We don’t want to see her face to face. And yet, it awaits us all when the time is right. Death has anguished humans since the dawn of time. And since the dawn of time, it has devoted the most diverse cults and rites to it.
To approach this very vast subject, the historian Catherine Ferland compelled herself to a considerable exercise of synthesis, by concocting the book 27 curious facts about death from then to nowpublished by Les Heures bleues, in the collection les 27.
Over the course of 27 entries, each of which takes up two illustrated pages, we go through data and anecdotes on the rites of passage to death perpetuated around the world and in Quebec.
“It was not easy, but, at the same time, I found it stimulating to be obliged to synthesize such a vast theme, anthropological and cultural and historical. […] I was as much interested in the elements that are universal as in those that are specific,” she said in an interview.
The facts she has selected are precisely those that raise questions. We learn, for example, that red ocher has been used for millennia, particularly in Quebec, to decorate corpses, as evidenced by the silvicultural period and beyond.
” Why ? asks Catherine Ferland. The researchers believe that it would be a kind of “substitute blood” allowing to protect the disappeared person by nourishing their vital essence in their transition to the afterlife. Anthropologists have also put forward the hypothesis that “this pigmentation may have served, in some cases, to give the corpses the appearance of life to facilitate the family’s mourning”.
More specifically, Catherine Ferland is also interested in the auction of souls, which took place from the 18e century in Quebec. It often took the form of an auction, which allowed the Church to raise funds to pay masses to the deceased, so as to shorten his time in purgatory. Catherine Ferland specifies that this practice is still current in different regions of Quebec, but that it is now mainly used to raise funds for the maintenance of churches.
In an interview, Catherine Ferland indicates that all these rites speak of “an anguish linked to what is after death […] Most religious systems are based on the fact that they brought an explanation to this great mystery”.
His book, of course, does not explain this mystery. Who will die will see, in the end… He is more interested in the way, throughout history, humans have taken care of the body itself and how they have experienced loss. “I try to see how, through the ages, human beings have tried to manage this anxiety by implementing all sorts of strategies, whether on the corpse itself, the future of the body that has been and which is no longer, or else on the soul,” she says.
hide from view
About the sarcophagi and coffins, in which it is customary to deposit the corpse, she thinks that “it is a confinement of the dead which aims to hide them from the eyes of the living during the process of decomposition”.
While many debates still continue on medical assistance in dying, certain entries in the book evoke the constant concern, through the ages, with “the art of dying well”, or ” ars moriendi “. So what is a good death? she asks.
“The dying man must remain conscious in order to be able to say goodbye to those around him: he receives his loved ones in turn, forgives old quarrels and pronounces words of appeasement. He strives to remain calm, because fear and panic may offer an opportunity for the demon to seize his soul! Dictating his will is also part of his preparations,” she wrote.
If the most diverse ways of marking human death have gone through the ages, Catherine Ferland notes what could be a new approach to the same anguish, a sort of modern erasure of mortuary reality. It is no longer uncommon, she underlines, that funeral ceremonies take place around a closed coffin and that the time of gathering around a mourning is shortened.
A deletion?
“Today, we look away to soothe this anxiety. Is it healthier or less healthy than what the people of the Victorian era did, who magnified death in an attempt to tame it? I do not know. They were in the demonstration. We are a bit in denial. But I find that it proceeds from the same mechanism consisting in trying to appease an anguish. »
Death itself takes on different faces, depending on the culture. The Angel of Death takes different names in Islam, in Jewish or Chinese tradition or even in Hinduism. In Western folklore, she often takes the form of an emaciated skeleton. And today, the image of the Mexican Calavera Catrina, a skeleton wearing a flowery hat, has become “the allegory of Death par excellence in Mexican culture”.