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

~~~
djscram
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
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.

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oz
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
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'.

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stale2002
We'll it looks like it worked! The dead didn't rise.

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nonbel
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...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-
eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/)

~~~
eriknstr
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
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)

~~~
eriknstr
Thanks, I thought it might be something relating to execution but was confused
by the Google results which was had a Wikipedia article stating "scaffolding,
also called scaffold or staging, is a temporary structure used to support a
work crew and materials to aid in the construction, maintenance and repair" as
well as a lot of pictures of such structures.

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abecedarius
There's a whole book on this topic:
[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/715512.Vampires_Burial_an...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/715512.Vampires_Burial_and_Death)

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okket
Still happens in parts of East Europe.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/19/theobserver](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/19/theobserver)

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

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

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

~~~
0xfeba
Well, seriously though, they are expensive because the industry* takes
advantage of people who are grieving.

*Service Corporation International namely, and other companies that buy up local funeral homes to basically price fix the area.

~~~
pc86
Yes those evil corporations, making a profit by providing a service!

~~~
0xfeba
> Yes those evil corporations, making a profit by providing a service!

Pretty low quality comment. Perhaps you misread. There are funeral homes that
provide a service. Then there is SCI, which buys up the local homes and just
increases prices. And they get away with it because they take advantage of
people when they are mourning, aka emotional, and state regulations on the
death industry vary widely.

The whole industry needs some heavy federal baseline regulations, IMO.

> SCI charges $6,256 on average (excluding casket and cemetery plot), 42
> percent more than independents. [1]

And then there's numerous cases of SCI just overselling plots, skipping
embalming regulations, etc.

[1] - [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-24/is-
funeral-h...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-24/is-funeral-home-
chain-scis-growth-coming-at-the-expense-of-mourners)

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

~~~
TeMPOraL
Because they come back... _different_.

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eriknstr
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.

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z3t4
Ever heard the story behind, "saved by the bell" ?

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wozniacki
Nothing on Wikipedia!

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

~~~
paulddraper
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.

~~~
slededit
Not buried with it, you'd have a bell tied to you as you sat on a gurney
waiting to be buried. They'd leave you for a period of time in case you awoke.
There are instance where people were buried with poisons to take in case they
woke inside the coffin - at that point its pretty much over for you.

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Fzzr
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
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
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!

~~~
pherq
There are records of similar practices (binding toes or piercing the soles of
the feet to stop the dead from escaping) in Scandinavia, so it may have been
something that came over with the Norse influence in Scotland.

See e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draugr#Means_of_prevention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draugr#Means_of_prevention)

~~~
jnbiche
>so it may have been something that came over with the Norse influence in
Scotland.

Not only via Scotland. Vikings regularly raided and colonized Ireland
directly, too.

~~~
pherq
I know -- I just apparently parsed Gaelic as Scottish and forgot that the
spelling is same for Irish Gaelic...

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ekianjo
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.

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michaelleland
"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.

