with the two toes tied together by a string and a red Tilak placed on the forehead. The body is carried to a cremation ground near a river and placed on a pyre with feet facing south. The eldest son or a priest circumambulates the pyre, places sesame seed in the dead person's mouth, sprinkles the body with ghee, and draws three lines for Yama, Kala, and the dead. The ash is consecrated to the nearest river or sea. Mourning lasts 10 to 12 days, after which male relatives shave their heads and trim their nails. For twelve days, everyone in the household sleeps on the floor with mattresses taken off the beds. The last day of mourning, called Terahveen or the thirteenth day, sees basic-need items donated to priests, while the eldest son is ceremonially crowned in the Pagdi Rasm as the new head of the family.

• 6. The Classical Procession

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  The pater familias was summoned to the death-bed in ancient Rome, where he tried to catch and inhale the last breath of the dying. Funerals of the prominent were undertaken by professional undertakers called libitinarii. No direct description of Roman funeral rites has survived. The rites included a public procession to the tomb or pyre, with surviving relations bearing masks of the family's deceased ancestors. The right to carry those masks was eventually restricted to families prominent enough to have held curule magistracies. Mimes, dancers, musicians, and professional female mourners joined the processions. Less wealthy Romans could join benevolent funerary societies called collegia funeraticia. Nine days after disposal of the body, a feast called the cena novendialis was given and a libation poured over the grave. During that nine-day period the house was considered tainted, or funesta, and hung with branches to warn passersby. The Romans prohibited cremation or inhumation within the sacred boundary of the city, the pomerium. The Greek word for funeral, kedeia, derives from a verb meaning to attend to or take care of someone. From the Cycladic civilization in 3000 BCE until the Hypo-Mycenaean era in 1200 to 1100 BCE, interment was the main practice. Cremation appeared around the 11th century BCE, probably from eastern influence. The ancient Greek funeral included the prothesis, the ekphora, and the perideipnon. In certain regions, coins to pay Charon, who ferried the dead to the underworld, were placed inside the casket. Memorial services in modern Greece still take place 40 days, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and 1 year after death.

• 7. Death And Color

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  White, not black, signals death across most of East Asia, South Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. White or off-white robes traditionally mark that someone has died, worn by relatives during the ceremony. In Chinese culture, red is strictly forbidden as a symbolic color of happiness. An exception is sometimes made if the deceased reached an advanced age such as 85, when the funeral becomes a celebration and white with some red is acceptable. Most Japanese funerals are conducted with Buddhist and Shinto rites, and many ritually bestow a new name on the deceased using obsolete or archaic kanji to avoid the name appearing in ordinary speech. Roughly 90% of Japanese funerals are conducted in a Buddhist manner, and by a 2005 estimate, 99% of all deceased Japanese are cremated. Newer methods of disposal have appeared, including scattering of ashes, burial in outer space, and conversion of the cremated remains into a diamond set in jewelry. In Korea, funerals are typically held over three days, with each day carrying its own tasks. Food prepared for the deceased includes three bowls of rice, three kinds of Korean side dishes, three coins, and three straw shoes. On the second day a family member places uncooked rice in the mouth of the body. Guests bring condolence money and are often served a food called Yukgaejang with the distilled drink soju. In Mongolia, families choose from open-air burial, which is most common, cremation, or embalming, the last mainly chosen by members of the Lamaistic Church.

• 8. Beyond The Somber

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  A fully stocked open bar, catered food, and even favors can mark the most extreme version of a celebration of life. A growing number of families choose this kind of event, held after burial, entombment, or cremation, focusing on the life that was lived rather than the death. Celebrations of life discourage wearing black and lean toward joyous, hopeful tones. Notable recent examples include those for Rene Angelil and Maya Angelou. The jazz funeral originated in New Orleans, Louisiana, alongside the emergence of jazz music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a traditionally African-American ceremony unique to New Orleans. A processional, the main line, marches from the service to the burial site while the brass band plays slow dirges and Christian hymns. After the body is buried, or cut loose, the band turns to up-tempo joyful numbers, and crowds of second liners join in dancing, turning the funeral into a street festival. Green burial and natural burial aim to return the body to the earth with little or no non-biodegradable material. The idea drew widespread attention in the 1990s, and the first explicitly green burial cemetery in the United States opened in South Carolina. The Green Burial Council, which came into being in 2005, operates out of California and certifies burial practices. One older Welsh case helped open the door to modern choice. The first child of William Price, a Welsh Neo-Druidic priest, died in 1884, and Price chose to cremate the body. Police arrested him for illegal disposal of a corpse. Price argued in court that while the law did not state cremation was legal, it also did not state it was illegal, and the resulting precedent led to the Cremation Act 1902.