Posted by Richard Rawlinson
I first came across this Latin phrase as a teenager reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Narrator Charles Ryder finds the words inscribed on a skull displayed in his bedroom. ‘Even in Arcadia, there I am,’ is the translation. Death, the great equaliser, prevails even in the most utopian lands, as certain in the stately homes of England as the slums of Calcutta, the parched plains of Africa or the war-torn streets of Iraq.
The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition
A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, Maggi Hambling, Graham Harvey, Gary Lachman, Nick Reynolds, and Dignity in Dying.
It’s out in May 2012!
Posted by Vale
What is it with this fascination with bones and skeletons?
Faced with a pile of them and one man plasters into the walls and cornices, another creates chandeliers and shields while elsewhere anonymous skulls are given names, cleaned, polished and even appealed to for information.
Bones seem to be the acceptable face of death. Tangible reminders of course; a frisson of the macabre certainly, but once the Yorick lesson has been learned – you might think there would be little more to add.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that.
Except that there always is. Faye Dowling has published a wonderful Book of Skulls that, through images, explores our continuing fascination:
And, for the ossuary lovers, Thames and Hudson are publishing Empire of Death.
It brings together the world’s most important charnel sites, ranging from the crypts of the Capuchin monasteries in Italy and the skull-encrusted columns of the ossuary in Évora in Portugal, to the strange tomb of a 1960s wealthy Peruvian nobleman decorated with the exhumed skeletons of his Spanish ancestors.
And our old friend St Pancras is on the cover too.
Posted by Vale
If Kutna Hora and Capela dos Ossos show anything it is that we cannot let bones lie.
Buried and disinterred, stacked and stored these vast collections become places where the living can meet and marvel at the dead.
In Naples, at the charnel house in the middle of its Fontanelle Cemetary, this urge has flowered into a full blown relationship. In the 1870s a cult arose around the anonymous dead. People adopted skulls, cleaned and polished them, gave them names, brought them offerings and asked them for favours.
The cult lasted until the late 1960s when the church closed it down.
Posted by Vale
Back in 1278 an Abbot of Sedlec came back to Kutna Hora with some earth from Golgotha in his travel bags.
He scattered it in the cemetery and created the most famous and popular necropolis in Bohemia and Central Europe.
Grave space was at a premium and, sometime after 1400, a chapel and charnel house was built. The ossuary is now estimated to hold the remains of some 40,000 people.
But it isn’t the numbers that astonish. In the 19th century a wood carver called Frantisek Rint began to make things – baroque, fantastical and unlikely – from the bones. The chandelier is only one of his many creations:
If you want to visit Kutna Hora there is information here.
If you want to see photographs try here.
Posted by Vale
An ossuary is a chest, building, well, or site made to serve as the final resting place of human skeletal remains.
These are photographs of the ossuary in the ancient town of Evora in Portugal. It is estimated to contains the remains of over 5000 people as well as two mummified corpses.
More information about the chapel and photographs here.
