A new burial technique
I’m curious as to how cremation came about. It had to be right after the caveman caught on to the whole fire concept.
Maybe one night, late, after their celebrating killing a dinosaur or something, one of them, giddy from the day’s events and too much food, stumbled into the fire and burned to a crisp.
Or maybe, since no-one was smart enough back then to invent a shovel, they just threw their deceased into the fire.
I cooked some steaks on a barbecue grill one time, but got a little drunk and forgot them until the next morning. It was pretty cool actually. The steaks, filets, had shrunk to half their original size and upon throwing them up against the wall, they’d explode into powder.
I like this concept more than I do cremation.
Maybe some new-age funeral home many years from now will offer new and creative ways of disposing of a corpse other than a casket or standard cremation.
I’m hoping they might offer that steak thing. That’d be pretty cool to roast me overnight, stick me in a casket the next day, and right about the time a loved one places one of my favorite possessions on my corpse, something they think I would have wanted to be buried with, I poof into powder.
That’d actually be pretty funny.
Probably not so much for the guy or girl who caused me to disintegrate.
May 17, 2012 at 8:44 am
Burial appears to be the oldest mode of dead body disposal, so cremation isn’t because no one owned a shovel (early burials were not always in the ground, but above it, with rocks forming a cairn over the body).
In ancient cultures where animal sacrifice was practiced, it doesn’t seem to be a stretch to also burn the bodies of the dead (and, in some cultures, the not-dead-yet) as either 1) an offering to the gods for the benefit of the people left behind, or 2) as a way to send the dead person up to sky (via smoke) where the gods lived.
Which begs another question: why have gods always been in the sky? Even in cultures were there are gods on the ground or under it, the supreme god or gods have always been, at a minimum, on the peak of the tallest mountain, or in the sky, or beyond the sky. “I life up mine eyes, from whence cometh my help.”
Why is that?
May 17, 2012 at 9:01 am
Holy shit Keri…is this part of a doctoral thesis?
May 17, 2012 at 12:39 pm
No, although I was a history major in college and have a fondness for religion (modern and ancient). That, and I wrote my senior thesis on vampire mythology in medieval Eastern Europe (plus a term paper on death and dying in the middle ages), so I’ve done some study into how various cultures handle their dead.
I promise I’m not emo, though. I’m not even vaguely Goth. I just find the things people do interesting.
I was at the Poulnabrone Dolmen in Ireland (a dolmen is a prehistoric burial site marked by large slabs of rocks stacked on each other, making something that looks like a little house or a table) and the field around the dolmen was very rocky. Tourists would make little stacks and pyramids of these small rocks, and the entire area around the dolmen was littered with these miniature cairns.
My tour guide fussed about it, saying that it took away from the importance of the dolmen–that people ended up paying more attention to the hundreds of little piles. I told him, “Personally, I find it fascinating. Why do people make the stacks? Thousands of years ago, people were here, stacking rocks. People are still here, stacking rocks. We haven’t changed. What is it that makes us want to stack rocks?”
May 17, 2012 at 6:57 pm
Keri, is that rhetorical or do you really want to know why we stack rocks? Because if you do, let me put forth a theory. My theory.
When rocks are just laying around being…well, rocks. They’re pretty much useless. Unless you’re a bug or something. Then it’s a good hiding place. But aside from that, it’s useless.
And that’s where we (homo sapiens) come in.
We bring order to chaos.
Rocks scattered about represent chaos.
But a rock stacked….well now, that a different ball game. Stacked, rocks bring order to an uncivilized world, forming walls, fences, houses, pedestals, fireplaces, barbecue pits…the list goes on.
Conversely, just laying around, an unstacked rock represents chaos and anarchy and, in short, is one toss away from beaning someone on the head and killing them.
After all, who’s going to, in the middle of an altercation, run over to their stone fireplace, grab a hammer and chisel and beat at one of the rocks until it dislodges in order they can bean the other person on the head with it?
My point exactly.
May 18, 2012 at 12:00 pm
No, not rhetorical; I really do wonder why we stack rocks.
Your order-into-chaos theory is interesting (and really good, I think). God spent 6 out of 7 days creating the Universe. Why did He “rest” on the 7th day? It’s not like God gets tired.
One thought is that if God had created for 7 days, everything would have been perfect. But instead, He stopped after 6 days, leaving the world not quite complete.
Judaism teaches that God created man to be a co-creator with Him. That’s what it means to “be in God’s image”: it’s to have free-will and the ability to alter Creation. “Tikkun olam” is a Hebrew phrase that means “repair of the world.” It is up to humans to fix the things which are not quite right.
It’s our job to bring order to chaos.
And, interestingly, when it comes to observing the Sabbath, the Biblical definition of work has nothing to do with our modern definition. “Work” is actually anything which alters the world–whether for good or bad. You can’t cut or tear or burn, or build or create or complete. Rock stacking is definitely out. On the Sabbath, you’re supposed to release your mastery over nature and the world and just spend a day existing, just like everything else.
Another theory regarding rock stacking is our need to leave something of ourselves behind. After all, the original dolmens were nothing more than grave stones. And if you think we’re all tasked with changing the world in some way, it makes sense that we would want tangible evidence left behind after we’re gone to prove that we did indeed change the world.
May 20, 2012 at 11:42 pm
….I think my mind has just imploded on itself.
If Person A-through-fucking-everyone found out they burned steaks to a crisp what would they do? They would throw them away… but has anyone ever stopped them from burning, and instead of throwing them away, just put them back on the grill to continue burning until there’s nothing left? The answer is, “No.. but dammit that sounds interesting.”
May 24, 2012 at 9:35 am
When I die, can I be Teriyake flavour?