Historical Origins And Development Of The Funeral

Christian rituals related to death did not begin at the funeral service. Dying itself was surrounded by many Christian rites. During the Reformation, Protestants' sharp attacks on the medieval beliefs in purgatory and intercession for the deceased eventually shifted attention in the modern world away from a preoccupation with death to a widespread ignoring of the reality of death. Death in Human Cultures Rituals are formative experiences-the means by which a community expresses for itself and hands on to others its significant beliefs. The funeral, encompassing all of the rites related to death and burial, embodies a community's understanding of death and the afterlife. An historical survey of the funeral properly begins with the anthropological data on the burial customs of indigenous peoples of undeveloped areas of the world. Like those peoples whose artifacts date back to antiquity, these peoples often view death with fear, not hope, and look upon the corpse with aversion, not…