Funeral rites are not only for the dead but for the living. And burial and burning are not about disposal of a corpse but about the ceremonial treatment of it.
Former health minister Godfrey Farrugia and some others were in discussion on RTK radio today, talking about what’s best to do with corpses in environmental terms.
There they were, discussing the relative environmental methods of burning (cremation), burial and dissolving a corpse by boiling it in high-alkaline fluid for two hours then pouring it down the sewer.
That last uses up a lot of water, said the former health minister, but it’s not as damaging to the environment as cremation is. It’s burial that has the highest impact on the environment said the man from the Planning Authority.
And so on.
They all miss the point. Burial rites, on land or at sea, and the time-honoured practice of burning the corpse in a ritual manner) are not about corpse disposal. They are about social ceremony.
That ceremony honours the dead and consoles the living. Even the most primitive human societies had some form of ritual burial. Ancient societies had rituals far more complicated than ours, though the level of complication increased with riches and status.
In the Punic period in Malta, graves were cut into the rock and single bodies laid out with their skeletons discovered centuries later.
That method would have been sustainable under today’s standards and population size, but that’s not the point. The point is that almost every human society since prehistory and across the globe has felt a deep need for ceremony around the corpse of a member of the social group or extended family.
Even methods that seem to be corpse disposal – leaving the body on barren land to be picked clean by vultures – was not corpse disposal at all, because the skeleton was retrieved and treated ceremonially.
The ceremonial treatment of the human corpse is one of the things that distinguishes us from other animals, that distinguished us from other animals even when we were barely distinguishable from them. Boiling a body in alkaline solution to dissolve it and then pouring it into the sewers is not about ceremony. It is about corpse disposal. It is about the commodification of the human body – it’s dead, so let’s find convenient and environmentally sound ways of getting rid of it.
If we are going to go down that route, why bother with dissolving the body at all? Just chuck it into the abattoir incinerator.
What sort of ceremony might be involved in standing round a metal tank in which the corpse of a member of your community is being slowly dissolved in hot liquid? None. What sort of ceremony might be involved when the dissolved remains are poured down the drain? Exactly.
The comparison of dissolution in boiling alkaline fluid with cremation is beyond flawed. Cremation is a ceremonial rite. In many different forms, it has taken place the world over since the dawn of time. The Vikings burned the corpses of their honoured warriors in their ships. Different peoples in Europe burned their dead on high pyres of wood. Always, a ceremony was involved. They didn’t just chuck the corpse on the nearest bonfire to get rid of it, and in those days there was no law about throwing dead bodies away in fields and forests, and still they didn’t do it, even though it would have been ever so convenient, easy and dare I say it, environmentally sound.
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http://www.newsbook.com.mt/artikli/2014/5/7/fil-likwifikazzjoni-ta-katavru-jintuzaw-130-litru-ta-ilma-li-jmorru-fl-ambjent-godfrey-farrugia.17679
Could we please ask the ministers or persons concerned to have it recorded in their last will and testament that they wish to be dissolved and poured down the sewers.
Leading by example is a sure way to show their environmental conviction about this.
Cremation makes the most sense I guess. Better than letting the body rot and become worm food.
The dissolving thing sounds so morbid.
Tgħid lil nieshom hekk se jagħmlulhom? Min minn nieshom se jkun l-ewwel guineapig? Nistennew u naraw.
This is all so terrible. What on earth are they trying to persuade us to do exactly? Besides, they can introduce it but few, if any, will actually want it to happen to their loved ones or to themselves.
The sheer thought of it might even turn so many off that even if someone put it in their will that they want it done to them, the family members would want to disregard it completely.
What happened to the idea that we can use the liquidated bodies as fertilizer? That’s just plain disgusting.
And all this coming from the party that bangs on and on about how labour supporters in the past were not allowed to be buried properly because the Churh didn’t allow them to be. What a hypocritical bunch of losers!
Fascinating Funeral Traditions from Aaround the Globe
http://blog.ted.com/2013/10/01/11-fascinating-funeral-traditions-from-around-the-globe/
It’s ironic that these proposals are being made by a Labour government when its supporters still have so many hang ups about the Curia refusing to hold religious funerals over 50 years ago. Shame they didn’t think of it back then. Would have spared us decades of violence.
Joseph Muscat is doing a round of vote-hunting in the Spring by promising Spring-hunting to voters.
Oops, this comment should be under the guest post on spring hunting.
If burial ceremonies are a measure of our level of civilisation, then I am not surprised that I find funerals in Malta to be an appalling affair, very often lacking in proper behaviour by mourners, but most especially from professionals who are supposed to help you bury your dead with due ceremony.
I especially, especially hate the procedure at the graveside where the coffin is jostled and bumped into the grave by poorly dressed labourers, as though they are delivering an unwieldy piece of furniture to third floor flat. Dreadful.
I work privately with sick and dying people here in Ireland and funerals are a regular occurrence for me.
You are perfectly right on the history of cremation and other forms of ceremonial send-off, but cremation these days seems to be more a mechanism of disposing of a body in a manner that is not as expensive as burial which has become ruinously expensive in the last few years.
The cremation process in western society is very far removed from what it was in centuries past or what goes on the banks of the Ganges to this very day.
Cremation has become a very clinical process. The last the family sees of the coffin is in the crematorium chapel when a curtain is drawn to conceal it for the last time in a way not dissimilar to what you would see in a theatre.
That is the family’s goodbye or closure moment, and is equal in effect to the lowering of a casket into a grave or the ceremonial casting of a fistful of earth over a coffin which has just been lowered into a grave.
I suppose the version of the latter in Malta would be sealing the grave with stone slabs. The cremation proper is very rarely done immediately the curtain is closed and coffins could be waiting for weeks before they are put into the furnaces.
This has to be done for financial reasons to keep the costs low, and it takes weeks for the family to receive the ashes. The film version of a coffin receding on a conveyer from the view of the family and guests into the flames which you can just make out in the background, as Take me Home, Country Road plays in the background, is fictitious and nothing like those I have been to.
It follows therefore that the dissolution process would follow more or less the same lines as cremation i.e. a ceremony with a goodbye moment when the casket is removed from view and then the ‘disposal’ process done on quasi industrial lines.
I think the idea of using it as fertiliser is one of the main turn-offs.
It follows therefore that the process it is they are calling it would follow more or less the same lines as cremation i.e. a ceremony with a goodbye moment when the casket is removed from view and then the ‘disposal’ process done on quasi industrial lines.
What is the big deal about building a crematorium on the island?
So they will use more gas than the ones in a large metropolitan city in the UK or in Northern continental Europe to bring the fire box to optimum operating temperature, big deal, that will be covered by the price that the relatives pay for the total of the funeral service.
It takes 3 hours to cremate an average sized corpse and they still have to manually crush the burnt remains of the cranium with hammers and then grind the rest of the charred bones in a grinder to get that consistent grayish ash powder that they place in a 8″x 8″ cardboard box or a fancy metal urn.
What seems to have been dissolved in acid is the Maltese Catholic Church. How has Muscat bought their total silence on everything?
Dissolving bodies, gay marriage, gay adoption, abortion, free use of drugs, nudist camps, and not a word uttered by the Church.
Somebody watched Breaking Bad.
Sandro Chetcuti will surely be in favour of dissolving corpses in high-alkaline fluid and then flushing them down the drain; he would do that even to his relatives as long as he gets what he wants: more space to build.
It was Joe Muscat’s personal promise to him before the election. So anything goes with Joe, even if this means dissolving the corpse of my own grandmother to make space for development.
The Catholic Church in Malta had no qualms or trouble in disinterring corpses in church- adjacent cemeteries when civilian burials were to be done in outlaying new cemeteries after the 1869 burials laws (although civilian burials inside the churches were still done till 1905) or when they wanted to enlarge or re-model the church.
Check out 19th century photos of the old style St Publius church in Foriana, it had a cemetery on its right side as you entered and very close to the grain silos too. The Zabbar church also had a small cemetery on the right side, that is now long gone.
I’ll have to admit, I’m not too keen on the dissolving of bodies for burial however, just to straighten facts, when the body is dissolved it is only the flesh and organs which are drained and discarded. The bones remain as a residue, are ground into a powder and given to the family in an urn.
It’s the dumping into the sewers that really gets my goat.
It is strange but there was this Marvel comic years ago called Doom 2099 where America invaded a foreign country called Makhelastan and reduced the population to “protein-rich sludge,” by dumping a chemical..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_2099
It’s the second time Marvel have predicted our future, after the episode of ‘Agents of SHIELD’ featuring ‘Malta’.
I wonder what’s next. Will we all start turning big and green every time we get angry? Have our government and society been infiltrated by Skrulls for long?