The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [80]
Nor can responsibility for the twentieth-century American funeral be laid at the door of “Judaeo-Christian beliefs.” The major Western faiths have remarkably little to say about how funerals should be conducted. Such doctrinal statements as have been enunciated concerning disposal of the dead invariably stress simplicity, the equality of all men in death, emphasis on the spiritual aspects rather than on the physical remains.
The Roman Catholic Church requires that the following, simple instructions be observed: “(1) That the body be decently laid out; (2) that lights be placed beside the body; (3) that a cross be laid upon the breast, or failing that, the hands laid on the breast in the form of a cross; (4) that the body be sprinkled with holy water and incense at stated times; (5) that it be buried in consecrated ground.” The Jewish religion specifically prohibits display in connection with funerals: “It is strictly ordained that there must be no adornment of the plain wooden coffin used by the Jew, nor may flowers be placed inside or outside. Plumes, velvet palls and the like are strictly prohibited, and all show and display of wealth discouraged; moreover, the synagogue holds itself responsible for the arrangements for burial, dispensing with the services of the Dismal Trade.” In Israel today, uncoffined burial is the rule, and the deceased is returned to the earth in a simple shroud. The Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, written several centuries before burial receptacles came into general use, makes no mention of coffins in connection with the funeral service, but rather speaks throughout of the corpse or the “body.”
What of embalming, the pivotal aspect of the American funeral? The “roots” of this procedure have indeed leaped oceans and traversed centuries in the most unrootlike fashion. It has had a checkered history, the highlights of which deserve some consideration since embalming is (as one mortuary textbook writer puts it) “the very foundation of modern mortuary service—the factor which has made the elaborate funeral home and lucrative funeral service possible.”
True, the practice of preserving dead bodies with chemicals, decorating them with paint and powder, and arranging them for a public showing has its origin in antiquity—but not in Judaeo-Christian antiquity. This incongruous behavior towards the human dead originated with the pagan Egyptians and reached its high point in the second millennium B.C. Thereafter, embalming suffered a decline from which it did not recover until it was made part of the standard funeral service in twentieth-century America.
While the actual mode of preservation and the materials used in ancient Egypt differed from those used in contemporary America, there are many striking similarities in the kind of care lavished upon the dead. There, as here, the goal was to outmaneuver the Grim Reaper as far as possible.
The Egyptian method of embalming as described by Herodotus sounds like a rather crude exercise in human taxidermy. The entrails and brain were removed, the body scoured with palm wine and purified with spices. After being soaked for seventy days in a saline solution, the corpse was washed and wrapped in strips of fine linen, then placed in a “wooden case of human shape” which in turn was put in a sepulchral chamber.
Restorative art was by no means unknown in ancient Egypt. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote: “Having treated [the corpse], they restore it to the relatives with every member of the body preserved so perfectly that even the eyelashes and eyebrows remain, the whole appearance of the body being unchangeable, and the cast of the features recognizable.… They present an example of a kind of inverted necromancy.” The Egyptians had no Post Mortem Restoration Bra;