The Stripy Strudel's Journal

Note: This entry has been originally written about the Russian society. It may or may not be relevant to European or North-American societies which I know next to nothing about.

It has occurred to me that, be it for the better or worse, our modern society has ceased to honor many traditions of the past. Of course, there are many religious rituals practiced by one or another group of the society, but there is hardly another kind of traditions that are still as mandatory for everyone as those related to death: funeral, burial, mourning. These rituals have managed to stay general while all the others became internal to specific social layers or groups. This is why the expression “ritual services” nowadays is unambiguously understood as pertaining to this particular category of rituals.

However, it's not that straightforward. When most members of the society do something similar, it doesn't mean they all have the same reasons to do it. For example, the original idea behind clothes was protection from cold and rain, and that's how it's still used up to date, but it's hard to believe that a girl going to a beach wears bikini to keep herself warm. A possible reason of the special treatment of burial rituals in the modern atheistic society is that death is one of the few transcendent phenomena that people encounter in their everyday life. Death, cessation of conscience, transition between living and lifeless — this is probably the only phenomenon surrounding our lives that can't be explained with the laws of materialistic science. Other such phenomena, such as existence of the Universe, irreversibility of time, are just as well incognizable, but they don't apply to our daily life directly, don't intrude into it and make changes that can't go unnoticed. Death literally “makes” us respect it, and this might be why the modern society, having lost the universal respect for the Sun, Earth, Life, Creator, still retains the universal respect for the death.

After thinking about it for a while, I've come up with a list of four dominant reasons that make people respect the burial traditions. These four reasons could be called kind of stages because each next one originates from the previous, reinterpreting and enhancing it. I'm not judging these reasons here and not claiming that one of them is somehow better than another; I'm also not trying to study the direction of historical development that transforms the previous reason to the next. This is just an attempt of unbiased analysis. Here follow the four dominant motives for honoring the burial rituals.

1. Pragmatical.

This is the most ancient motive, and it's hardly ever found in modern societies (though it might still dominate in some remaining tribes). The transcendent and the ordinary were so tightly intertwined in the life of ancient societies that death could hardly pretend to any special place among the other, not yet cognized phenomena. The burial rituals were regarded as commonplace actions with immanent tight causality. When placing a sword and a shield into a dead warrior's tomb, the ancient hardly felt themselves executing a ritual; it was rather a common action necessary to prepare the dead for future fights in the afterlife. The need for it was as obvious as a living warrior's need for ammunition.

2. Symbolical.

Compared to the previous motive, the perception of ritual actions has changed from direct to indirect via symbols. It seems like the point of transition was the use of magical symbols (such as pentagrams) guarding the dead from demons. It's important that a pentagram, unlike a sword, is not a direct bearer of some force, but it rather signifies such a force. This transition is caused by delimitation between the transcendent and the ordinary: phenomena such as death are no more common components of everyday life, and it's only through symbols that interaction with them is now possible. Most modern rituals dealing with death seem to have originated under domination of this motive. The tombstone, coffin, burial and mourning in cultures based on Christianity or Judaism are symbols signifying the respect of the living for the dead and helping the souls to find peace. It is important that an individual realizes the meaning of the symbols. The causality is still strong because the nominal meaning of the symbols is regarded as their actual role (a pentagram is a real defense weapon).

3. Formal.

The nominal value of the symbols is retained but their causal role is lost. Burial is still perceived as something done for the dead, but there is no clear understanding of how it helps the dead and what would happen if the ritual is neglected. I suspect that this motive is dominant for most of the modern population of Russia. It's worth noting that as an incentive, this motive can be no weaker or even stronger than the previous one: the loss of causal reward is compensated by the obsession to do everything properly.

4. Social.

Like a fourth derivative, this motive is a product of further regression of the third one. Not only the alleged factual role of the symbols, but also their nominal value is lost. An individual no more thinks that the dead really need burying. The grief from the death of a close relative changes its central object, shifting from sympathizing the dead (“poor Yorick!”) to dealing with the loss by the living (“how can I live without Yorick?”); condolence becomes important. The living perform the burial not for the dead but rather for each other, projecting onto each other the retained from the previous stage and now self-sustaining need for proper execution of the ritual. A variation of this motive is when someone conducts the ritual not for another person, but in order to follow the ethical or formal laws of the society; I'd still call it the social motive because it's the incentive originates from the individual's socialization.

Undoubtedly, any classification of imprecisely expressed phenomena is doomed to be imperfect, and it's possible to point out a multitude of transitional types between any two; also, the same individual can behave under influence of different motives at different times in life.

The original entry in Russian features a poll: A small statistic survey not pretending to be representative. It is possible to vote in the poll after logging in to LiveJournal; registration of LiveJournal accounts is free.

Which of the motives best describes your personal reasons for conducting burial rituals?

• Pragmatical.
• Symbolical.
• Formal.
• Social.
• I have no reasons to conduct burial rituals.
• The described classification of motives is fundamentally flawed (please comment).

Please don't vote if you haven't read all of the above. Also don't vote and accept my apologies if you regard asking the question inappropriate.

Ready to be bashed by specialists in cultural studies and sociology as well as other interested parties.

PS: Did you think it's going to be all screwdrivers?

По-русски: Почему мы хороним своих мертвецов