Funeral Customs

What It's About

A survey of the origins and development of funeral practices, drawn mainly from British customs but with comparisons from around the world. The book opens with how nature deals with its dead, using the sexton beetle as an example. It then argues that most human funeral customs grew out of a fear of haunting and revengeful ghosts. Its fourteen chapters cover death warnings, coffins and grave-goods, suttee, wakes, mutes and wailers, bells and mourning, funeral feasts and processions, early burial places, churchyards and cemeteries, trees and flowers, body-snatching, plague, state funerals, cremation, embalming, and memorials, epitaphs and mourning cards.

Key Concepts

Puckle's central idea is that nearly all modern usages trace back to ancient pagan superstition, even where their original meaning has been forgotten. He covers the sin-eater, a person paid to take on the sins of the dead, and compares the figure to the scapegoat. He also looks at the rise of the undertaker and the commercial funeral trade, which he views with open disdain. Diarist John Evelyn's accounts of seventeenth-century funerals appear throughout. Puckle is strongly opinionated and often dismissive of the customs he describes, and he sometimes raises a subject without exploring it in depth. Modern readers will also notice some attitudes typical of a British writer of the 1920s.

About the Author

Bertram S. Puckle was a British writer of the early twentieth century. Very little is recorded about his life; he dated the foreword to this book from Richmond in 1926.