Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising, study finds

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/03/medieval-villagers-mutilated-the-dead-to-stop-them-rising-study-finds

by benbreen • 9 years ago

120 48 9 years ago

I went there about a year ago. This is a gravestone in the churchyard. Just saying... https://goo.gl/photos/C9JnEHddouNcKuEb8

buro9• 9 years ago

Just 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• 9 years ago

Sure, but I'd still want a bling tombstone (angels, cherubim, the works) to tell everyone I basically Owned It when I was alive.

paulddraper2• 9 years ago

...and that's why funerals/burials are so expensive :P

nonbel• 9 years ago

There 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-o...

MatthewWilkes• 9 years ago

The news article does say that the cuts were not consistent with butchery.

eriknstr3• 9 years ago

Disturbing 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• 9 years ago

Scaffold 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)

Fzzr• 9 years ago

So 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• 9 years ago

Probably 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• 9 years ago

Reminds 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!

pessimizer• 9 years ago

Vampires: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/staking_claims_the_vampires_of...

Romero-style zombies are a modern invention.

NoGravitas• 9 years ago

Or it might be better to say that Romero-style zombies have more in common with European vampire/draugr myths than with West African zombi myths.

okket• 9 years ago

Still happens in parts of East Europe.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/19/theobserver

z3t4• 9 years ago

Ever heard the story behind, "saved by the bell" ?

wozniacki• 9 years ago

Nothing on Wikipedia!

Care to expand? Is there some oral history behind it?

ZeroGravitas• 9 years ago

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/saved-by-the-bell.html

paulddraper2• 9 years ago

You'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.

tinco2• 9 years ago

Surely 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• 9 years ago

Yes, because humanity has never held a belief that wasn't firmly grounded in fact!

tinco2• 9 years ago

Humanity certainly has not suffered greatly from curiosity towards the grounds of beliefs.

M_Grey• 9 years ago

Someone 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• 9 years ago

Indeed, safety coffins and such were a great deal. Also a long wake when someone died. Thankfully measuring pulse ended the deal.

nkrisc• 9 years ago

Hammering coffins shut and burying them also ensured they were dead.

djscram• 9 years ago

Actually 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...

awinter-py• 9 years ago

Disagree -- agriculturists & hunter-gatherers are way more familiar with death than moderns because they slaughtered their own livestock. We don't even experience human birth & death at home; it's packaged for us by hospitals and funeral parlors.

The basic anatomical knowledge in a society where everyone has killed a goat is arguably higher than industrialized 2017 where we get our steaks pre-cut.

I'd be interested in an argument that says wealthy, artistic, anatomically modern humans in the stone or bronze age aren't aware of the symbolic content of their death rituals. But I haven't heard one yet.

jszymborski• 9 years ago

I mean, graves that aren't consistently below the frost line can eventually move and shift to the surface. That's a sight that'll have you chopping up the corpses of loved ones, I bet.

Edit: speeling

heurist• 9 years ago

It was a big enough problem that technological solutions were invented to solve it: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Safety_coffin

It still happens today: http://www.businessinsider.com/man-rescued-after-being-burie...

Bodies can also move from gassing or various parts of their nervous system being prodded shortly after death.

ekianjo• 9 years ago

not 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• 9 years ago

I'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• 9 years ago

My 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'.

eriknstr3• 9 years ago

Not 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• 9 years ago

Why wouldn't you want the dead to come back?

TeMPOraL• 9 years ago

Because they come back... different.

Nadya• 9 years ago

Possessed by demons/evil. Dead things don't come back - if they do it must be because of evil spirits.

That's the general belief at least, upheld by the beliefs of various religions and cultures.

abecedarius• 9 years ago

There's a whole book on this topic: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/715512.Vampires_Burial_an...

stale2002• 9 years ago

We'll it looks like it worked! The dead didn't rise.

michaelleland• 9 years 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.

Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising, study finds

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