Critique of “green burial standards”
December 16, 2009
The Green Burial Council has set itself up as a watchdog to ensure that burial becomes “more sustainable, economically viable, and meaningful” in North America. We applaud such an effort - our Mother Earth can only benefit from any help. And burial is no insignificant environmental factor when the earth’s massive population and consequent burial needs are considered.
We reviewed their environmental standards for burials and find them excellent … as far as environmental factors are concerned. However, as a new initiative, we should not expect its aims or ideas to be perfect from Day 1. In fact, we find that in certain aspects green burial favors environmental aspects at the expense of human ones. Following their standards will certainly make burial “more sustainable and economically viable” as they hope - but not necessarily more meaningful for human beings.
Burial - human needs vs environmental ones
Human meaning is not at all irrelevent, for burial and death rituals have been a cultural and spiritual cornerstone of humanity, perhaps the most important, ever since Man understood that he was mortal. The environmental factor in burial on the other hand is a modern phenomena - starting with Napoleon’s removal of the Parisian cemeteries to the catacombs under the city. We should remember this relation - for if we disregard what has always been of importance to humanity exclusively to benefit a temporary (albeit acute) environmental factor, we do so at our own cultural, psychological and spiritual risk.
Now I am not suggesting the Green Burial Council excludes the human factor altogether. They certainly understand that a conflict between man and environment, nature and culture is natural and unavoidable. And that nothing is black and white, that compromises are inescapable - one simply cannot have it all. But in their compromise between nature and culture, the Green Burial Council has clearly chosen to err on the side of the environment. That is their perogative - but it necessarily entails compromises for humanity, for the cultural and spiritual aspects of burial.
In fact, the environmental factors in a burial are far easier to understand and change than the cultural and spiritual ones - we must return to what mankind did until very recently. (In fact, even that is no longer so simple - today’s population size does complicate matters. But the green burial movement as a whole does not address this more global issue - see Green Burial’s Shortcomings ).
The shortcomings in human terms of modern burial practices take more creativity and sensitivity to overcome: creating attractive, meaningful new ways of memorializing; discovering new mechanisms to guarantee grave perpetuity in an overpopulated and ever-changing world; finding acceptable new aesthetics to replace the gloomy old Victorian one we have inherited.
Freedom of expression in memorials
Returning to the Green Burial Council’s Standards, we find nothing specific to take issue with at the lower two levels, which essentially aim to eliminate ground pollutants (concrete, formaldehyde, pesticides etc) and conserve energy. It is at the third level of standards (the second-most stringent) that we cannot agree with them - at this point the nature/culture conflict emerges in the question of memorialization, an archetypal human need with no possible environmental benefits.
Here we see that a “natural burial ground” must:
- “Develop a plan for limiting the types, sizes, and visibility of memorial markers/features to preserve or restore naturalistic vistas in the cemetery landscape and (where appropriate) to landmarks outside its borders.”
- “Develop a plan for dealing with unauthorized grave decoration and landscaping.”
Certainly enduring monuments and personal grave decorations will interfere with the natural aesthetics of a site - but should we be limiting the last freedom of expression left to human beings, the one that will represent them long after all other reminders of their existence have melted away? I can’t accept this personally and I suspect that a majority of society will feel the same way, if they reflect on it. This will self-limit the popularity of green burial.
In regard to freedom of expression in memorials, I believe the Perpetua’s Garden concept offers a far better compromise between nature’s needs and humanity’s.
Grave perpetuity
In the past, the perpetuity of a grave site, the eternal “Rest-in-Peace”, was considered a sacred right, perhaps the most important consideration of all in a grave. That has long since disappeared in the modern world, with whole cemeteries turned into parking lots, golf courses and shopping centers. And unless a radical new solution is found (Perpetua’s Garden?), the future can only be even darker in this respect.
But instead of addressing this grave cultural deficiency, the Green Burial Council first addresses perpetuity in their last (and least accessible) level, the “conservation burial ground”. Here their highest goal becomes transparent - the perpetual protection of the land, not the grave sites:
- Conservation Burial Grounds, in addition to meeting all the requirements for a Natural Burial Ground, must further legitimate land conservation
- A Conservation Burial Ground must protect in perpetuity an area of land specifically and exclusively designated for conservation.
- A conservation burial ground must involve an established conservation organization that holds a conservation easement or has in place a deed restriction guaranteeing long-term stewardship.
Perpetuity is nowhere expressed as a benefit to humanity and the dead who can rest in perpetuity, but only in terms of the perpetual stewardship of the land. And the perpetual stewardship of the land does not necessarily imply the perpetuity of the grave sites - indeed, there is no mention anywhere of the perpetuity of the individual graves. According to their phraseology, it is only the “land-as-nature” that will be conserved, not the “land-as-cemetery” and not the individual graves. One wonders if this last point has even been thought of…? Or does the Green Burial Council anticipate grave recycling in the European model? This would be a very bad compromise - but we don’t know, this question is not mentioned on their site.
Conclusion
We agree that the elimination of ground pollutants and the conservation of energy in burials are important goals and we wish the Green Burial all the success in the world here. And though we are skeptical about the long-term effectivness of it, we also love the idea that nature can be conserved because our bodies protect it from redevelopment. But if the human questions of memorials and grave perpetuity are not better addressed, then we suggest the Green Burial Council stick simply to their pollution-reduction goals and let others address the human questions.
The purpose of cemeteries? To defeat death of course!
November 11, 2009
This blog is an answer to the comments in my previous blog by James Leedam of Native Woodland Natural Burial Sites. Thanks James for opening this conversation up!
I’ve given some time to this response, please take your time reading it.
HOW LONG SHOULD A MEMORIAL LAST?
As long as possible, without getting too technical and reducing the question to a number of years. That is how the ancients thought about it and I don’t think humans have fundamentally changed since then. As individuals and as a culture we may have forgotten why we erect memorials but the same archetypal need slumbers latent within us. It just needs reawakening by the appearance of new memorials that actually appeal aesthetically and symbolically - the old Victorian stuff has long become morbid and meaningless to most people.
REGARDING BOULDERS AS MEMORIALS.
An ancient boulder slumbers in a forest - as a memorial to a human life?
I advocated that idea somewhat off-handedly - but I maintain that something like that would have a postmodern-primitive appeal. Which is to say, a timeless one - and there is nothing more desirable in a cemetery than a sense of timelessness. It is what a cemetery is all about - a place for people to escape for a moment from the inexorable changes that time brings.
REGARDING THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE OF CEMETERIES - THE DEFEAT OF DEATH AND TIME.
Death is the ultimate consequence of time; by resisting the visible changes of time with enduring cultural landmarks we symbolically resist death. Cemeteries that achieve a sense of timelessness psychologically “defeat death” . But many cemeteries actually emphasize the victory of time and death. Anything trendy does this - because the eclipsing of a trend is precisely another victory of time. Victorian cemeteries were once upon a time fashionable - now all they do is remind us of a specific moment in the past which is dead and gone and irrelevent to most of us. These cemeteries are not, and never were, free of time but rather locked to a narrow moment in it, a momentary aesthetic, a momentary belief system, which is now long gone.
We should learn from that - a new aesthetic of cemeteries should not fall into the trap of trendiness - or its opposite, nostalgia. Both will only create more symbols of the victory of time and consequently cause their own failure as cemeteries.
Of course we cannot ever escape from the style of our time, but this should be our aim at least - to transcend it by providing symbols of timelessness, or timeless symbols.
How do we achieve such a death-defeating sense of timelessness? The easiest and best way IMHO is to 1) place the cemetery into a natural context (but see + below) since nature undergoes the changes of time only very slowly and then by definition with natural grace; and 2) add human cultural artifacts which also age only slowly and gracefully.
We like the look of weathered old gravestones - this is precisely because they resist time, but without denying it. A titanium gravestone would not have the same appeal because it would symbolize a pathetic denial of reality. A tombstone and a cemetery should age gracefully. The closer the materials and forms of the artefacts are to the natural ones (without hiding themselves as nature) the better this integration and graceful-aging-together will be.
Zentralfriedhof - golden leaves fall year after year on the same mellowing memorials.
If we can achieve this, people will be drawn again tocemeteries as sanctuaries of timelessness - and what more do we need in our time-enslaved world than just such refuges!? (At a minimum, such a place provides room for hope of liberation from time’s tyranny.)
(By the way, in response to your belief that permanent on-site markers are not essential, this last point above is one reason why permanent memorials are fundamental - without cultural artifacts that resist time (and yet slowly succumb) there is no sense of the symbolic defeat of death which every human wants, however subconsciously hidden it may be in most. If these artefacts are personal and connected with a place, as gravestones with names and images are, then the defeat of death is even more striking. A central stone temple or any building may defeat time just as well, but it is not personal.)
PRACTICALITIES. (65 million deaths a year, 7 billion people living people needing graves and memorials):
This is also my big question, the reason I came up with Perpetua’s Garden.
Firstly, we can thankfully subtract the millions of Indians who want no memorials - the fuel for their cremations is another huge environmental question, but not mine here.
Secondly, we can calculate a smaller memorial space for each Western or Chinese cremation - and that choice is rapidly becoming the majority worldwide. (I have a simple and effective idea for this which I am amazed doesn’t yet exist.)
Thirdly, as you say, whether for a burial or a cremation, a memorial can be designed* (see below) to memorialize a few people - assuming there is a natural relationship between them. Bundling unconnected people into unwanted last-intimacies would not be a nice thing.
And lastly - and from my perspective most importantly - there is in fact a wealth of suitable land available, whose use would not subtract a square inch of green-field or “land for life-uses”, as I put it in my website. We just need to know where to look.
On this last note: I am keen to get some professionals like yourselves into my Perpetua’s Garden initiative. I have what I think is a potential answer to the space problem, one which would allow decent and enduring memorialization and the creation (not just the conservation) of green spaces.
If any of you would be interested, let me know. To ensure my own involvement in any initiatives which may result from my ideas, I will have to ask you to sign a simple non-disclosure form.
In the meantime, I look forward greatly to your responses.
Cheers!
Thomas Friese
(* And why is so little attention given by designers to memorials? An All-Saints Day article in the local Viennese newspaper - and Vienna is the arch-conservative regarding all death-matters - suggested it is because designers are typically too young to be naturally interested in this. A pity for us and for them, because it would be a huge market and an interesting new challenge for them, far more so than designing yet another kitchen container or light fixture.)
(+ If we expel the cultural aspect completely (as an extreme version of woodland or green cemetery does), then we have no symbolic fight against death and time but a perfect surrender - dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and nothing more. We must all accept that our bodies return to ash or dust - but to embrace that as a spiritual triumph or goal and not put it in its place as mere physical reality is to my mind a superficial view of things.)
PS: Regarding your first question: the information on a memorial stone can be based on people’s desires. Provide the market with options and let it decide. As a cemetery operator, you come up with various feasible alternatives, market them all, and see what catches on. People can decide for themselves, but designers and cemetery operators have to do the thinking and provide alternatives - the public should not be restricted to one option, or worse, to none at all!
Culture vs Nature in cemeteries
November 5, 2009
If I have one gripe with many green and woodland cemeteries it is that they don’t think deeply enough about the consequences to humans and human culture of making cemeteries more “natural”. This regards above all finding a place for enduring memorials in natural cemeteries.
This morning I came across an interesting story from the UK, in which the same conflict emerges in another aspect: http://www.midweekherald.co.uk/midweekherald/news/story.aspx?brand=MDWOnline&category=news&tBrand=devon24&tCategory=newsmdw&itemid=DEED03%20Nov%202009%2012%3A32%3A44%3A790
For the time-pressed (or if the link expires), the story essentially concerns the conflicts between mourners in a woodland cemetery and the deer that wander in and quite naturally eat the fresh flowers laid on burial sites. As a woodland cemetery, it is a good sign that the deer like to visit. But what happens when they eat all the natural flowers so that, paradoxically, all that remain are the artificial ones?
This simple example illustrates well the possible conflicts between nature and culture that can only become more evident as woodland and other “green” cemeteries multiply. I find nothing wrong with more natural cemeteries - on the contrary, Perpetua’s Garden aims to be just that. But people need to be clear that natural cemeteries set different boundaries between nature and culture than conventional cemeteries and the consequences need to be accepted. When a cemetery is intended to be a closer part of nature, it is only logical that situations like the above happen.
The issue of the flowers can be extended to memorials and in general to all that is human (ie cultural) in the cemetery. We want a cemetery that blends into and is friendly to nature - this means that we must accept that the human cultural aspect is curbed: that the flowers get eaten (or we use artificial ones) and that the stone memorial is forbidden. That flowers get eaten and must be replaced is a small concession to nature’s cause which we can easily accept; but not being allowed any kind of enduring memorial means the line has been drawn too far on the side of nature and human culture has lost its place altogether in the cemetery. The disappearance of the flowers upsets the direct descendents of the deceased - the absence of personalized, enduring memorials may not be noticed until later, when nature has naturally taken back its domain and no signs remains whatsoever, not even where the body rests. Then it is too late and human culture as a whole suffers.
Where does nature’s place end and culture’s begin, where do we draw the line, what are our priorities and what compromises must we make? Ideally we think about these things in advance and do not have to learn only by our mistakes. Perpetua’s Garden also sets this question as one of its tasks.
Father Ed: there is room for every hope
October 20, 2009
BBC World Radio surprised me with a call today, inviting me to take part in a broadcast debate on the “Tina Turner -esque funeral” trend in Britain. I learned from the journalist that an uproar had been stimulated by an Anglican vicar (Revd. Fr. Edward Tomlinson SSC of Saint Barnabas Church) speaking frankly about the - in his view - spiritual emptiness and superficiality of secular funerals.
Given that Perpetua’s Garden is clearly not yet a mainstream initiative (may it one day become the new mainstream!), the journalist presumed I might like to argue the alternative view - he still needed to suss out someone for the “traditionalist” side. Flattered though I am, I will decline - if he even calls back after I told him that Perpetua’s Garden was more about the place (a new kind of cemetery) than what happens there (the funeral rituals).
In fact, I categorically take no sides when it comes to how each person deals with death or wants to celebrate it. Father Ed has his beliefs, as those commenting on his blog have theirs. Fair is fair - as beliefs each is valid. But I am not a vicar, or an atheist, or a humanist - I am simply someone trying to provide a better alternative for EVERYONE, regardless of belief.
Yes, Perpetua’s Garden is hoping to develop a better alternative than the funeral industry (which is every bit as superficial and spiritually empty as Father Ed presents secular funerals to be.) But it has no intention of substituting the spiritual function of the church - rather it will have room to integrate the church’s practises and beliefs, along with those of all other beliefs or non-beliefs. That is, there will be room for every hope, room for every denomination or individual to celebrate their beliefs about life and death - the traditionally religious, the “free-thinkers”, new-agers, environmentalists, atheists, whoever, however.
Whatever my own personal beliefs may be, ABSOLUTE freedom must be allowed to every other person’s faith. Freedom to believe in this, or that, or even specifically in Nothing. If the state of Death has any reality, then it is by default a spiritual one - beyond a decaying body or some cremated remains, it certainly has no material reality. And as as a spiritual matter, let no-one dictate to anyone else what is right and wrong here. We can express and live our beliefs with regard to death, but we must not dictate or impose them on others - people understandably object violently to such efforts. (And anyway, imposed spirituality is quite meaningless - belief is there or it isn’t, full stop.)
In conclusion, it seems fair that Father Ed is reluctant or sees no meaning to secular motifs being aired in his specifically religious place. Perpetua’s Garden on the other hand allows absolute freedom of belief - it does not presume to judge who is closer to the truth and who is therefore allowed entry or not. It will provide space for each to practise in their way.
In Death we are all equal - “ROOM FOR EVERY HOPE” is thus the first and most fundamental premise of Perpetua’s Garden.
Individuality and graves
April 14, 2009
Contemplation of the ravens that I feed on my terrace led to interesting conclusions about the importance of individuality in human relations, conclusions which can be extended to our graves and cemeteries.
Unique individuality is not apparent to me here
I noticed that I was very curious if the raven that came each day to eat my offerings was the same bird or always another of the thousands that overwinter in Vienna. Since these birds appear identical to my non-raven eyes, I began fantasizing about complicated methods of marking the birds to establish their individual or collective identity.
How curious! Yet how characteristic of humanity. As humans, we strive to establish the unique identity of those with whom we interact, especially those close to us, and we do this through their individuality. Our closer relationships are with specific human beings, and we know and relate in unique ways to their unique individuality. Equally do we try to establish ourselves as unique individuals in the eyes of others.
Or here unfortunately....
In this way we are different from animals, especially lower forms such as insects to whom other individuals are merely interchangeable functional units of the social whole. In higher animals such as dogs, primates, elephants, dolphins and many others, individuality begins to become important. This is evident in the differing relations between individuals in the group, in a pack of dogs for example. The individual dogs are not interchangeable, and the relationship between any two is a unique phenomenon. When higher animals die, there is also evident mourning from the rest of their community. At the other end of the spectrum, the death of an individual ant is not even noticed; it immediately becomes mere food for the others.
As the most developed animal - and also more than animal - human beings are obsessed with individuality, even when it cannot be satisfied or has no functional purpose, such as my curiosity about the raven’s identity.
Roman cremation urn: a unique memory for a unique individual
The desire for individuality extends even beyond death, which is obvious in the memorialization arrangements people have constantly made for themselves over the millenia. The greater the means, the greater the individualization of the arrangements. Thus pharoahs built huge pyramids and mausoleums with marvelous and unique art works; but even the humble Egyptian farmer spent as much as he could possibly afford for his own Book of the Dead and sarcophagus.
Differences in the importance attached to the individuality of grave memorials can also be seen between societies. Our own western society has recently tended towards minimizing this individuality, applying standardization even to our graves. We purchase anonymous mass-produced urns, we are buried under rows of minimal and identical tombstones with only a name and date to distinguish ourselves from the other thousands near us. Or we dispense with the marker altogether and are buried anonymously or scattered to the winds or the waters.
One is tempted to ascribe this uniformity to a mass-produced modern human beings without individual tastes and desires. But I believe this cannot be true, because we live in an especially individualistic society. (The real reason, our lost hope for transcendence over death, will be the topic of a future blog entry).
No, I believe the desire to leave behind a memory of one’s unique existence, to be remembered as an individual and not a number, survives in all of us, if only latently beneath thick layers of socialized conformity. Similarly, I believe cemeteries filled with unique memorials of others satisfies our characteristic human desire to relate to unique individuals, even dead ones or ones we never knew. Nothing is more depressing to the spirit than walking through a cemetery with thousands of identical and utterly non-individual stones. Except perhaps a cemetery without markers altogether, since here the individual has finally given up all aspiration to individuality.
In contrast, a cemetery like Perpetua’s Garden would strive to provide memorials for every unique individual, regardless of means. Memorials that express their individuality, their contemporary tastes, their personal beliefs, their private hopes. Of course, our own modern-day pharoahs have the right to create grand memorials for themselves. But our contemporary equivalent of the simple farmer should also have the right to be remembered and thought of as the unique individual that he or she was.
Making this possible for all is one of the most important tasks of Perpetua’s Garden. Alongside perpetual rest for all.
Man, stone and eternity
March 31, 2009
“All that we call history is largely dependent on stone. This is true for earth, natural and world history in the broadest possible sense; thus it holds true also for the creation of the planet, the arrival of plants and animals and of Man, from his primeval and prehistory all the way to the present day.
Just as we can only learn of the earth’s early history through fossils, so we know incomparably more about lost cultures that built with stone than about those that built with wood. Stone temples, stone graves and stone law tablets.
It is not the material per se that creates a historic culture but rather the time consciousness connected with that people, people who chose stone not randomly to eternalize themselves with and in. This consciousness has documentary power; it plants fixed points like obelisks, by which the past can be measured very far back.”
Ernst Jünger, Steine (my translation)
Ancient Buddhist graves hewn into the stone
This simple yet penetrating insight from this exceptional German author (1895-1997) captures far better than I could the relevance of returning to the use of stone in any new cemetery that aspires to perpetuity, that wants to go beyond time. And why conversely in our newest cemeteries the fragile materials of cement, steel and glass predominate.
The development towards ephemeral or even non-existent cemeteries is part of the global development towards ephemerality. We are now reaching the apex of a movement to ephemeralize all aspects of life, including culture and personal memory. We focus only on the present and the near future - our buildings, even our largest ones, are built of glass, steel and synthetics, and are intended to last a few decades at most. Our arts have “progressed” over the millenia from painting on stone cave walls and carving in stone, thus preserving memories and meanings from many thousands of years for us today, all the way to our virtual age, where most art exists only as non-concrete electromagnetic information that might last from a few seconds to a few years. Even paper photos are old-fashioned - our images, our memories now reside precariously in hard drives and other digital storage and viewing devices.
Ancient Corsican memorials - memories in solid rock
As that aspect of life most intimately connected with the passing of time, Death and the ways we deal with it in funeral rituals and cemetery practices have remained more immune to the surrounding ephemeralization of life. But even the supposedly timeless realm of the dead can no longer resist the change. Continental Europeans now get grave plots for just 20 or 30 years, North Americans and the British are moving towards burials with anonymous tree markers which might last a century, and in the most “advanced” parts of our world tangible markers are now disappearing into the ultimately fleeting realm of virtuality - centralized electronic displays of the deceased’s information at the cemetery or online markers. As Jünger says, this is a reflection of the time-consciousness of the culture, in our case one fixated on the present only, concerned only with acceleration and change.
Ancient Etruscan family tomb - in stone
But things are changing. Or rather, our sense of reality is improving, and we are beginning to see beyond the dead-end road our shortsighted “now-mentality” has led us down. In fact, this dead-end road will end, for our cultures and for each of us, in the same place it has since mankind has existed - in the grave, in the earth. When we begin again to realize our mortality, not theoretically, but palpably, directly in front of us, as aging individuals and cultures, then we will once again understand the ancient impulse to transcend time through leaving enduring memories.
In this connection, as contrary to current trends as it may appear, stone is the way of our future. The monopoly of NOW has come to a head, after which the pendulum will swing back towards a re-evaluation of time, memory, experience, and history - and we should add, of the long term future. At that point, closer than we may think, Perpetua’s Garden will be there as a place to create lasting memories of our culture and ourselves - memories hewn into, and with, the stone of our mother earth.
Learn how we can guarantee that Perpetua’s Garden cemetery will be truly perpetual.
Common and anonymous graves
March 11, 2009
Anonymous ash-scattering grave in Switzerland
Browsing through landscape architecture magazines in search of promising architects and architectural ideas for perpetual cemeteries in the 21st century, I at least found exactly what I would not want Perpetua’s Garden to become!
In Germany and Switzerland, recent demand has led to the creation of various forms of Gemeinschaftsgraebe, that is, common areas, usually plain flat lawns, where ashes are scattered or buried with no individual grave markers. At best, the names of the individuals whose remains lie there are inscribed on common plaques or pillars at the edges of these featureless lawns, along with the other unrelated people whose remains lie equally randomly there.
Often the scattering is completely anonymous, so that no-one except the cemetery register and the surviving families know who is buried there. In one example, urns were deliberately buried randomly under the lawn, so that survivors would not know even more or less where on the open expanse of lawn their loved ones lay.
I cannot deny that I find this personally abhorrent. It is an unsurpassable symbol of the heights that nihilism can reach, that there is no higher meaning to life beyond a one-time physical existence. No, that there cannot even be a hope of a higher meaning, be it only the memory of others. Therefore we should make an active effort to erase all memory of a life lived, loved and suffered through. No individual physical marker, no name or image or symbol to stir the memory of future generations. No, these individuals are dead and gone in the most absolute way possible.
To counter a possible objection…. Hindus also scatter their ashes and leave no sign of their existence once their physical existence is over. But they actively believe in reincarnation, that is, an aspiration to something beyond this physical temporal life. Those buried in these anonymous graves on the other hand actively believe in the meaningless of anything beyond this once-only purely physical existence. There’s is an attitude of hopelessness, the Hindu’s is full of hope and belief. There is no comparison to be made between the two.
For the record, the anonymity and hopelessness illustrated by these Gemeinschaftsgraebe is the perfect antithesis to what Perpetua’s Garden will be.
Cemeteries and funerals: body or soul?
February 5, 2009
The first and most obvious point in discussing the question above it that it always includes at least the materialistic matter of dealing with the dead body. But how this is done, with what accompanying beliefs, with what ulterior purposes, in short, everything beyond the actual body disposal is where the question of spiritual or materialistic becomes relevant.
If the material body disposal issue is always present, what of the spiritual elements which are also presumably present, even if only to a minor degree? Can we say which practices and aims are material and which spiritual, and to whom are they seen like that? These distinctions are very personal in nature, since the very same act or object can have spiritual or material significance or both, depending exclusively on the person or culture making the judgment. Moreover, we should look carefully, below the surface - for each individual or culture, what looks like a materialistic goal or value at first glance might reveal itself as spiritual, and vice versa.
Let us take embalming. In North America, this seems at first glance to concern only the body, whose appearance it aims to preserve until the family has made its farewells, and whose dangerous potential to decay and spread sickness it purports to forestall. But at a deeper level, this is a non-material need: for the individual family, to create an attractive last impression; and for the society, to maintain the possibility of a collective denial of death through the preservation of the body as if it were living. (This modern western schizophrenia reflects on our materialistic culture and its fear of admitting to having spiritual needs which cannot be satisfied materially - that is, we pretend that we embalm for hygienic and aesthetic reasons, whereas in reality we do it to keep an awareness of our mortality at bay, to keep from looking for a spiritual solution to the problem of death.)
The ancient Egyptians were far more self-aware and coherent on their reasons for embalming. Their embalming was done explicitly for spiritual reasons of the soul, in this case for one (of the many) souls of the departed, that it have a permanent physical home to return to from its flights away from the tomb. The purely spiritual importance of embalming for the Egyptians is underlined by the fact that they also put symbolic facsimiles of the dead into the tomb, usually little statues, so that if the body did not not survive, the soul would still have a place to dwell. They evidently also understood the embalmed body as a symbolic home, and not purely literally.
We see from this example that what seems like a common practice has little in common when its aims and the world view of the practitioners is examined more closely. We would 0nly have something in common with ancient Egyptians if we admitted that fundamentally our embalming was also an attempt to deny death, albeit a rather pathetic one.
Let us further examine body preservation along spiritual/materialistic lines. Like the ancient Egyptians, fundamentalist and orthodox Christians and Muslims also apparently believe in preservation of the body for spiritual reasons of the individual soul: the body must rest undisturbed and intact in the earth until the Second Coming and the body’s resurrection. But even within these groups we cannot generalize based on external similarities: for the most fundamentalist, the resurrection is understand literally, as some sort of miraculous rising of the flesh-and-blood body from its grave. More mystically minded Christians and Muslims understand this rather as a resurrection in a higher body, an astral body, a gloried body, the names vary, in any case not the old flesh-and-blood body. Again, the difference is essentially whether the matter is seen materially or spiritually. Fundamentalists reveal themselves to be surprisingly materialistic in this sense.
Analysis along these lines is also interesting regarding cremation. For the most materialistic of Christian and Muslim “body-preservationists”, cremation can only be seen as evil, since it utterly destroys the flesh-and-blood body that is to be resurrected. (Among the ancient Egyptians, for whom a symbolic body-double could serve as a substitute home for the wandering soul, an accidental cremation or other destruction of the body would not have been so tragic.) For a mystically-minded Christian or Muslim, cremation should in theory be acceptable, since the body that will be resurrected is not the one destroyed in the flames.
For Indians, cremation is viewed from an altogether different perspective. Here it is a matter of the soul, but paradoxically one that actually requires the material destruction of the body: the soul of the deceased sees the utter destruction of the body by fire and understands, without leaving any room for hope, that its old life and body are gone, that it must make a clean start into a new incarnation.
Secular cremation in the New World appears on the contrary to be purely materialistic, a simple utilitarian matter of body disposal: it is a cheaper, less complicated and supposedly more environmentally-friendly method of disposal. Yet spiritual elements are also present, even in the most secular or atheist proponents of cremation. For example, the commonly heard aversion to the idea of being eaten by worms or “going into the cold damp earth”, reveals a spiritual belief which subconsciously must be similar to the beliefs of materialistic fundamentalists. If our bodies are merely matter, then what difference does it make what happens to that dead matter that our body becomes after death? Or do these people subtly believe in some kind of continuing life or significance of the body after death? Moreover, would not the “burning heat” of the cremation oven not be at least as uncomfortable as the cold damp ground? If the whole matter was purely material, none of these confused but genuine feelings would even be felt. Here too a subtle belief in a spiritual element reveals itself.
Some proponents of cremation may disagree here, claiming that that cremation is for them a spiritual return to the natural cycles of the earth, and thus a “spiritual” affair, a reincarnation of our matter, if you will. Of course, the cycles of nature in their complexity and beauty are wondrous things, and to see one’s place in them is a spiritual matter. But it is a nihilistic spirituality which cannot deal with the possibility of survival of the individual soul. Since it is not able to believe this, it opts for the only survival it can imagine, an anonymous survival of its physical matter.
Hence, it would be invalid to compare or justify cremation in the west by using the ancient Indian tradition as proof. There may be other good reasons for cremation in the West, but not the Indian one, unless we also accept reincarnation of souls.
This line of analysis could be extended to all aspects of funerals and cemeteries, but we leave it to readers to do that for themselves. Or post their ideas in comments below.
We will extend the analysis to green burial and cemeteries in a future posting.