Making Sure the Dead Stay Dead
Friday October 5, 2007 8:38 AM
Death tops the greatest fears of humankind. Close on the heels of that comes another great fear: the dead who don't stay dead. Once you're out of this world, you're not supposed to come back. Throughout history, human beings have devised many ways to make certain the dead stay where they belong.
Funeral and burial practices have been designed not so much to please the living, but to prevent the dead from returning as restless ghosts, lost and wandering souls, hosts to evils, and even as angry vampires. Rites can be simple or extravagant — it doesn't matter to the dead, as long as they are buried with respect. Apparently, few things are worse to human beings than having one's physical remains unaccounted for. A motif in folklore called the "grateful dead" concerns stories in which the unburied dead pester the living for a proper burial. Perhaps that's why people have always gone to great lengths to recover bodies, and even body parts.
In the days before mortuaries, corpses were prepared for burial at home. Bodies were laid out, washed and dressed, and put out to viewing for wakes. Mirrors were covered. People believed that the dead lingered around their bodies for a while, and if they saw themselves dead in a mirror, they would be shocked and unable to transit to the afterlife. Likewise, clocks were stopped at the time of death, so the dead would not be aware of the passage of time.
Corpses were always carried out of a house through a back door, never the front. Funeral processions took various detours to the cemetery. These tactics were designed to confuse the dead so that they could not find their way back to their homes. If an animal jumped over a corpse before it was buried, that was bad news, and meant a restless ghost or vampire.
In folklore, passage to the afterlife is not free. People placed coins in the mouths and on the eyes of the dead. One famous ancient source of this tradition is the Greek mythological figure Charon, who ferried the dead across the river Styx to Hades. If you couldn't pay Charon, you didn't go, and were doomed to wander for a century.
The dead are hungry, according to lore. Graves and tombs have been filled with food, followed by offerings of food left at gravesides for a period of time. The food sustains the journey to the afterlife. Otherwise, the dead will return to the living for a meal — maybe even blood, in the case of vampire cult beliefs. Once the dead make it to the other side, they'll need things they had in life, and so offerings of objects, tools and other items have been traditional in the past. The Egyptians dispatched their pharaohs with a staff of dead animals, servants and soldiers. Message: Have a good afterlife, and stay there!
