Death A User's Guide

Respecting the Dead Artifacts for the Afterlife You can't take it with you, it's said, but for millennia they did. The Neanderthals began the practice of putting goods in graves fifty thousand years ago, give or take the odd ten thousand years. As they were not the hairy, bulbous-browed knuckle-trailers of popular belief but members of the genus Homo sapiens with anatomically modern brains, it's reasonable to conjecture that, like the civilizations that followed, they thought that existence continued in some place beyond the grave, that a journey to get there was involved, and that the dead needed a few creature comforts to undertake it and to make the afterlife the good life when they got there. Not belonging to a consumerist society, the Neanderthals had little to give: food and drink, the odd flintstone ax, fire charcoals. Food, drink, and fire-lighting implements remained the staples in later history, but eating utensils, household items, clothing, and jewelry were added. Different peoples, not surprisingly, reflected their culture in what they considered essential. On a prosaic level, the Arctic Eurasians from Norway to Siberia send off their dead with the reins of a sled, fish, copious amounts of tobacco, and plentiful tallow--the Arctic Circle is generally a gloomy place. More fundamentally maritime races like the Scandinavians, the Anglo-Saxons, and the South Sea Islanders buried their elite dead with their boats, as did the ancient Egyptians, whose world revolved around the sacred Nile. The Twana Indians of the American Northwest seacoast also buried dead in their canoes, although they placed them in trees. Sometimes the Arctic tribes and the Scandinavians set their dead adrift at sea--alight in the latter case, as the Vikings especially rather liked setting things on fire--emphasizing that a journey was being undertaken. The practical ancient Greeks (copied by the Romans), assuming that you were likely to have to pay your way in the next world as in this, saw their dead on their way with a coin in their mouths to pay Chiron, the ferryman, who would row them across the river Styx to where they were headed. As a bit of contingency planning the Greeks placed honey cake or bread in the coffin as a bribe to the three-headed dog-demon Cerberus, who guarded the entrance to the underworld. Quite as practical as the Greeks, the Chinese also placed coins in the mouth of the corpse and cakes and bread in the coffin to ward off not Cerberus, but the pack of vicious dogs that awaited the dead--customs continued to this day. But living under a complex and corrupt bureaucracy as they did, and assuming that nothing would be different on the other side, they also placed jade, pearls, and gold leaf in the corpse's mouth. This was to bribe the officials, either in hell to secure their release or in heaven to buy a better class of rebirth on earth. And they still send their dead special paper money, drawn on the Bank of Hell, by burning it. There's a reflection of all this in the British actor Robert Morley asking for his credit cards to be buried with him. After his funeral in 1992 readers of The Times pondered in the letters page what they might appreciate most accompanying them on the other side. Heather Tanner of Woodbridge specified a good map. "I have immense trouble finding my way in this life," she wrote, "so I am extremely worried about the next." "A pair of earplugs," specified Sir David Wilcocks of Cambridge, "in case the heavenly choirs, singing everlastingly, are not in tune." Wrote M. L. Evans of Chester: "In the unfortunate event of the miscarriage of justice and several thousand years ensuing before my sentence is quashed, I will take a fire extinguisher." The prodigious amount of worldly goods that went along with the elite deceased in ages past included not only precious artifacts but also armor, weaponry, chariots, pets,Hickman, Tom is the author of 'Death A User's Guide' with ISBN 9780385337052 and ISBN 0385337051.