funeral pyres – Page 4 – The Good Funeral Guide

Forward backwards!

My good friend the embalmer is not noted for halfway utterance, nor for half-tones in her vocabulary. She calls a spade a spade and hits you with it if she thinks you’re wrong, thwang thwang. She’s never less than invigorating.

One of the themes she warms to hotliest is that of the present reinventing the past. “What do they think is so new about that?!” she’ll expostulate in response to some new funerary trend. “It’s all been done before!!”

Quite right. So it has. Personalisation, for example. Everyone’s talking about that — unique funerals for unique people. Turns out the Vikings were doing it more than a thousand years ago.

They were more like us than you might think, the Vikings — and I’m not inviting comparison here with Friday night revellers in our city centres.

For starters, they had no defined religion. Instead, according to Professor Neil Price, Chair of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, they “made up a set of spiritual beliefs, which were then acted out at the graveside … They were aggressively pagan and strongly anti-Christian.”

Just like so many of us.

Possibly more emotionally sophisticated. Professor Price observes “how slim they perceived the boundaries to be between life and death”. We haven’t got there, yet.

He talks about burial rituals which became a form of theatre lasting up to ten days, during which order cialis online australia mourners told stories about men and gods — stories “intended to provide the deceased with a poetic passage into the next life,” stories which predate the sagas and may even be the progenitors of Norse mythology.

We haven’t got there, yet, either, but the trend towards more participative funerals is, er, a move in the right direction.

As for personalisation, they benchmark it. “No two graves were the same,” says Professor Price, who has studied thousands. “Some bore evidence of a military career, with whole ships containing the corpse left open. Other graves were found to have had animal remains – one had no fewer than 20 decapitated horses – and occasionally there were human remains as well. Some Vikings were buried with their wives and families; others were laid to rest in more simple single graves.”

Way to go.

It turns out that the Vikings’ reputation for raping and pillaging is unmerited. They were actually far more interested in poetry and spirituality. A medieval English chronicler, John of Wallingford, observed that they combed their hair every day, washed every Saturday and changed their clothes regularly. He meant it disparagingly.

We’ve a long way to go to catch up with our forefathers. Indeed, you could say that Viking funerals illustrate how the forward march of our civilisation has in fact been a retreat into fear and impotence.

Blazing row

“The Hindus of Britain have never asked for anything,” says Mr Gai of the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society “but we’re not asking for much, just to cremate our loved ones in the way our religion says it must be done.”

The issue of open-air cremation is hotting up as Newcastle-based Mr Gai prepares to go the High Court next month to demand the right to have his body disposed of in accordance with his religious beliefs.

He’s got precedents on his side. In 1884 the colourful Dr William Price cremated his five month-old son Jesus Christ on an open-air pyre. He was prosecuted, and acquitted on the grounds that cremation is not illegal if it creates no nuisance. When he died, Dr Price himself went up in smoke on top of two tons of coal. His successful test of the law was the green flag the Cremation Society was waiting for. Britain’s first-ever crematorium, at Woking, was in business at last, its first customer the pioneering (if inert) Mrs Pickersgill.

There are other precedents. You can read about them here.

Mr Gai’s challenge will, doubtless, come down to an evaluation of both the aesthetic and environmental effects of outdoor cremation. It is not long since measures to control foot and mouth disease in the UK blackened the sun and cloaked the countryside with the smoke and stench of burning cattle carcases, so no problem there. But those innocent beasts did not have teeth filled with mercury amalgam, and vaporised mercury is particularly nasty emission.

Invocation of a Supreme Being is often an effective way of bypassing standard procedures, leaving those who defer either to no deity, or to one with no political clout, in second-class-citizen position. There was a row last month over a man whose body couldn’t be buried on a Saturday because he wasn’t a Muslim. Read about it here.

Let us hope that Mr Gai will be successful and that the judgement will permit open-air cremation for anyone who opts for it. Does that mean that the derelict shipyards of the Tyne will be replaced by burning ghats?

No — regrettably or otherwise. Open-air cremation is perceived to be a religious requirement only by some Hindus. And for a very few non-Hindus it is an elemental desire which cannot be reduced to a mere reason. It’s a tiny niche market, but one which nevertheless deserves to go the way of its choosing.

Let’s not forget that our ‘bonfire’ derives from the Middle English ‘bone fire’.