Humanity - the creature that buries its dead
By Mark Vernon on Wednesday, August 27 2008, 08:12 - Religion - Permalink
The word humanity ??" humanitas in Latin ??" apparently derives from the word humando, burying. To be human is to be a creature that buries its dead.
Burial might achieve many things. It might be an attempt to humanise death by dealing with the dead in a ritual way. When the coffin is lowered in the ground the words earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust are spoken: its an enactment of origins and ends, the completion of a life. The Hebrew for Adam, adamah, is a pun on the word for soil, so burial might be an ancient remembrance of creation, the gift of being alive.
Maybe too the word carries a memory of an old kind of human consciousness, when the experience of being alive was different. To be buried is to become earth, and the modern mind tends to think of this as a blunt statement of fact: with death, we become food for worms, no longer an animated body. That understanding of burial emphases humanitys difference from nature, if a difference that is strictly time-bound.
But maybe the pre-modern consciousness was not of difference but of participation, as Owen Barfield puts it: nature thought of as humanitys garment rather than its stage. To bury, then, was to enact such participation. It was not an act of shock, to help mourners realise what had come to pass. It was an act of comfort ??" for dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return. For humans, to be buried is to be finally at home.
Comments
I was curious about the burying connection, so I did a quick search and came across the following blog entry from a student of linguistics. It states that there is a connection based on common derivation from a term associated with "earth", but that human is not directly derived from humando.
wishydig.blogspot.com/200...
Strange that our name for ourselves should be Earthlings... Anyway, maybe burial is also to do with our origins as cavemen. Maybe humans are those who live in houses, and we put our dead in crypts because those are the houses of the dead. The dead were often buried with household goods and trophies, notably in pyramids but even holes in the ground covered with stones are not unlike the houses that we all used to live in, holes in the ground covered with sticks... What is also interesting is how we live on top of our ancestors, as cities grow up much as woods and moors do. Burial of the dead is just the way of things, cf. fossils.
Whether or not "human" comes from "humando," your post made me think of a more figurative interpretation of "burying." For it seems to me that one of the inherent aspects of the human condition is that the real us, who we really are, is buried beneath our conditioned/constructed ego-self. I think the ideas of death, burial, breaking out from under, directionality in life and death, all make interesting food for thought, especially when mixed together.
Mark, Not all cultures bury the dead. The Indians use cremation. Some native-Americans leave the bodies out to be eaten by vultures and nature at large.
I would say that the reason Christians bury their dead is because of the belief in the "resurrection of the dead".
Such a possibility being of course absurd and it also reflects a culture which reduces human identity to the meat-body scale of being-existence only---when you are dead you are dead. And which also denies the concept or possibility of the process of re-incarnation however that is envisioned. The concept of re-incarnation was once part of some streams of early Christianity until it was made into a "heresy" by the dominant power faction(s) that became the "official" church.
And what if we always already, and in each moment, even now, immortal light beings.
Which is suggested or pointed to by E=MC2 and the writings of quantum theorists who elaborated upon the cultural implications of that equation.
Where then is our "home"?
Thanks for the comments. Interesting.
John - I did wonder about about the other traditions that don't bury their dead and perhaps should have added that for one thing, the humando derivation is pre-Christian (so not I think linked to belief in the resurrection of the death, whatever you make of it). But actually probably stretches back into distant pre-history - maybe even before language, language just picking up on the connection. For example, it seems that probably Neandertals buried their dead. If so, the link is very deep indeed.
As a heads up, the Hebrew word for "Adam" is simply "Adam," not "adamah." "Adamah" means "earth/soil." The word play still is there, you just mixed it up a little.
To speak to your overall theme, it might be interesting to note the occasional use of the word "kever," which means "grave," as a euphemism for "womb" in rabbinic sources.