Fun Fact of the Week: The History of Death
As long as people have been alive, people have been dying. And for as long as people have been dying, there have been living people around them who need to figure out what to do afterwards. So, in honor of All-Hallow’s Eve, Dia De Los Muertos, and the rupture of the thin veil between the spirit world and our own, let us rejoice in the presence of life as we take a quick look through how past peoples have dealt with the deaths in their lives.
Plato, the OG king of yappers, once stated that burials should not be held until three days after the deceased was first pronounced dead. This was to prevent accidental burials, and there were many cases where these precautions paid off. King Louis IX of France was once reported dead, and an argument broke out over whether his successor was allowed to take over. However, the inert king soon woke up and quickly put a stop to all that noise.
A side fun (?) fact about hangings of medieval England; if the victim of a hanging survived somehow, a royal pardon was customary (but not required). So, sympathetic executioners would occasionally cut the victim down a little too early. On rare occasions, victims would recover only after being taken into a church for their burial, in which case they could claim sanctuary, and be exempt from the authorities who tried to hang them.
Once a body was declared dead, what to do with it presented another, even more complex challenge. A method was developed in medieval Europe known as mos teutonicus, or ‘The German method’ which, in my personal opinion, has been critically under referenced in modern horror movies. In it, the body was chopped up slasher style and the pieces were thrown into a cauldron of boiling wine (the effect must have been quite shocking). Eventually, the bone parts and the non-bone parts would separate, the hard bits were packaged and sent off to burial, and whatever was left in the cauldron was disposed of (presumably not to EPA environmental regulation standards).
Moving the dead to the burial ground was also tricky. For example, some traditions dictated that women were not allowed to carry the bier (a coffin carrier, and great name for a death metal band) of men, and vice versa. In Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, Joachim Whaley (available in Reed Library) explains how this precaution was taken “in case men’s limbs were accidentally exposed during the process. Presumably this would excite un-funeral reactions among the females.” Again, how Hollywood hasn’t latched onto this already is beyond me.
This sort of scandal would have been abhorred by the later English, as the late 1800s saw a great reduction in extravagance and fun of funerals, particularly for the upper-class. Particularly, standardized motorized black hearses began to replace the once horse-drawn, extravagant, and personalized biers and coffins. However, my fun loving partiers do not need to despair. One needs only to look to the traditions of the West African Coast, and in particular the Accra region of Ghana to observe how one may ‘go out’ in style. The Ga people developed (and still practice) a tradition of exquisitely crafted handheld funerary vehicles called ‘Fantasy Coffins.’ If the plain black coffin doesn’t suit your style, perhaps you would better enjoy a roaring lion, soaring eagle, roaster, butterfly, cruise ship, Mercedes-Benz, jumbo jet, government building, Sony Walkman, Nikon camera, pineapple, Coke bottle, shoe, syringe, guitar, cannon, or a uterus. Typically, the coffin somehow represents what you did in life, and it is traditional that the family and friends of the deceased ultimately decide the form of the coffin, but a will stipulation is probably not out of the question.
Ultimately, memento mori and all that. In the Odyssey, Athena told Telemachus, “Death is common to all men,” but why not put the fun back in funeral, you know? So, happy Halloween, everybody!
These facts are sourced mostly from Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Deathby Joachim Whaley. If you have a fun fact or topic that you would like to be brought to light, email me at qhoop@reed.edu!