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.
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.