8 hours ago
(This post was last modified: 8 hours ago by C C.)
Thank the very late advent of embalming chemicals for finally nipping corpse misconduct in the bud.
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Night of the dangerous dead
https://archaeology.org/issues/november-...rous-dead/
EXCERPTS: Around 1190, a man died in Buckinghamshire, in southeast England. The night after he was buried, he returned home, barged into his wife’s bedroom, and attempted to suffocate her. A few days later, he harassed his brothers. Rebuffed but undeterred, the dead man “took to dancing around wildly among the animals in and near the houses, as their restless and abnormal behavior showed,” writes twelfth-century historian and cleric William of Newburgh. “This was an equal nuisance to friends and neighbors.” The dead man began spooking villagers by day, though only some could see him. Something had to be done.
[...] The corpse of an indolent priest who returned from the grave was struck with an ax, then burned. Villagers dug up two dead men who had been roaming with their coffins on their backs, beheaded them, then cut out and burned their hearts. “Like anything else, certain procedures get established,” says archaeologist John Blair of the University of Oxford...
[...] Skeletal biologist Simon Mays of Historic England led a team that studied a collection of unusual human remains excavated in the 1960s in the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire. The team determined that the remains belonged to at least 10 different people, whose corpses had been variously hacked, dismembered, and scorched. ... The mutilations did not match the types of trauma osteoarchaeologists usually observe on victims of murder, execution, battle, or cannibalism. “We were left with the idea that these were revenants, corpses that had risen from their graves to menace the living,” says Mays. “In medieval textual sources, these revenant corpses have a sort of aggressive physicality to them. And the way to combat that physical aggressiveness is by physical means.”
The dangerous dead, as some scholars call malevolent returning corpses, are invoked in literature as early as the Akkadian epic Descent of Ishtar, composed in Mesopotamia in the second millennium b.c. “I will raise the dead, that they shall eat the living,” threatens the goddess Ishtar. Archaeologists have suggested that Mesopotamian burials in which bodies were weighted down with stones, tied up, maimed, or burned may have been intended to prevent such uprisings.
Medieval Europeans practiced all these techniques, adding further ways to violate corpses such as impalement with spears and stakes. As recently as 2019, a posse of Romanians, including a priest, was prosecuted for staking a corpse.
[...] Scholars are trying to understand what anxieties drove English villagers in the late seventh century a.d. to exhume and attack the decaying body of a teenage girl buried on the grounds of a nunnery near the present-day town of Ely. ... At this time, many English people had converted to Christianity, while some held on to pagan beliefs. Among pagans, women were ritual specialists, and nuns became spiritual leaders to Christians.“Women were powerful,” Blair says. “Therefore, women were frightening.”
Neutralizing the dangerous dead was grim business... (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Night of the dangerous dead
https://archaeology.org/issues/november-...rous-dead/
EXCERPTS: Around 1190, a man died in Buckinghamshire, in southeast England. The night after he was buried, he returned home, barged into his wife’s bedroom, and attempted to suffocate her. A few days later, he harassed his brothers. Rebuffed but undeterred, the dead man “took to dancing around wildly among the animals in and near the houses, as their restless and abnormal behavior showed,” writes twelfth-century historian and cleric William of Newburgh. “This was an equal nuisance to friends and neighbors.” The dead man began spooking villagers by day, though only some could see him. Something had to be done.
[...] The corpse of an indolent priest who returned from the grave was struck with an ax, then burned. Villagers dug up two dead men who had been roaming with their coffins on their backs, beheaded them, then cut out and burned their hearts. “Like anything else, certain procedures get established,” says archaeologist John Blair of the University of Oxford...
[...] Skeletal biologist Simon Mays of Historic England led a team that studied a collection of unusual human remains excavated in the 1960s in the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire. The team determined that the remains belonged to at least 10 different people, whose corpses had been variously hacked, dismembered, and scorched. ... The mutilations did not match the types of trauma osteoarchaeologists usually observe on victims of murder, execution, battle, or cannibalism. “We were left with the idea that these were revenants, corpses that had risen from their graves to menace the living,” says Mays. “In medieval textual sources, these revenant corpses have a sort of aggressive physicality to them. And the way to combat that physical aggressiveness is by physical means.”
The dangerous dead, as some scholars call malevolent returning corpses, are invoked in literature as early as the Akkadian epic Descent of Ishtar, composed in Mesopotamia in the second millennium b.c. “I will raise the dead, that they shall eat the living,” threatens the goddess Ishtar. Archaeologists have suggested that Mesopotamian burials in which bodies were weighted down with stones, tied up, maimed, or burned may have been intended to prevent such uprisings.
Medieval Europeans practiced all these techniques, adding further ways to violate corpses such as impalement with spears and stakes. As recently as 2019, a posse of Romanians, including a priest, was prosecuted for staking a corpse.
[...] Scholars are trying to understand what anxieties drove English villagers in the late seventh century a.d. to exhume and attack the decaying body of a teenage girl buried on the grounds of a nunnery near the present-day town of Ely. ... At this time, many English people had converted to Christianity, while some held on to pagan beliefs. Among pagans, women were ritual specialists, and nuns became spiritual leaders to Christians.“Women were powerful,” Blair says. “Therefore, women were frightening.”
Neutralizing the dangerous dead was grim business... (MORE - missing details)