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Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising, study finds
- limbicsystem 10y agoI went there about a year ago. This is a gravestone in the churchyard. Just saying... https://goo.gl/photos/C9JnEHddouNcKuEb8 https://goo.gl/photos/C9JnEHddouNcKuEb8
- buro9 10y agoJust yesterday I saw that phrase on a church next to where I live. It was the most prominent phrase in the stonework around the top of the building, and it is a strange phrase so I looked it up. Psalm 89:48 The gist being that "all men must die, even God's own son". For it is a necessary step on the path to enter heaven, and implies the "you can't take it with you" thing about wealth and property. It also implies mercy, for whatever pain you suffer in life, the pain will end one day (such mercy!). Death, the great leveller, making all the same status. But yeah... amusing in light of the paper and zombies.
- sbardle 10y agoSure, but I'd still want a bling tombstone (angels, cherubim, the works) to tell everyone I basically Owned It when I was alive.
- paulddraper 10y ago...and that's why funerals/burials are so expensive :P
- 0xfeba 10y agoWell, seriously though, they are expensive because the industry* takes advantage of people who are grieving. *Service Corporation International namely, and other companies that buy up local funeral homes to basically price fix the area.
- pc86 10y agoYes those evil corporations, making a profit by providing a service!
- 0xfeba 10y ago> Yes those evil corporations, making a profit by providing a service! Pretty low quality comment. Perhaps you misread. There are funeral homes that provide a service. Then there is SCI, which buys up the local homes and just increases prices. And they get away with it because they take advantage of people when they are mourning, aka emotional, and state regulations on the death industry vary widely. The whole industry needs some heavy federal baseline regulations, IMO. > SCI charges $6,256 on average (excluding casket and cemetery plot), 42 percent more than independents. [1] And then there's numerous cases of SCI just overselling plots, skipping embalming regulations, etc. [1] - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-24/is-funeral-home-chain-scis-growth-coming-at-the-expense-of-mourners http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-24/is-funeral-h...
- nonbel 10y agoThere is no direct link to the paper (only the journal), but I wonder if they considered this (apparently) previously common practice: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-o...
- MatthewWilkes 10y agoThe news article does say that the cuts were not consistent with butchery.
- eriknstr 10y agoDisturbing practice but interesting article. Good point about hypocrisy on the part of the people of that era. I was wondering though, what is meant in the following sentence: >And in 1908, a last known attempt was made in Germany to swallow blood at the scaffold. What does "swallow blood at the scaffold" mean in this context?
- kweks 10y agoScaffold refers to the structure used for execution by hanging. It's a somewhat clumsy phrase meaning: the last attempt to drink someone's blood after they were executed (presumably hanged)
- eriknstr 10y agoThanks, I thought it might be something relating to execution but was confused by the Google results which was had a Wikipedia article stating "scaffolding, also called scaffold or staging, is a temporary structure used to support a work crew and materials to aid in the construction, maintenance and repair" as well as a lot of pictures of such structures.
- Fzzr 10y agoSo we have beliefs in the dead rising, a bunch of decapitated and burned bodies, and then they all leave anyway. Guess it's time to re-read the Zombie Survival Guide.
- lithos 10y agoProbably not zombies, just miss identification of a deep coma. Especially during plague times, people knew to not linger near the dead and quickly get rid of them (a logical reason for the miss ID, rather than the normal stupidity people seem to think the ancestors had). Someone only needs to wake up once to start the story.
- maaarghk 10y agoReminds me of a Gaelic word I found in a dictionary - somehow this is the second time I've got the chance to roll this out on HN: Teurmnasg (lit. thumb binding). a bandage on the toes and thumbs of a dead person, to prevent his ghost from hurting foes. I couldn't find anything to indicate the origin of this practice but it seems like what you've said here would pretty much make sense. Cool!
- pherq 10y agoThere are records of similar practices (binding toes or piercing the soles of the feet to stop the dead from escaping) in Scandinavia, so it may have been something that came over with the Norse influence in Scotland. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draugr#Means_of_prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draugr#Means_of_prevention
- jnbiche 10y ago>so it may have been something that came over with the Norse influence in Scotland. Not only via Scotland. Vikings regularly raided and colonized Ireland directly, too.
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- okket 10y agoStill happens in parts of East Europe. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/19/theobserver https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/19/theobserver
- z3t4 10y agoEver heard the story behind, "saved by the bell" ?
- wozniacki 10y agoNothing on Wikipedia! Care to expand? Is there some oral history behind it?
- ZeroGravitas 10y agohttp://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/saved-by-the-bell.html http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/saved-by-the-bell.html
- paulddraper 10y agoYou'd be buried with a bell, so in case you woke up (weren't really dead), you could ring it and be rescued. Or at least that's the story.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- slededit 10y agoNot buried with it, you'd have a bell tied to you as you sat on a gurney waiting to be buried. They'd leave you for a period of time in case you awoke. There are instance where people were buried with poisons to take in case they woke inside the coffin - at that point its pretty much over for you.
- tinco 10y agoSurely if this practice is so widespread, at some point it should have happened, or at least seemed to have happened right? Perhaps so many people lived in near death circumstances due to plague and such that some persons simply looked dead for a while, and then came back as the disease relented a little? I can imagine someone suffering late stage bubonic plague certainly looked like zombies.
- StavrosK 10y agoYes, because humanity has never held a belief that wasn't firmly grounded in fact!
- tinco 10y agoHumanity certainly has not suffered greatly from curiosity towards the grounds of beliefs.
- M_Grey 10y agoSomeone suffering from late-stage plague looks like a rotting, moaning, stinking pile in a bed, it's not mobile. It's possible that this was a result of the difficulty in determining the difference between near-death, and death, but honestly lets be realistic... this was probably just the usual terror and anxiety.
- angry-hacker 10y agoIndeed, safety coffins and such were a great deal. Also a long wake when someone died. Thankfully measuring pulse ended the deal.
- nkrisc 10y agoHammering coffins shut and burying them also ensured they were dead.
- djscram 10y agoActually there are a lot of reasons for dead people apparently coming back. Burying bodies so they stay down is actually a big effort for most cultures, wild animals and weather conditions can easily pull a body from a shallower grave and redeposit it somewhere else. Add that to the tendency of bodies to continue to change after death, or at least appear to (gums receding looks like teeth growing, etc.) and it's not hard to see how people in earlier culture s might get the impression that the dead are up and walking around. Factor in also how diseases can take members of a family or others close to the dead person invisibly, and, well...
- stefantalpalaru 10y agoWe don't need to go farther than 19th century New England: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_vampire_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_vampire_panic
- ekianjo 10y agonot limited to medieval times at all. prehistoric tombs also revealed tribes that used to bind hands and legs and feet of the dead probably for the very same reasons.
- oz 10y agoI'm Jamaican. My mom (64) says that when she was growing up, it was standard practice to hammer nails into the soles of the dead, so their spirits couldn't "walk".
- duncan_bayne 10y agoMy late grandmother (Trinidadian) used to tell a story of a funeral procession where the body sat up in the coffin (something to do with the bandaged, poorly-embalmed body swelling in the heat?). Apparently the locals wouldn't approach the body for some time afterwards, for fear it was 'walking'.
- eriknstr 10y agoNot really surprising. I've heard about corpses being fastened in their coffins with a metal pole through the corpse and that said practice is the origin of the idea that you can kill a vampire by driving a wooden stake through their heart.
- ikeboy 10y agoWhy wouldn't you want the dead to come back?
- abecedarius 10y agoThere's a whole book on this topic: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/715512.Vampires_Burial_and_Death http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/715512.Vampires_Burial_an...
- stale2002 10y agoWe'll it looks like it worked! The dead didn't rise.
- michaelleland 10y ago"21st century commoners burnt the dead to stop them from rising, study finds" (2295) A study of early 21st century literature shows a tendency to burn their dead, instead of interning it in a space capsule. "Early space goers faced high costs to obtain orbit" an unnamed source at the International Space Consourtium said "which likely resulted in them burning the bodies before sending them into space." What is unknown is how many allowed the remains to drift once reaching space and it seems the practice of sending towards Sol didn't begin in earnest until Priest Johobath's teachings began to spread in earnest. "Despite the seeming uncouth behavior, it was likely an established tradition. Much detailed information probably will be discovered once we crack the code surrounding the Facegoog group's information trove." reported the Cyborgisty in a statement.