Skull of Civil War Soldier to be Auctioned

[Eva Elisabeth]

(06-05-2014 07:56 AM)L Verge Wrote:  I'm like you, however, and wonder if there is a spice connected with the death ritual. More research.

More research said Laurie...well, while searching for a meaning of spices or other ingredients in mourning and also for possible origins of the Victorian traditions - I didn't find much, but some interesting asides that IMO fit here well and are worth sharing. Voilà a copy & paste summary:

Commemorative eating and drinking customs at funerals go back so far in time that Paleolithic humans are believed to have dined on the corpse itself before they buried it. Those ancestors - "cave men" - were the first humans to perceive some higher meaning in death and to ceremonially entomb their dead. It's likely that eating a bit of a deceased loved one was an effort to both honor and incorporate their essence into one's own. Anthropologists believe this grisly habit evolved into the somewhat more civilized mourning practices throughout medieval Europe and ultimately gave rise to the "funeral biscuits" in the Victorian age.

Emerging from the Middle Ages in old Germany, for instance, was the funeral tradition of eating "corpse cakes" that symbolically mirrored the act of eating the deceased. After the body had been washed and laid in its coffin, the woman of the house prepared leavened dough and placed it to rise on the linen-covered chest of the corpse. It was believed the dough "absorbed" some of the deceased's personal qualities that were, in turn, passed on to mourners who ate the corpse cakes.

The practice of funeral cookies however is believed to have evolved from another earlier custom of hiring ‘sin-eaters’ during a funeral. A sin-eater was usually a man of poor means who was hired to sit before the casket and eat and drink food that was handed to him over the coffin. The belief at the time was that the sins of the deceased person would be ingested by the sin-eater as he ate the meal.

Funeral cookies at least were, in a way, a secular communion – in the spirit of Christ’s Last Supper.

British children of yesteryear were eagerly awaiting the death of others in expectation of the cookies, like in the following article, "Scotch Funerals,” published in 1883’s "The Living Age":
"My grandfather...always had one or two of his grandchildren awaiting his return from any burial he attended, who were often not disappointed in seeing the coveted morsel produced from his pocket and having it shared among them."

Americans however, as Laurie said, preferred to keep the cookies to alway remind them of the person who died.

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BTW, if you don't want to end up in a jar of formalin check the small print of what you sign before your next surgery. At least at our local university hospital the consent form contains a paragraph in small print in which you agree to donate your body to the university for the education of the medicine students in case of decease. Most people who sign the consent form before undergoing a surgery actually don't know that they sign this paragraph, too.