Essie William
Cremation of the Dead
CHAPTER II
METHODS OF TREATING THE DEAD
It will be necessary for my purpose to give a short description of the chief modes of disposing of the dead, and to quote a very few examples of each practice. In instancing such examples, I will as much as possible confine myself to my note-books of the last four years, and by so doing the matter will not only be more likely to possess novelty, but it will have been based upon the late observations of our distinguished travellers and possess authenticity.
The first method of disposal which I will mention is Exposure, which might be better described as no burial at all. The Colchians and Phrygians at one time hung the dead bodies upon the limbs of trees,44 and some of the Indians of the Plains of North America to the present day do little else, since they expose their dead, after a rude bandaging, upon platforms erected upon the top of tall poles. Many ancient nations, however, purposely exposed their dead to the predatory instinct of animals. For instance, the Syrcanians abandoned their dead to wild dogs.45 The ancient Ethiopians threw their dead into the water, to be devoured by aquatic animals.46 The Parsees, as far back as 400 B.C., and for an untraced time previously, exposed their deceased friends upon high gratings to feed birds of prey, and such 'towers of silence' are in use up to the present day. Dr. Aveling informs me that in India they are accustomed to carry the body to the top of a hill and place it upon a stone slab, returning for it in order to bury it when the bones are picked clean. Disturbances have frequently taken place of late between the Hindoos and Parsees owing to this practice, for the vultures and other birds often let fall portions of the body during their flight into the gardens of the former. And speaking still of our own times, the Hindoos often expose their dead by the banks of their sacred river to the attacks of the river monsters; some of them even, when fuel is scarce, cast the partly burnt body into the Hooghly. Some Kaffir tribes also remove the dead out of sight to spots in the bush, where they are devoured by wild beasts.47
Casting the body into the deep is another form of exposure, with the reservation that although it is understood to be in the nature of things that it will be devoured by the lower animals, this is not the primary motive. The practice is common with all maritime nations on the occurrence of deaths out at sea. Burial in the sea generally has, however, of late been recommended as a panacea for the ills seen to be consequent upon inhumation. One writer48 pictures the 'dead ship' daily departing from the strand with its lifeless burden, and reverently and prayerfully committing the bodies to the bosom of the 'mystic main,' until the time when the sea shall give up its dead. But there is little to recommend the practice, even if the idea were not revolting to a people who exist largely upon fish and crustaceans. When a flight of locusts was some years ago swept by a storm into the Bay of Smyrna, many people there would not feed upon fish for a considerable time afterwards, and what would the feeling be if only the dwellers in our littoral towns and villages followed out burial in the sea? Even the sinking of the bodies with heavy weights down to the ocean's depths would be hazardous. The only people who appear to practise sea-burial are the aborigines of the Chatham Islands. When a fisherman there departs this life, they put a baited rod in his hand, and, after lashing him fast in a boat, send him adrift to sea.49 But I need not further continue the subject,50 and I think that it may be taken for granted, that sea-burial, or immarment, or immersion, or aquation, or whatever names the method may be known by, will never become general. The ancient Lacustrine dwellers did not practise water-burial, but disposed of their dead upon terra firma, evidently from motives that have already been explained.
A method of petrifaction has lately been broached, and has met with some adherents. Something is to be produced similar to a relic which I once saw for sale in Manchester, taken from a guano-bed about thirty years ago, and which had been interred in the phosphates about a hundred and fifty years previously. In a cave in the Bay of Nipea, a number of bodies were discovered which had been petrified by the waters of some springs. The latest mode of effecting this kind of sanitary preservation was practised upon the body of Mazzini; and the result was, I understand, very disappointing.
A system of inhumation analogous to that practised when stone-coffins were in use is now agitating in Germany.51 It is proposed to encrust the subject over with a cement, and, after placing it in a sarcophagus of similar artificial material, to pour more of the same matter in a fluid state around it, so that the dead would be entombed in a solid matrix of long-enduring material. But those who are practically acquainted with the nature of cements, or rather with the impossibility of resting assured that proper cements would always be used, will know that it is more than likely that, out of the 32,000 who are said to die annually per million, one-half of the bodies would be enveloped in an impoverished material, which would speedily fall to pieces, with disastrous results. Dr. Sedgwick has expressed himself as certain that even plaster of Paris would prove ineffective in preventing the exhalations from coffins. Supposing, too, that each of the defunct required a space of one cubic yard only, where could cemeteries be obtained which could afford permanently to alienate 32,000 cubic yards of space per million annually? The scheme carries wildness upon its very face. Something analogous to this system of burial was the strange one carried out by the ancient Peruvians. A late traveller52 has described some of the Huacas, as the places were called, and the well-preserved remains of which are still to be seen. It was a system of piling up coffins of plaster in pyramid fashion, to such an extent that one of these pyramidal mounds measures over 14½ millions of cubic feet. One carefully examined measured over 3½ millions of cubic feet, and was one mass of half-mummified bodies. As fast as a death took place, a chamber of sun-dried material was prepared upon the mound, and the body laid in it; and although the material of which the mound was composed was little else than mud-plaster, these cellular-built Huacas possessed a wonderful power of resistance to decay. One of them, in 1854, had occasion during the war to accommodate a battery of artillery on its summit.
Many of the ancient peoples buried in caves. The primeval races frequently used the caverns once inhabited by the extinct beasts for this purpose.53 The ancient Persians hewed out holes in the mountains with the same view. The early Arabians also hid their dead in caves, in order to protect them from wild beasts. Burial-caves of some ancient Russian peoples are found along the Borysthenes.54 To this class of burial might also be said to belong all those tombs which were built up in chambers with rude pieces of stone, and whether afterwards heaped over with earth or not. A tomb of this latter description was the huge barrow of the Emperor Yung-Lo, with its extensive megalithic avenue leading to its centre, by way of which the dead was visited or the tomb cleansed.55 The stone lines on Dartmoor may have originally belonged to this category. Even at the present day the Inguishes of the Caucasus bury in vaults of masonry built above ground, with an aperture in the west side by which the corpse is introduced, and which is afterwards filled up with stones.56
We now approach burial in the earth, and the common practice of the present day. It is not needful, however, to say much here concerning it, as it will be treated of in a separate chapter, where its shortcomings will also be noted. The most persistent practisers of inhumation57 are the Chinese. They seem rarely to have followed any other system of burial. Long before the Christian era they used coffins, and previous to committing them to the ground inserted in them gold and silver valuables. But at that time they did not form grave-mounds or fence them round with extensive palisades.58 The secret of their attachment to burial in the earth lies in the fact that they believe that the body must rest comfortably in the grave, or misfortune will follow the family.59 The Chinese are therefore particularly anxious about the suitableness of the burial site, and sometimes a priest is consulted and a fresh interment made. This superstition has considerable disadvantages, because the dead not being interred in enclosed spaces, as with us, but at the fancy of the relatives, it is sometimes impossible to make roadways from place to place. They oppose tramways and railways for this reason, and riots with the Franks have already taken place in consequence. The Chinese never desecrate the graves of even foreign sailors, and have been known to inter cast-ashore bodies with the greatest attention. To wherever they themselves wander, and whether they die and are buried in California or in Australia, they are eventually re-interred in the Flowery Land, in the mortuary erections of the villages dear to them. It is therefore not uncommon to see a China-bound vessel from San Francisco well freighted with the bones of disinterred Celestials. On the hills in China the graves are often allowed to remain undisturbed for years, whilst in the low-lying districts the bones are gathered up as soon as possible.60 There is no such thing there as a burying-ground or cemetery.
The treatment of the dead known as embalming was carried on by the ancient Egyptians from apparently the remotest times. They believed in the transmigration of souls, and their return in three thousand years to the same body; hence the practice. Long before the sumptuous mummy-pits were commenced by the later races, the system was in full observance. There have lately been exhibited61 a bone necklace and two flint bracelets which were found in a very rude mummy-pit on the edge of the Plain of Thebes, and doubtless these represent the distant antiquity of Egypt. Flint instruments have also been found in mummy-cases.62 The extent of country over which mummifying must have extended was enormous, if, as is urged,63 there was any kinship between the red races of Europe and America and the Egyptians – who all practised embalming in some shape or form – and as was supposed to be the case from the existence of pyramid building in all three countries.
Embalming has continued to meet with supporters in most civilised countries, but little practical result follows, for the opportunities of practising it are few and far between. Some literature exists on the subject, and a few treatises have been published upon it in our own country, notably one by Surgeon Greenhill in 1705. Mummifying preparations were, I find, patented by Orioli in 1859, by Morgan in 1863, by Audigier in 1864, and by Larnandes in 1866. Suggestions for a partial embalmment were also published in 1860 by Copping and in 1863 by Spicer. The filling of the arterial and vascular systems with concentrated solutions was also proposed by Spear, Scollay, and by two Parisians, in the year 1867; and yet another patent was issued in 1868. But we may assume that an universal system of embalmment is undesirable in our times. There is no purpose to serve in withholding from nature her very own. Cases may be imagined in which the practice would be advisable; but, as a rule, the earth's surface is required for the living, not for the dead; and we have, at least here, no underground caves. Had the Egyptians lived in a damp climate such as ours, there would have been no embalming. It is not every country that is suited to the practice. The people of Etruria were, it is now supposed, Egyptian in descent, but they were content with images of mummies only. The failures we ourselves have met with, and which are to be seen in the Royal College of Surgeons Museum64 and other places, are quite sufficient to disenchant anyone. The Egyptian authorities themselves eventually abolished the practice.65 What would they have said if they had lived to see their revered dead and their sacred animals carted away and sold as a drug, or worse still, as a manure? Professor Coletti has wisely remarked that when a man passes over to the majority66 he should speedily become 'a handful of simple earth and nothing more.'
There is a system of burial somewhat analogous to embalming, which consists of drying up the body, and then interring it. The ancient Peruvians used to dry their dead in the sun, and inter them in a sitting posture, bound in cotton cloth, the quantity of saltpetre in the ground completing the desiccation.67 The Huacas or huge pyramidal burial mounds of these people, which were so constructed that each added body, with its funeral accessories, had its own clay-mortar enclosure, prove also that some rude attempt at embalmment was practised.68 To the present day races are discovered which possess some knowledge of the art. A tribe in South Australia practise the following system. They place the deceased in a sitting posture near the top of the hut, and keep up fires until the body is dry, when they proceed to bandage it. Eventually they hide it away amongst the branches of trees.69 In another remote part of the world, Japan, the Aino aboriginals, when a chief dies, lay the body out at the door of the hut, remove the viscera, and wash it daily in the sun for a whole year. When completely dried, the remains are put in a coffin and buried.70 In India beyond the Ganges, the Looshais also practise a desiccation of the dead.71 And the manner in which the body of our noble traveller Dr. Livingstone was prepared previous to bringing him home, would seem to point to the prevalence of such a custom, or to the tradition of one, amongst the African races.
There remains now only cremation to notice, the origin of which practice is lost in obscurity. It would serve little purpose to compile a mere list of the countries in which it was practised. Sufficient now to say that nearly all the ancient peoples observed it, the Chinese and the Jews being notable exceptions to this rule. The ancient Germans burnt their dead;72 so did the ancient Lithuanians – placing the ashes in urns of unburnt clay, and burying them in mounds, as is proved by an exploration of the great barrows near Sapolia in Russia.73 Over our own islands also, cremation seems to have been common. Urns are still unearthed from time to time in England, and in parts of Ireland – one part of Antrim especially – the ground is almost studded with burial sites of this character. In Scotland, too, many similar remains have been discovered. In Hindoostan the system is all but universal, and in Siam, where the ashes are frequently placed in urns of great value,74 it doubtless existed from the first peopling of the country. The people of Pegu and Laos also burn their dead;75 and in Burmah, when a Buddhist priest of rank dies, the body is embalmed in honey, laid in state for a time, and then sometimes blown up with gunpowder together with its hearse.
Scarcely a year passes over our heads without adding to our list of cremation-practising peoples. Thus we have lately learnt that amongst the Gāro Hill tribes of Bengal, the dead are kept for four days and burnt at midnight within a few yards of their residences, the ashes being put into a hole in the ground dug upon the exact spot where the burning took place, and a small thatched building erected over the grave, which is afterwards allowed to fall to pieces.76 The Khāsi Hill tribes also practise cremation of the dead, and the ashes are collected in an urn, and temporarily buried close by, until it is deemed proper to remove them to the family depository of the tribe.77 Some of the Aracan tribes of Further India also burn their dead, leaving at the place of cremation some packets of rice, a neglect of which custom is a bar to inheritance.78 And not only from remote Asia do instances of cremation come before us, but from America, where the practice was little suspected. Thus the Cocopa Indians there practise it to the present day, laying the body upon logs of mezquite wood, burning it, with the effects of the deceased, and placing the ashes in urns with peculiar ceremonies.79 The Digger Indians also burn their dead, the nearest relative collecting the ashes and mixing with them the gum of a tree. This they smear on their heads in evident imitation, one would suppose, of the Israelites when in mourning.80 I could quote numerous other examples of the practice of burning the dead, tracing them satisfactorily, I have reason to think, to sanitary motives. Some of the systems observed, however, are excessively puzzling; for instance, the triple treatment of the Singpho people, who embalm, burn, and bury in rotation. The bodies are first of all dried in coffins made for the purpose, whereupon the mummy is burnt, the ashes being deposited in mounds, which last are eventually covered over with conical roofs.81
Many other strange matters connected with mortuary observances, incomprehensible I am afraid at present, would confront the student of burial customs. Why, for instance, should the Greeks who burnt their dead place in the tomb vases and other things esteemed by the deceased?82 and why do we find the same practice in vogue as far off as Madagascar, where they do not burn their dead?83 Why also should the Scythians of old have burnt the body, and also the chattels of the deceased?84 Why should the Patagonians of to-day bury the body and burn the chattels,85 and the Shan-doo tribes of Aracan, where cremation is common, burn neither and bury both?86 Or if these questions are easily answered, why, if not for sanitary reasons, should any people have gone to the trouble and expense of cremation, when exposure or burial in the earth was so easy to perform and absolutely costless?87
When the necessity for cremation has once become a settled conviction with a people, nothing but the pressure of a conquering race or religion inimical to the practice will eradicate it. In parts of Madras where fuel is dear, the body is reduced to ashes with dried cow-dung and wood. In Siam, if poverty forbids immediate cremation, the body is first buried, and when the cost of the process can be borne, the body is disinterred and given to the purifying flame. Rather too than lose the benefits of cremation, when wood was scarce and when it was forbidden to cast the partly consumed bodies in the river, the poor people of Bengal, with, for that race, even avidity, are closing with the proposal of Sir Cecil Beadon to erect a Cinerator, and thus departing from their ancient traditional routine.88 Not even the recurring cases of premature burning, such as that not long ago at Ramkistopore, can wean the Hindoos from the burning ghat. They will risk their lives in war time in order to collect fuel to bury a dead comrade.89 In any country where cremation is practised, it is only when there is absolutely no property whatsoever that burning is omitted. For instance, a Zaisaugh amongst the Kalmucks, whose property will pay for a proper offering, can have his dead body burnt, and only the utterly poor are buried or abandoned.90 More than this, in order to establish apparently a proper regard for the practice, and preclude any laxity in its observance, a sham burning is carried out by some peoples. Should, for example, a Khāsi Hill tribe man die whilst on a distant expedition, and his body not be recoverable, some cowries or shell money are burnt with the deceased man's clothes, and the ashes placed in the family repository.91
There are several spurious kinds, or half-and-half schemes, of cremation. For instance, the Fresendajians place their dead in vases of aquafortis.92 Caustic potash and other chemical substances have also been proposed for placing in the coffin.93 A quasi-burning – the burial of the bodies in quicklime – is also practised by the Sephardic Jews of Gibraltar and North Africa. Even recently, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews have made use of this system at the Mile End cemetery, London.94 During the Prussian occupation of Chalons, numbers of typhus-stricken dead were interred in this material, but the result was unsatisfactory.95 At York can be seen a casting inside which a Roman lady was so burned, but whether intentionally or not, it is impossible to say.