by Sarah Murray
The Paris catacombs were born of a burial crisis. In the late eighteenth century, the city’s cemeteries were bursting at their seams—literally. In one instance in May 1780, a communal grave running along the Rue de la Lingerie split open, disgorging its contents into the cellars of neighboring houses. Similar spillages occurred in other parts of the city, too, sparking public outrage.
Soon after, Alexandre Lenoir, lieutenant-general of police, devised a plan to construct new catacombs in the abandoned limestone quarries that then lay on the city outskirts. Once the catacombs were completed, the bones from several Parisian cemeteries were transferred down to the dingy caverns. To avoid distressing locals, hundreds of cartloads were shifted at night shrouded in black cloths. Along the way, priests chanting the Office of the Dead accompanied this morbid cargo.
It’s a strange sort of resting place. But as at Sedlec, it’s an ornamental one. While much of what lines the walls could be mistaken for neatly stacked logs of wood, some of the bones decorate the surfaces, forming crucifixes or heart shapes. And the catacomb designers certainly knew how to play up the drama of their dungeon for the dead. An ominous sign at the entrance tells visitors: ARRÊTE! C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT (Halt! This is the Empire of Death).
Throughout the winding passages, quotations from French writers such as Racine, Rousseau, and Lamartine, and ancient scribes such as Homer, Horace, and Virgil play their part in a gloomy drama. “Croyez que chaque jour est pour vous le dernier” is one from Horace, translated from the Greek, which in my very loose translation runs something like this: “Live every day as if you’re going under a bus in the afternoon.”
But skeletons don’t always need poets and philosophers to pass on their messages. Some of the remains housed across Europe tell us about the medical history of the people whose living bodies once relied on them. In the Sedlec ossuary, as anthropologist Charles Merbs has pointed out, the bird’s wing in the Schwarzenberg coat of arms is made from the hand and wrist of someone with arthritis so severe that the bones fused together, forming a single piece.
At the ossuary in St. Leonard’s, Hythe, the benefits of a sugar-free diet are evident in a collection of teeth that, though worn, show few signs of decay. More worryingly, however, holes in some of the skulls indicate that their owners underwent trepanning, an agonizing medieval therapy in which the cranium was perforated with a saw. Other details emerge in the skulls at St. Leonard’s. In many of them, a high cephalic index (the ratio of the widest point of the head to its length), something that was not an English trait, may indicate genes passed down through intermarriage during the Roman occupation of Britain.
Our bones have tales to tell. They speak of hideous wounds, primitive medieval surgeries, and natural deformities. But others, like the skulls housed at St. Leonard’s with their unexpected shape, tell a bigger story about the ethnic shifts in a society. History, demographics, migration patterns, and geopolitics—they can all show up in the curvature of a cranium.
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Medieval Europeans dug up bones for purely practical purposes—to create more space in the cemetery. But exhumation and reburial can be important ceremonies in their own right. Anthropologists call them “rites of secondary treatment,” and they usually mark the spirit’s departure for the afterlife, representing a vital stage in the leave-taking of the living from the dead. Double burials are practiced in a surprisingly diverse range of places, from Bali, where the corpse is unearthed for its cremation, to Vietnam, Borneo, and Greece—parts of the world with radically different languages, cultures, and beliefs that are nonetheless united in the practice of digging up and reburying the bones of their dead.
Robert Hertz, an influential French sociologist born in 1881, was fascinated by double burials and how they reflect a changing relationship between the body, the soul, and the survivors. Drawing on well-documented practices found in Borneo, he argued that as the “wet” body deteriorates, it loses its status as a member of the living community and hovers temporarily on the threshold of society. As the corpse gradually separates from its bones, the soul is forced to wander in a sort of limbo. Once the “dry” bones are free of flesh, the soul’s “liminal” phase ends and it can enter the land of the dead.
In Greece, traditional death rites in rural villages also involve digging up remains. Loring Danforth describes these rites in Potamia following the tragic death of Eleni, a young girl from the village who died in 1974 in a hit-and-run accident. After an all-night vigil with her mother, Irini, Eleni is buried in the customary Greek outfit for women who die unmarried—a white bridal gown and a wedding crown. (Links between death and marriage often appear in death rites. After all, in different ways, weddings and funerals are both occasions for saying good-bye.)
For Irini, the exhumation is a painful experience. “The chorus of laments could not mask the sharp ring of the shovels against the earth, nor could it blot out the increasingly violent cries and shouts of Irini and [her friend] Maria,” writes Danforth. When the skull is uncovered, Irini cradles it “as she would have embraced Eleni were she still alive.” Eleni’s bones are placed in a box in the village ossuary. Looking down at the empty grave Irini sighs wearily. “Eleni, my child, you have gone away,” she says. “But you will never come back.”
For Irini, it’s the end of a prolonged and highly emotional relationship, for during the year after her daughter’s death, she would leave the house only to visit the grave, where she talked to her, wept, and sang mourning songs.
Between death and exhumation, the relationship between the living and the dead can continue in other ways, too. “Women in mourning,” explains Danforth, “frequently report dreams in which the soul of a dead person appears to them with a request that some service be performed.” It might be for food, water, or clothing, but once the requests have been fulfilled and the bones have been exhumed (the final service performed for the dead), the dreams tend to stop.
Astonishingly, this phenomenon appears in yet another, very different, part of the world—Vietnam. One story I heard suggests an uncanny connection between living and dead in the period between burial and exhumation. After the burial of her father, Nguyen Thi Thuan, a Vietnamese teacher living in Hanoi, started experiencing terrible headaches, accompanied by vivid dreams in which her father would talk to her. Night after night, he would appear, agitated and desperately trying to tell her something. Thuan could not work out what he was saying.
When the day came for her father to be exhumed, the family went to the cemetery. As soon as they uncovered the bones, Thuan knew the cause of her father’s agitation—growing through his skull was the root of a tree. They removed the root, retrieved all the bones, cleaned them, arranged them in the proper order, and placed them in the clay pot designated for his reburial. That night Thuan had no headaches or unsettling dreams and she has had none since.
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While science and rational thought might tell us otherwise, human remains have a funny habit of living on. Even after the death certificate has been signed, we persist in attributing thoughts, sensations, and feelings to the dead. Throughout history, people have endowed corpses with all kinds of special powers, whether political, medicinal, or spiritual. Corpses could contaminate or cure, give life or take it away, curse or bless, wreak revenge or deliver wealth and happiness. They refused to do what they were supposed to: lie down and keep quiet.
In the early seventeenth century, treatises such as Dr. Heinrich Kornmann’s De Miraculis Mortuorum described corpses that could laugh, cry, speak, jump, and scream. It was also once believed that the body parts of decedents had curative properties. According to Philippe Ariès, a woman with dropsy (buildup of fluid between the tissue cells) could be cured if she were to rub the warm hand of a fresh corpse across her abdomen. Bones worn around the neck or sewn into clothing prevented disease. The finger of a dead comrade could help a soldier emerge from the battlefield unscathed.
Cadavers can even play detective. It was once b
elieved that the corpse of a murder victim would start to bleed at the approach of its killer. The superstition appears in Shakespeare’s Richard III, when, at the funeral procession, Lady Anne cries out that the murdered Henry’s wounds “Open their congeal’d mouths and bleed afresh!” It is, she says, a “deed, inhuman and unnatural / Provokes this deluge most unnatural.”
As well as producing a “deluge most unnatural,” bodies could also stand up for themselves in court (well perhaps not stand). In one of the more bizarre episodes in the Catholic Church’s history, a ninth-century pope, Formosus, was yanked from his grave in Rome for a macabre trial—the “Cadaver Synod”—in which the rotting papal corpse was accused by his successor, Stephen VI, of usurping the papal office. Dressed in vestments propped up in a chair, the unfortunate and no doubt malodorous cadaver was found guilty. Three of his fingers were cut off—those used for blessings, so symbols of his authority—and his body was hurled into the Tiber.
The potency of the corpse has inspired other posthumous acts of violence. During the French Revolution, while aristocratic heads were being sliced off, the remains of dead kings and queens were also punished when the tombs at the abbey church of St. Denis, used as a royal necropolis since the Middle Ages, were desecrated and the bodies summarily dumped in nearby pits.
And so powerful was the Andean cult of the dead that when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru in the sixteenth century, they felt it necessary to destroy the royal mummies before they could convert the people they’d conquered to Catholicism. For the Andeans, the destruction was devastating. They considered the mummies sacred living potentates (every year they’d take them out of their tombs and display them in Cuzco’s main square, where they offered them food, drink, and prayers), and as they could no longer feed them, they imagined them suffering terrible starvation.
Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher and social reformer, believed that, through his remains, he might continue to influence the affairs of the living. In his will, Bentham, who died in 1832, requested that his skeleton (along with the “soft parts” of his body) be preserved, dressed in a black suit, and placed inside a case, seated “in a chair usually occupied by me when living.” The case, he continued, should occasionally be taken to the chamber in which his friends and disciples met and “stationed in such part of the room as to the assembled company shall seem meet.”
His request was fulfilled, although the preservation of his head went horribly wrong and it’s a wax version that now tops his besuited skeleton. Today, the “Auto-Icon,” as he called it, sits in its cabinet at the end of the South Cloisters of the main building at University College London. Legend has it that he’s still wheeled in to join College Council meetings, where he’s recorded as “present but not voting.”
For me, the Cadaver Synod or Bentham’s creation of his Auto-Icon are the acts of a species gripped by an inescapable bond—that between a living and a dead individual. We just can’t let go. For some, double burials succeed in severing the link. Yet others insist on anthropomorphizing, assigning abilities, motives, and emotions, to lifeless flesh, and even using this as an excuse to wreak revenge on their late enemies. Whether driven by hate or by a desire to retain influence over college council meetings, I wonder if this isn’t simply another way of persuading ourselves that there is indeed some form of life after death.
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Poke around a bit in any of Europe’s churches and cathedrals and you’ll probably find in a side chapel on an altar small caskets that are deeply carved, elaborately decorated, and heavily gilded, with glass sides that permit a glimpse of what lies within. This is usually something that looks decidedly grim—a blackened finger bone, a piece of what you’re told is an elbow, a finger, or, if you’re lucky, a whole skull, often resting on beds of dusty cotton wool. These are pieces of dead saints and martyrs. Since the dawn of Christendom, they have been placed in reliquaries and venerated as holy objects.
Europeans are not alone in their reverence for sacred remains. A Muslim pilgrimage shrine in Srinigar, India, houses a whisker believed to have come from the beard of the Prophet himself. The whisker is displayed on important Islamic religious days in a glass casket inside the Hazratbal mosque on the banks of Lake Dal.
Possessing far more powerful properties than your average cadaver, these fragments have for centuries inspired pilgrims to make long and arduous journeys to pray and prostrate themselves before them. They still do. When in 2008 the body of Padre Pio—the controversial Catholic saint known for his stigmata (palm wounds resembling those of Christ on the cross)—was exhumed and displayed in a glass casket on the fortieth anniversary of his death, a million or so people visited the shrine, many hoping to be cured of disease and disability.
The healing properties of saints’ relics even extended to those with no wish to be cured. One story has it that in the medieval city of Tours, a couple of beggars—one blind, the other a cripple—heard that the body of Saint Martin was to be paraded around the town to heal the sick. This was unwelcome news for the beggars, for their disabilities were critical in attracting alms. But while trying to make their escape as Saint Martin’s body approached, they got caught up in the crowds and, against their will, had their ailments removed (along with their earnings potential).
But the fascination with relics is about much more than health care. These pieces of human remains also draw their potency from the legends and miracles that were associated with their owners in life. In relics, the morbid is endowed with something extraordinarily mystical. Most important perhaps, relics are a strange mixture of this world—a genuine piece of a human being—and the world to come, providing a bridge between terrestrial life and the afterlife.
Given the power of relics, people often wanted to possess their own, as we learn from a short story by nineteenth-century French writer Guy de Maupassant. “The Relic” takes the form of a letter to Abbé Louis d’Ennemare from his friend Henri Fontal. Fontal had given his fiancée, Gilberte, the abbot’s cousin, a sheep’s bone, claiming it was a saint’s relic he’d stolen from a cathedral (he in fact bought a genuine one on a trip to Germany but then lost it). “Just note this,” writes Fontal, “I had violated a shrine; violated and stolen holy relics, and for that she adored me, thought me perfect, tender, divine.”
Unfortunately, when Gilberte visits Cologne, she finds the cathedral from which her lover “stole” the relic does not exist. Realizing he’s fabricated the whole story, she breaks off the engagement, saying she’ll only forgive him if he brings her a real relic. Thus the unhappy Fontal finds himself writing to the abbot to beg for an introduction to a cardinal or prelate who might help him to procure one (Maupassant doesn’t tell us whether or not Fontal is ultimately successful).
Getting your hands on a relic was easier if you were wealthy and powerful. Spain’s sixteenth-century Hapsburg King Philip II was a particularly enthusiastic collector. He had hundreds sent to him from all over Europe. In fact, there was something of the trainspotter in Philip—he wanted in his collection a relic from every single Spanish saint. In his austere palace-monastery near Madrid, the Escorial, he would kiss his favorites each night before retiring to bed. Throughout the illness of his later years, he’d have corresponding relics—one of Saint Alban’s ribs perhaps, or a bit of Saint Sebastian’s knee—applied directly to the parts of his own body that most ached.
In 1598, when the monarch lay on his deathbed in the Escorial, his obsession helped his daughter keep him awake so he could—as she believed necessary for the salvation of his soul—greet death with his eyes open. Watching him around the clock, whenever he drifted off, she would cry, “Don’t touch the relics!” as if someone had entered the room and was laying hands on one of the precious bone pieces. This had the desired effect—Philip’s beady eyes would pop open to make sure no one was tampering with his beloved collection.
The cult of saints’ relics became so well established that they acquired hierarchical categories. First-class re
lics were the bodies or body parts of saints. Second-class relics were objects touched by a saint, such as a piece of clothing, while third-class relics were objects that had touched either a first-class or a second-class relic (and, of course, there were fakes). Amazingly, the miraculous power of a saint’s relic didn’t diminish with the size of bone fragment. A tiny splinter, a fingernail, or even a single hair was just as good as the whole body.
This was fortunate for the early Christian church. Since relics could convert pagan sites into holy ones, they became powerful tools in spreading the religion to far-off places. But demand for sacred remains far outstripped supply, so the saintly were sliced and diced and shunted around the religious centers of Europe. The relic’s journey was known as a translatio, or translation, and along with the pilgrimages made to visit them, they created bonds between members of the new church across Europe. In a pre-Internet era, relics were the nodes linking a web of religious connections, giving the lonely faithful, who were so widely dispersed, something tangible—something they could see and touch.
Relics traveled in richly decorated biers, accompanied by religious ceremonies and all-night vigils. When they arrived, grand pieces of architecture were waiting to house them (Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, built by Louis IX, was designed in the shape of a giant reliquary). And while great cathedrals were sometimes built on the graves of the divine, such as St. Peter’s in Rome, it was cheaper to take the relic to the church than the church to the relic.
Some relics are extremely well traveled. The relic of St. Francis Xavier, the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary to India, has been hauled across several continents. In 1614, he lost an arm when it was sent to Rome as evidence in the case for his canonization (it’s still there, in the Church of the Gesù). His humerus, or funny bone, is in Macau. And when in 1975 his body was processed around Goa, India, in the ten-yearly “exposition of the relic” (a tradition initiated in the nineteenth century), a few toes and other bits were also reported as missing.