In the Western world images of death have overwhelming arisen from Medieval European Catholic culture. Death anthropomorphized in the form of a human skeleton first appears in the fourteenth century when the Black Plague sent approximately a third of Europeans to an early grave. In this context emerges the figure of the Grim Reaper, a skeleton wielding a scythe to harvest not wheat but human souls. While the Grim Reaper eventually became the iconic personification of death in the West, other skeletal representations of mortality emerged from Catholic cultures both in Europe and the Americas. In this chapter, we will explore through iconic imagery, the major personifications of death that have been imagined in Catholic cultures and touch upon the gender of death in art and icons. Since Catholic depictions of anthropomorphic death originated in Western Europe, we will first examine the main personifications of mortality there. The Reaper and his female Mediterranean counterpart, la Parca. How did death come to be visualised as a reaper and why in male form in northern countries and female in the Mediterranean? Not long after the emergence of the Reaper, Catholic artists and thespians began to depict death in similar skeletal form but with bare bones. La Danse Macabre appeared in the visual arts and morality plays in which actors, dressed as skeletons led the mortals of flesh and blood to their graves. Here we will focus on the leitmotif of these symbolic images which conveyed to Catholics the message of memento mori and served as a sign of societal levelling in which all meet the same end no matter their social status. Traversing the Atlantic to Catholic Latin America, conquered and colonized by the Iberians, we examine how images of death were transmuted in the New World, combining with Indigenous iconography and eschatology. Three regional folk saints of death, as we describe, resulted from the symbolic and cultural syncretism of the Spanish Grim Reapers and Indigenous death deities. Returning to question of gender, we will analyse the unique female personification of death, Mexican Santa Muerte, and her two male cousins, Argentine San la Muerte and Guatemalan Rey Pascual.

This chapter explores the religious and moral message expressed through the medium of vanitas art. In this chapter, I will focus on four kinds of seeing: first, the vanitas artists’ exhortation to look at their careful arrangement of objects; second, insights regarding life and death in Qoheleth, the preacher associated with the Book of Ecclesiastes, since it from this biblical source that the phrase ‘vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ is taken; third, the view of things opened up by the use of symbols, with a focus on symbolic vocabulary common to 17th century and contemporary vanitas art; fourth, an overview of the religious and social contexts which have influenced the beliefs of vanitas artists past and present: the cultural arenas which either accepted or rejected their moral message about human life and the transience of pleasure. Throughout, the line of my argument will be illustrated and grounded by reference to two 17th century painters and one contemporary Scottish artist. In finding comparisons and contrasts in these works, I will show that, while something of the moral and religious message of vanitas art remains across time, content and methodology have changed as religious and ethical sensibilities change, and as the power of media results in the instantaneous dissemination of images. I will conclude by noting the irony that a comparative study of past and present vanitas art reveals, not only the transience of human life, but also the lack of durability of a text in relation to its meaning(s). The work of the vanitas artist, I would argue, belongs in the chain of signifiers which inform and express the relationship between death and human desire at any given time. In a world in which visibility is equated with power, then seeing is believing. The eye of the beholder, however, is always restless.

Historians to date have sought to understand the visual, tactile, auditory and taste dimensions of historic funerary customs, and how these would have facilitated the social, emotional, and spiritual process of dying. However previous research has largely overlooked the role of smell in this connection. This chapter will therefore highlight and explore the olfactory dimensions of popular funerary customs in England, c.1850-1920. Employing contemporary antiquarian sources, and with reference to the anthropological, psychological and neurobiological literatures concerning the relationships between the sense of smell, emotion and religiosity, customs including the consumption of ‘funeral biscuits’ flavoured with caraway seeds (the sweet, woody smell of which reminded at least one commentator of a day-old corpse lain in its coffin) will be discussed. Even amongst the very poorest – and the normally teetotal – these biscuits were generally accompanied by port or ‘burnt wine’, which added alcohol, herb, and spice fumes to the distinctive olfactory admixture of a typical Victorian working-class funeral. At a time when the newly dead were normally lain out at home in an open coffin to allow for viewing, and before arterial embalming became commonplace, mitigating the malodour of decay assumed importance. While the saucerful of salt customarily placed upon the deceased’s chest symbolically warded off decomposition, absorbent bran and/or wooden shavings placed within the coffin would have played a more concrete role here. Similarly, the traditional custom of opening windows upon a death ‘to let the soul out’ would have played both a symbolic and very practical role in letting the dead go. Meanwhile the smell of the living, unwashed bodies of family, neighbours and friends pressed into small houses to view and ‘wake’ the deceased would also have been pervasive, mingling with freshly baked funeral cake and pipe smoke. Perhaps fortunately, sprigs of delicately scented ‘rosemary for remembrance’ might be provided upon entering the house. In connecting these antiquarian and other literatures, this chapter will illustrate how the olfactory aspects of religious and quasi-religious funerary customs constitute potent opportunities to make sense of the materiality-yet-immateriality of the dying and the dead, and indeed of death itself.

‘Smell’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘that property of things which affects the olfactory organ, whether agreeably or otherwise’. The ‘smell of death’ is undeniably not agreeable to humans. Indeed, students at a London medical school surveyed over several years, consistently reported that even the anticipation of the ‘smell of death’ was a significant factor in generating increased levels of anxiety and concern prior to entering the anatomy laboratory. Upon entering the lab and participating in human dissection for the first time, students then often comment on how relieved they are by the strong presence of the acrid chemical smell of the embalming fluid used to preserve the human donors. After death, the human body undergoes various chemical and physical processes, modified by biological and environmental factors, resulting in the breakdown of the organic matter of the body into its original elements. These processes result in the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The pungent VOCs originating from decomposing tissue are strong drivers of necrophobic behaviours. The avoidance of dead or injured conspecifics reported in insects, aquatic organisms and small mammals has been related to the idea that such avoidance has been selected for by the increased risks of predation and disease often associated with the presence of the dead. It has also been reported that humans can process the smell of putrescine (a VOC produced by the breakdown of fatty acids in decaying body tissue), which they process as a warning signal that mobilises protective threat management responses. In recent years there has been a substantial increase in the interest in VOCs due to their potential use in forensic science, in particular in the location of clandestine burials and the victims of mass disasters and in establishing the post-mortem interval, i.e., how long a body has been dead. This chapter explores the ‘smell of death’ and its application as a tool for the police and disaster workers in cases involving the dead human body, and it discusses how the scent of the deceased itself aids the process of returning the human body to its original elements.

Sitting on the cold, hard wooden pew in church, the space reserved for family – the sharp designation of my responsibility that day, watching your final performance from the coffin. I’d already choked my way through your eulogy, and I sit there in my wet and heavy grief as Kirsty MacColl’s rendition of ‘Days’ rings out through the speakers. My heart cracks down its middle and I know in that moment, I can never listen to that song again (Shadrack, J, pers comms, 2021). Performance autoethnography allows us to bring the world into play, to make visible […] in fits of nostalgia, to forge a link between myself and the world, the living and the dead, a reaching out to what seems to be ‘slipping away or transmogrifying into something harsh and loud’ (Stewart qtd. in Denzin, 2014, p. 89). [I must] make fleeting sense out of a world gone mad, and I need this because the world does not make very much sense to me right now. (Gingrich-Philbrook, 2013, p.609) When my mother died in 2000, two pieces of music were chosen for the funeral, as if her words and spirit were carried on through their performance in the church. I have often ruminated upon the significance of those pieces of music and how they impacted her death ritual. Kirsty MacColl’s ‘Days’ and Bizet’s ‘The Pearl Fishers’, (the Jussi Björling and Robert Merrill version), occupy vastly different emotional and psychological spaces for me, of love, of pain, of beauty, and of earth-shattering grief. I know I cannot listen to the MacColl song again; she would sing it to me on happier days, and I always knew she meant every word. The Bizet is different, perhaps because of the Italian words that I do not understand or perhaps because the harmonic counterpoint between the tenor and the bass, carry the emotional engagement that forges a space within it for hope and transcendence. My recollection for this chapter is framed through my autoethnography, to enable a rigorous structure for analysis that incorporates my grief, rather than requesting I sidestep it. Which I cannot do. Gingrich-Philbrook notes that ‘autoethnography works its territory between the orienting and disorienting story’ (2013, p.609) and when I hear these pieces of music, I am immediately interpellated into the liminal space that sits between; I am oriented and disoriented, I am between life and death, silence and hearing, the void and music. My mother reaches out to me through this music and sometimes this is ok, but most times it is not. What is it that I hear through their role in her life and death? This is my ‘deep, inner groping for meaning, and this self and its meanings are forever and always unfinished productions’ (Denzin, 2014, p.89). This chapter uses interpretive performance autoethnography to identify the epiphanic moments for data analysis whilst applying a musicological analysis to ‘Days’ and ‘The Pearl Fishers’ to identify how death and hearing are conveyed through my experience of them at her funeral and long into my afterlife.

Drawing on Douglas Davies’ theory of ‘words against death’ (2017) and Dr Monika Renz’ research into the auditive sensitivity of the dying (2015) this chapter explores the significance of sound, and the sense of hearing, in relation to death. It considers how words and sounds embedded within traditional death rituals bring comfort to both the dying and the mourning. Prayers, blessings, invocations, chants, hymns, and eulogies exemplify such vocalised ritual responses to death, all of which occur in some form across every human culture and religion. The sound of mournful crying, and the practice of keening, or wailing are powerful and emotional cross-cultural expressions of grief which universally communicate death without the accompaniment of liturgical music or words. Sounds associated with death can bring both comfort and distress to those who hear them. The final messages, voices and intonations, of loved ones can soothe those who lie ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1969:95) the threshold of life and death. Clinical studies have shown that hearing may be the last sense to function at end of life and that even when unconscious, the dying respond to different sounds, tones, and rhythms (Blundon, Gallagher, Ward, 2020:1). Conversely the gurgling sound of the ‘death rattle’ in the latter stages of dying, can be extremely distressing for relatives to hear. Finally, this chapter touches upon mythology relating to the sounds of nature as omens of impending death, such as the squeaking sound emitted by the hawk moth, the sound of a cricket chirping in a house, or the tapping of the death watch beetle (Cherry, 2011).

In this chapter I will explore the various meanings behind acts of cannibalism, the deliberate ingestion of human flesh. The use of the human dead as food made acceptable through ‘culinary ritual transformation’ (Classen 2012: 97) has occurred in numerous cultures, and for various reasons. Excluding dietary reasons born from extreme survival situations, there are many motives for ritual human cannibalism including cannibalism as acts of aggression, and as acts of compassion. Much of the ethnographic information which detailed this activity was mediated through a Christian lens and placed the act and the cannibalistic peoples, such as the Tupinambá of Brazil, as people religiously and morally opposed to the norms of the colonisers (Forsyth 1983, Bôas 2008). The Tupi regularly engaged in inter-tribal warfare where selective captured warriors were eaten, and as such cannibalism in this context (exo-cannibalism) can be considered an act of aggression against a foe. For the Amazonian Wari’ meanwhile, as well as practicing exo-cannibalism by eating body parts of their defeated enemies as a form of ritual abuse, the ingestion of parts of deceased members of one’s own community (endo-cannibalism) was also practiced, although here as a form of funerary compassion to help severe ties between the living and dead (Conklim 2001). However, the perceived binary division between Tupi and Wari’ acts of cannibalism is overly simplistic, and in this chapter, I aim to complicate this seeming duality. Further, I aim to complicate the perceived colonial notions that the ingestion of human body parts was morally opposed to colonial norms by exploring the early-modern European practice of medical cannibalism. Mummia, human flesh, was regularly ingested in early-modern Europe as a medical cure. The earliest extant evidence for this practice dates to the thirteenth century with the noted sixteenth century physician Paracelius (1491-1541), terming it the noblest of medicine (Noble 2003). A recipe for making a mummy oneself even appeared for the English Pharmacopoeia Londinensis by William Salmon (1678) and indeed it was not until the 1824 edition that corpse medicine no longer featured in this medical work. As such the literal taste of death is not so far removed from our own history.

Food and drink have played a fundamental role within the process of death and grieving since ancient times, when funerary feasts and the desire to sustain the deceased in his or her journey to the afterlife were a central component of the ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek civilisations. It continues to play an important part in the material world of grief and, though the types of sustenance and the rituals vary between cultures, religions and geography, food and drink is a universal constituent in how the living come to terms with loss. In this chapter, I explore the role that food and drink plays in death and mourning using examples from a variety of different world cultures and covering a span of differing time periods. It will highlight how some cultures care for the dead, whilst others remember them, and will highlight the role that food and drink plays as a ‘means of social bonding following a rupture in the community.’ Here eating and drinking is understood as a communal action that consoles, supports, and helps the bereaved with dealing with their loss. Food can also operate as a material conduit between the living and the dead. Whether it is the Sin-eaters of 19th century Wales, or the Mexican Day of the Dead altars whose food nourishes the dead, there is a sense that the living can help with the deceased’s journey and afterlife through food and drink. I will also explore how food and drink can provide a shared ritual space in which the bereaved come together to think about life, death, and life after loss, not just at the time of death but also as part of bigger celebrations of remembrance. In exploring the role of food in death and ritual practice in this chapter, we see how food and drink can fulfil many levels of human need. It can be nourishing, comforting, fulfil a spiritual necessity, be symbolic, evoke familiarity, and honour a culture or the deceased. Furthermore, food and drink become the medium through which communal, ethnic, and religious identities are formulated, conveyed, and reinforced.

Drawing on the continuing bonds theory of Klass, Silverman, and Nickman (1996) and the work of Dr Anna Fisk on knitting as a form of mourning and memory (2019, 2021), in this chapter I will explore the role that traditional handcrafting can play in continuing a relationship with a deceased loved one. As a crafter engaged in the study of death through the Death, Religion and Culture MA, I argue that crafts such as knitting, crochet and sewing offer a space for therapeutic, contemplative reflection surrounding a death and grieving process and that the use of these crafts can offer a capacity for memorializing and remembering our ancestors. The ritualistic aspect of these traditional crafts and the tactile nature, as well as history behind some of the items used within knitting, crochet and sewing offers a tangible and comforting facet to the grieving process. Finally, I will explore the historical importance of handicrafts, as well as the modern-day necessity for continuing these traditional crafts and the impact of feminism on knitting’s culture & prevalence.

Whilst sight may be the most recognised factor in the analysis of human remains touch will also play an important part in our interpretations and is paramount in the learning experience for osteology students. Both the look and feel of archaeological human skeletal remains will be dependent on a variety of factors. Taphonomic processes (aspects of the burial environment), such as how the body has been interred (shrouded or coffined), the geology of the cemetery site, rates of fluctuation in ground water, and disturbance to the site involving both cultural and natural (such as animal and plant action) processes, will play a part in the preservation of human remains. These factors will affect both how the remains look and feel in terms of erosion (to the external surface), weight (with demineralised bones feeling lighter), colouration and concretions (due to minerals in the soil and/or grave goods placed with the body), and the completeness of individual bones. The age of the skeletal remains, both in terms of how long the remains have been interred as well as how old the individual was when they died, will also factor into the preservation and therefore the feel of the remains. Pathological conditions that these once living individuals may have suffered from can also cause changes to the bones in life which remain apparent in their skeletal remains, such as loss of bone density, increase in bone formation, and deformation, that will affect the feel of the remains to those who analyse them. In this chapter I will aim to discuss these processes reflecting on how human skeletal remains are perceived through the sense of touch, illustrating how these processes create differential preservation, both between a range of cemetery environments and for individuals buried within similar environments, drawing on case studies from archaeological collections in the UK. I will also aim to address, using a questionnaire directed at recent students, how, when working with archaeological human skeletal remains for the first time, most people are surprised by the way the remains feel, and how the sense of touch becomes an important part of their learning experience.

Japanese Obon dance festivals date back over five hundred years to the Buddhist sutra of Mokuren (Mulian in Chinese), in which a son offers sacrifices to the Buddhist boddhisattva, Avolokitsvara, and can help release his mother from hell. In celebration of her release, Mokuren supposedly danced for joy, beginning the history of the Dance for the Dead festivals in Japan. When Japanese immigrants arrived in Hawai’i, they brought the custom of dancing Obon, and soon each Buddhist temple became known for its local traditions, dances, dress, and most importantly, its food. Now, in the summer months, Hawai’ian residents eagerly look forward to the various O’bon dances celebrated across the islands, visiting various temples, and purchasing the local treats while dancing in commemoration of the dead. This chapter offers a brief history of the O’bon tradition on the island of Oahu, Hawai’i, and then examines the more specific aspects of these dances at the Shinshukyokai Buddhist Mission through ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews. The annual Bon Dance at Shinshukyokai Mission follows O’Bon services for the dead, usually held the week before and after the dances themselves. The services honour the deceased ancestors of the mission, while the dances themselves serve as an extension into the broader community, serving food, offering entertainment, and helping to forge a network extending to the neighbourhood surrounding the temple. The preparations are extensive for the dance, and volunteer dance troops travel from temple to temple throughout the islands, teaching the traditional dances of the dead to safeguard the temple’s relationship to the community in such a way to strengthen its local Buddhist and Japanese identity.

This chapter will examine the concept of the Egungun, the practice of the living memorial, as a dance for the ancestors. In the ancient Yoruba tradition, Egungun-Oya is an orisha of divination. Egungun refers to the collective spirits of the ancestral dead. Egunguns are considered to be the children of the Orisha Oya, who is popularly known as the Orisha of extreme weather, examples being; lightning, heavy storms, tornadoes, raging waterfalls and earthquakes. She is also linked with funerals and cemeteries. This is part of her responsibility of carrying the souls of the dead and departed to the afterlife. In practice, Egunguns are masquerades where the body of a percipient performer is completely covered from head to toe by thick layers of cloth, who then proceeds to masquerades by parading in a festive community setting with musician and ritual guards with long sticks with whips to playfully clear a path for the occasion. The word Egungun literally means ‘powers concealed’; metaphorical with the dry bones of our ancestors. Egunguns are mobile, visually colourful, and performative displays of the departed spirits concerning our ancestors. They are seen as revisiting us periodically to remind the living, the importance of keeping the ancestors alive in the minds of our human community. The dance performance is an expression and practice of remembrance, celebration, and blessings as we realise the integrated symbiosis between the ancestor, the living and the unborn.

In this chapter I will critically explore the sense of decency in relation to death, specifically in relation to the display of plastinated human remains. Case studies utilising my perspective as a Funeral Director will provide experiential accounts which evidence the sense of decency in relation to death in practice and will be combined with related academic theory to facilitate the positioning of plastination in its historical context. Walter’s (2004) argument that plastination as a method of final disposal is accepted, but not in all forms of display, will be developed through critical exploration of the relationship between nudity and decency, and the importance of skin, when considering this association. The plastinates displayed performing a sexual act in the Berlin Body Worlds exhibition and the reclining pregnant woman in the London Body Worlds exhibition will be exemplified to inform this exploration. My experience in preparing bodies for display in the Funeral Home will inform the interpretation of my visit to the Amsterdam Body Worlds exhibition which will also be considered to develop this argument. Additionally, various religious and cultural practices of covering the deceased’s modesty will help contextualise the different interpretations of the sense of decency in death. Hertz’s (2004) theory that the human corpse has a wet and dry phase will be used to distinguish the key differences between plastinated specimens, bog bodies and bones for display. The elaboration of this theory will explicate how religious and cultural practices influence perceptions and in turn, affect the way human remains are displayed with perceived decency in different parts of the world. I will also argue that the plastination process transforms a corpse from a subject to an object and that plastinated specimens are in an eternal state of meta-liminality, a concept which draws on Turner’s (2011) development of van Gennep’s (1960) idea of liminality. By combining this development of theories with my professional experiential accounts, this chapter will provide a unique practitioners’ perspective of the sense of decency in relation to death and the necessary context required to understand the circumstances in which the display of plastinated human remains would be deemed decent.

In this chapter, we will explore death and the sense of decency in two sets of case studies; through the lens of dark tourism and Holocaust tourism, and through the disposal of human bodies considered Other with a focus on enslaved African people during the Slave Trade, and the tiny bodies of neonates in contemporary medical settings. Regarding the bodies of enslaved peoples, this will focus on Brazil, and Barbados and St. Vincent in the Caribbean. In Brazil records show that common graves were often used for enslaved Africans however, there were differences in terms of decency depending on where one died. In Olinda for instance, common graves mean side by side burials rather than a mass pit, and the given name of the enslaved person was recorded alongside personal information such as their marital status, place of birth and cause of death, although the inclusion of the slave owner’s name ensured that the recorded death was clear in assigning Other status. However, in Rio mass pits were commonplace and contemporary descriptions note they were more like a rubbish tip than a cemetery. In the Caribbean both archaeological evidence and burial records show that slave burials were not recorded, nor was body disposal in consecrated round. Despite enforced baptisms, enslaved Africans were routinely denied a dignified burial. The notion of what counts as worthy of a dignified body disposal can be seen in the treatment of human remains in the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and contemporary times through the ‘medical waste’ disposal of neonates below a certain age. These case studies raise issues beyond the sense of dignity within that time and space, to what makes a person worthy of remembrance, but also with the rise of dark tourism, where the line between fun tourism and respectful memory lies.

I am writing this during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Where once it could be said that Funeral Rhetoric and Rituals change slowly and that folk in the Western World deal with death infrequently, the whole world has now been impacted; death has been in our face since the Corona virus outbreak begun. How then, do funeral providers, experiencing the second-hand grief of others deal with the pressure of their work? In my own involvement within the frontline services, humour has often been an important coping strategy, a safety valve in extremis. We use humour gently as ‘words against death’, or manifest it in an extreme form, as ‘gallows humour’. This latter, a veritable blast of humour, reactive, cathartic and as Critchley suggests ‘context specific’ can be a vital resource for death workers; Berger says, ‘black humour defies the tragic’. This chapter explores the way in which the different styles of humour may be used by funeral workers, as coping strategies against dealing with second-hand grief or difficult situations arising in the workplace. I speak generally as a funeral insider of many years, about the stresses at work and how important effective transcendent humour (sometimes very dark) has been to those of us on the ‘funeral frontline’ and how it has been used by workers even in ways that may appear to be totally inappropriate or offensive under the rules of normal and polite society. Humour such as this is vital, but by nature subversive and dangerous if not contained within a tight group as argot. Pass that bottle of Corona!

In this chapter I explore how images of Death from Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal (Sweden, 1957) have been reproduced over time, illuminating aspects of the film’s approach to death as well as creating new meanings. The focus will be particularly on the ‘Knight Playing Chess with Death’ and its use in the work of contemporary British satirist and digital collagist, Christopher Spencer, known as ‘Cold War Steve’. Methodologically, the chapter investigates how traditional and emerging arts and technologies breathe new life into film images in a fascinatingly reciprocal relationship, examining the extent to which the film image, functioning as both a valued cultural form and semiotic referent, has the capacity to cut across boundaries of art and popular culture. The image is both fixed within its film context and constantly remoulded by its evolving external connections in a fusion of stasis and movement. Cold War Steve’s vast volume of work (recently collated in an online archive) emanates from the images he regularly posts on Twitter, and the chapter will also engage with related merchandise and follow-up tweets, where audiences discuss his work, plus national exhibitions in an array of external spaces. Anticipated broader outcomes of the chapter include providing a framework for looking at death satire: reconceptualizing values of art, artists and respondents within contemporary flexible contexts that are bridging gaps between traditional concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Also, I aim to unravel how far, during times of trauma, such as the current global pandemic, satire can act as cultural educator, or speak to the fears of the people. Further to this, I will scrutinize how far satirical humour and laughter might allow means of communication for the collective expression of fears and thereby act as a healing or empowering process – by negotiating ethical quandaries, governmental decisions, and actions, for example, or by confronting fears of death.

In 2019 a funeral service was held on the mountain which, until recently, had been covered by the glacier ‘Ok’ in Iceland – the first of Iceland’s more than 400 glaciers to be declared ‘dead’, with many more predicted to follow in the coming years. This event, and many other like it, can be seen as an expression of a sense of loss in the face of dramatic climate change and rapid species extinction. Through the concept of ecological grief, developed as an articulation of the ways in which environmental change effects mental and emotional wellbeing, this essay argues that mourning and memorialisation of the loss of land(scapes) is a complex assemblage of acts of mourning, ontological positioning, political statements, and activist practice. Building on the work of Burton-Christie (2011), Willox (2012), Butler (2004) and others, in this chapter I will explore how a sense of loss and the responses of grieving, mourning, and memorializing can shed light on relational patterns and existing value- and power structures while potentially also manifesting, embodying, and nurturing ethical relationships with the other-than-human environment. While translating existing death rituals, such as a funeral, to a climate change context and human – non-human relations might present its own set of problems and complexities, this essay nonetheless argues, with Burton-Christie, that a sense of loss can be seen “as part of a restorative spiritual practice that can rekindle an awareness of the bonds that connect all life-forms to one another and to the larger ecological whole” (2011; 30).

Throughout history grave goods have been gifted to the deceased as part of funerary ritual. Meaning behind the inclusion of objects varied yet were often part of mitigating the loss of the deceased, to both surviving individuals and communities. Myth intwined with ritual helped to prepare the survivors for initial detachment, and subsequent reintegration of the deceased in another form. This was often considered a transcendence of being, with bonds between the living and the dead evolving, yet continuing after death. Contemporary death practices have created distance between the living and the dead, leaving people bereft and adrift with their grief in an age where death has become unspoken, hidden, and medicalised. Historically, objects placed with the deceased were to prepare them for the afterlife or were visual indicators of the persons rank and status: often impacting the survival of those remaining through their loss. Modern uses of gifted objects focus on provision for the living, goods pertaining to identity, or life events of the individual, dominate in funerary ritual. In this chapter I will employ the theory of transcendence in coping with death by Chidester (2002), Ariès’ historical categorisations of death (1991), and Klass, Nickman and Silverman’s (1996) concept of continuing bonds, to consider how the use of grave goods in mortuary ritual can help the survivors cope with the loss of a loved one. The theory of continuing bonds by Klass et al provides an especially valuable insight into the healthy transformation of relationships through the process of death, and how grave goods can allow individuals to process the loss and readjust to a life without the deceased.