Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising, study finds

theguardian.com

120 pointsbenbreen48 comments

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.

Yes, because humanity has never held a belief that wasn't firmly grounded in fact!

Humanity certainly has not suffered greatly from curiosity towards the grounds of beliefs.

Someone suffering from late-stage plague looks like a rotting, moaning, stinking pile in a bed, it's not mobile. It's possible that this was a result of the difficulty in determining the difference between near-death, and death, but honestly lets be realistic... this was probably just the usual terror and anxiety.

Indeed, safety coffins and such were a great deal. Also a long wake when someone died. Thankfully measuring pulse ended the deal.

Hammering coffins shut and burying them also ensured they were dead.

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...

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.

I mean, graves that aren't consistently below the frost line can eventually move and shift to the surface. That's a sight that'll have you chopping up the corpses of loved ones, I bet.

Edit: speeling

It was a big enough problem that technological solutions were invented to solve it: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Safety_coffin

It still happens today: http://www.businessinsider.com/man-rescued-after-being-burie...

Bodies can also move from gassing or various parts of their nervous system being prodded shortly after death.

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".

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'.

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

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...

The news article does say that the cuts were not consistent with butchery.

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?

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)

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.

There's a whole book on this topic: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/715512.Vampires_Burial_an...

Still happens in parts of East Europe.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jun/19/theobserver

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

Just yesterday I saw that phrase on a church next to where I live. It was the most prominent phrase in the stonework around the top of the building, and it is a strange phrase so I looked it up.

Psalm 89:48

The gist being that "all men must die, even God's own son". For it is a necessary step on the path to enter heaven, and implies the "you can't take it with you" thing about wealth and property. It also implies mercy, for whatever pain you suffer in life, the pain will end one day (such mercy!). Death, the great leveller, making all the same status.

But yeah... amusing in light of the paper and zombies.

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

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

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.

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

> 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...

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

Because they come back... different.

Possessed by demons/evil. Dead things don't come back - if they do it must be because of evil spirits.

That's the general belief at least, upheld by the beliefs of various religions and cultures.

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.

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

Nothing on Wikipedia!

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

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/saved-by-the-bell.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

>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.

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

During the Victorian (and maybe earlier) era the British Army and Navy would sow the dead into a shroud with the past stitch being tied through the nose on the basis that if a man weren't really dead they'd probably wake up when you rammed a large needle through them.

Vampires: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/staking_claims_the_vampires_of...

Romero-style zombies are a modern invention.

Or it might be better to say that Romero-style zombies have more in common with European vampire/draugr myths than with West African zombi myths.

I'd never seen a person with full blown rabies, but if you search Youtube, you can see some disturbing videos. It's pretty clear that if you saw someone with rabies, it wouldn't be hard to confuse them for a zombie.

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.

"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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com