![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() For many thousands of years, death, funerary and mourning rites were not very different in the West from those that had existed everywhere in human society the power of the community was unchallenged in matters of death as well as birth and marriage. It is also a fair way of describing Philippe Aries's view of the way death was experienced until two centuries ago, when, on the evidence of this book, significant counterforces began to operate in the West. That is a fair way of epitomizing the significance that death has had in all the great world religions. Death takes place within the community death is a wound to the community death is a departure from the community. Whether we leave food, clothing and implements in the burial place - as people have as far back as the Paleolithic Age - or simply offer prayers at graveside, the premise is the same: The community that nourished in life must also nourish in death. It is as though an instinctive disposition exists in man to reject the thought of death as definitive, as the completion of the life cycle. Of the recurrent crises of the human condition - birth, marriage and death - it is death that has generated the largest number of rituals, most of them based on a belief in an afterlife. MAN is the only species to bury his dead. Translated from the French by Helen Weaver. ![]()
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