Just Finished Reading: The Buried Soul – How Humans Invented Death by Timothy Taylor

This is actually quite a difficult book to write a meaningful précis of. As the sub-title suggests it’s about death – or rather the human cultural construct our species has designed around it to help societies cope with our inevitable mortality. Yet as with most things human there is a hierarchy of responses determined by social standing. Slaves seem to have been casually discarded almost without further thought. Human bones – both adult and children – have long been discovered in tribal rubbish heaps. For most of human history women have generally been treated similarly unless they are particularly highborn and even then their burials seem to reflect more the wealth of their husbands rather than their own status (with notable exceptions). It is only when the powerful die that the full impact of human mortality comes to the forefront of our cultural response to death. It is here that we are presented with leaders buried in their ships often surrounded by their dead servants and retainers. It is hear that we see the construction of innumerable barrows throughout Europe and the great pyramids of Egypt. It is here that the author presents an interesting hypothesis – that burial, with all of the associated ceremony and the final internment of the body is only partially the result of grief on the part of the leader’s subject population. Primarily, the author maintains, it is because they fear that the now disembodied soul will return to cause harm amongst the living. This is the reason for the elaborate tombs of the ancients with their hidden passages and dead ends. Not to keep grave robbers out – which they generally failed to do – but to keep the souls of the angry dead confined and confused. The dead were confused by the noise and pomp of ceremony, then bribed by the burial of grave goods, then locked away beneath the earth where they could do no harm. It’s certainly an interesting twist on what seems on the face of it a reverence for the recently departed tribal leader.

Attitudes to death and the dead have varied widely (and wildly) across the world and across the eons. There appears to be a great deal of evidence that we have eaten our dead until comparatively recently. Some societies literally live on top of the graves of their ancestors, others give up the bodies of their relatives to carrion birds and then reverently keep the bones of their dead as mementoes. We in the modern West are odd in that we distance ourselves from death with many of us never actually seeing a dead body (I personally have never seen one). This distancing is, again, a very recent phenomenon. Throughout the book the author never fails to make the point that our attitudes to death, despite being driven by the same fears and anxieties founded on the mysteries of mortality, have ranged through a very wide range indeed because, like much else, they are culturally and historically determined. The reaction to the universal fact of death is filtered through the accumulated culture of each society. Activities which seem strange, bizarre or just plain wrong when seen from the outside can seem perfectly reasonable when seen from the inside. Picking your way through that particular cultural mine-field is far from simple. Books like this, however, make such endeavours at least a little easier by bringing to the notice of those who might encounter such things some explanation of why certain groups act as they do. This is a must read for anyone interested in cultural anthropology or for those interesting in how humanity has tried over its long and bloody history to cope with death. Not always a fun read or a comfortable one it is however simply fascinating.