For the Love of God, by Damien Hirst

This is a diamond encrusted skull made by Damien Hirst. If you don't know who he is, he makes shocking, macabre, and expensive (like hundreds of million dollars, expensive) sculptures including lots and lots of contorted dead animals in formaldehyde. Apparently he's also the richest (or one of the richest) artists alive today.

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This particular beauty is called For the Love of God and is encrusted with over 8,500 diamonds, including a huge pear shaped pink diamond in the center of the forehead. It is a platinum cast of a real human skull and is was sold for a hundred million dollars. I wonder how the person (who died between 1720 and 1810) whose skull this is as casting of, and whose teeth are on the sculpture, would feel about this.


In my opinion, the existence of this sculpture, and the existence of Damien Hirst as a hugely wealthy, as well as controversial, artist says something about our fascination with, and our fear of, death. It seems that people are so disgusted by his works that we can't look away.

Jeremy Bentham!

I was very excited when (quite some time ago) Jeremy Bentham came up in lecture. I still remember learning about Bentham's "auto-icon" in the very first class I took at UVic, Philosophy 100, and being absolutely delighted. I'm not sure why, I just thought Bentham's wish to have his skeleton dressed up and displayed with his preserved head was hilarious. In case you don't know about Jeremy Bentham and how he related to this class, he was a philosopher of law (who had some pretty good ideas for the early 1800s,  I might add) who wrote into his will that his body should be used for educational purposes, and then his skeleton and head preserved and dressed up to be displayed at the University College London. There have even been a couple instances where Bentham's auto-icon was brought out to be present at milestone college council meetings (he was "present, but not voting").

Bentham's head has had to be replaced by a wax replica due to the degradation of the original. Additionally, said head has been the subject of student pranks and thefts (which I'm sure Mr. Bentham would have found amusing). The auto-icon is now kept locked in a display case.

I think that perhaps one of the main reasons why I appreciate/giggle at Jeremy Bentham's auto-icon so much is because (in my twisted mind anyway) it pokes fun at two things that I think people take much too seriously: death and the institution of higher education. Additionally, I think it's interesting that Bentham chose to have his remains put out there for everyone to see when it seems to be more common for people to want their remains to be hidden away.

Us and Death: Why the Disconnect?

Being the daughter of a mother who works in health care, I get some pretty frank discussion about getting old and dying - discussion that sometimes results with me yelling "Mooooom oh my god, stop talking! Seriously." I remember, when she worked with the elderly, my mother jokingly asking out loud before reading the obituaries "let's see whether I have any schedule changes for tomorrow." Now that she works in the ER, the stories are much worse. For a long time I wondered how the woman remains cheery and functional when she deals with death on such a regular basis (perhaps she's pocketing so-and-so's meds now and then?) She's seen a dead body -- I have never seen a dead body (aside from the sterile bones in the Anthropology lab, hardly the same thing).

"I touched a dead guy at work today, kids!"

However disturbed by my mother's dinner table conversations (the ones that taught me not to ask "so what did you do at work today, Mom?"), I have been considering something lately, maybe due in part to all the morbid blog posts I've been writing. Perhaps it's not that my mom is a little bit kooky (ok, ya she's totally kooky), but maybe it's our ideas about the dead that are disconnected from reality. Why is it that I get creeped out when she says that it was a patient's "time", or when she tells me exactly what she wants her funeral to be like?

These questions are ones that I have been mulling over this past semester. I think seeing death from an archaeological perspective has showed me that we (i.e. modern, western populations) have an unprecedented alienation from our dead. Our folklore, popular culture, and even our science tell us that the living and the dead should have as much of a divide between them as possible, and however unlikely it is that I will become a mortician any time soon I definitely see this disconnect as something that I wish were different. I feel that, if we were all more like my mother (It's like she's comfortable with the reality that everybody dies or something -- what a novel idea), then people would have a lot less to be freaked out about. Perhaps then we could live by the golden words of wisdom of 1970s Canadian rock band Trooper, "we're here for a good time (not a long time), so have a good time."

Buddhism, Cremation, and Impermanence

1325 CE depiction of the Buddha's death

This semester I took Religious Studies 200B: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Chinese Religions (fantastic course by Dr. Martin Adam, by the way - I recommend it). One day we were encouraged to attend a talk by author Tim Ward about his stay at Wat Pah Nanachat, an English speaking Buddhist monastery in Thailand for outsiders wishing to be introduced to monastic practices.

Since I'm mad diligent, I had my death blog on the brain and perked right up and started taking notes when Ward (an excellent public speaker) started talking about a particular experience from Wat Pah Nanachat that stuck with him. (For background knowledge, Buddhists usually prefer cremation because it symbolizes detachment from the self, among other reasons.)

The skeleton on display at Wat Pah Nanachat. Image source

In Ward's story, a female cancer sufferer who lived near Wat Pah Nanachat committed suicide and, as is customary in cases of suicide, was not permitted to be cremated (I promise I'll quit with the suicide posts, and no I am not planning on harming myself). However, since she was a particularly devoted Buddhist it was permitted, as it often is, for her bones to be cleaned and her skeleton to be displayed in the temple as a lesson on impermanence - in this case the impermanence of life.

According to Ward, a German monk at the monastery who had befriended the woman before she died volunteered to be the one to clean the woman's bones as a personal lesson on impermanence. In Ward's account the monk used his dinner knife, which he later cleaned and used in his meal preparation, to prepare the woman's bones to be displayed.

I think that this story was particularly interesting for the fact that the monk was coming from a western society, where the dead may often be treated as scary or dirty, and where many (if not most) people have never seen a dead person. However, he chose to have an experience that many westerners (myself included) would be absolutely traumatized by, one that might even be considered disrespectful. In fact, I'm certain that it would be impossible in our (western) society to find yourself in an instance in which you could legally do what this monk did.

Another thing that this story made me think about was how, to somebody who does not know what they are looking at, the display of the woman's skeleton in a monastery might signify that she was of some special, higher religious status. However, it's sort of the opposite. In actuality her skeleton is there because she did something that meant her body was given the second most preferred treatment. Additionally, an observer could tell that there is something significant about the skeleton, but many of the multi-layers of meaning that it holds for the living (i.e. the monk who cleaned the bones) are lost.

Aokigahara: Suicide Forest at the Base of Mount Fuji, Japan

And now time for some spooky business...

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The Aokigahara forest in Japan lies northwest of Mt. Fuji, and is known as the second most popular place in the world for people to commit suicide (after San Fran's Golden Gate Bridge). The forest, quiet and dark due to high tree density, is described by travel writer Zack Davisson.

On another note, large iron deposits under the forest mean that standard compasses usually don't work in the forest. I can't figure out why we haven't seen an awesome Japanese horror flick about Aokigahara yet.

Since the year 2000, the number of bodies recovered from the forest climbed from 70+ up to around a hundred a year in the Aokigahara until the government decided to stop releasing the statistics. Aokigahara's long association with darkness and death seems to have been perpetuated with author Seicho Matsumoto's 1960 novel Kuroi Jukai (or "Sea of Trees") in which the forest is a suicide location.

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I found the following podcast, from culture and lifestyle website Studio 360, to be an excellent introduction to the modern culture and folklore regarding Aokigahara forest. There's so much more to this place than I have the space to write and you have the time to read, so if you're at all interested definitely take a listen. You can even download it to your ipod so you feel all smart on your morning bus ride (as a side note, I think this podcast shows the depth and mood that can be conveyed without images when someone knows what they're doing.)



There is also a short documentary about the forest available here. I haven't watched it (not sure if I will yet, I think it depicts some fairly recently deceased individuals and I just don't think I'm cool with that sort of thing for my own purposes...but that could be a whole blog post of its own!), but if you decide to take a look then let me know what you think.

Perhaps Aokigahara bodies would provide a deep look into something that I haven't encountered all that much in archaeology - the archaeology of suicides. I think that these peoples' choices of "grave goods", location, positioning, and method of suicide would speak volumes about them and their personal values. Additionally, I think (and this is totally just my opinion) that both the idea of the Aokigahara, as well as perhaps the bodies that archaeologists would find, speaks volumes about the society that the deceased come from. In a nation that has been subject to rapid globalization over the past century, it it interesting that this is the time period when Aokigahara really became what it is today - a place of pilgrimage for people who intend to end their lives.

That said, I still don't think I would feel right about sending troops of archaeologists into the Aokigahara. These are often very recently deceased people, who likely have living family members and friends. Additionally, I think things become sticky when archaeologists try to do work at sites that are still in use, as Aokigahara clearly is. This area seems to be much more than just a place where people commit suicide, it is a place where people commit suicide because other people committed suicide there. In my opinion it serves the same purpose as a church, graveyard, or other spiritual site. I would argue that it has made something as solitary as suicide into a community action. I don't mean this in the sense that people are doing it together, but in the sense that people are choosing this location to end their lives based on a shared cultural significance.

Aaaaaaanyway, I'm getting depressed and I think I'm going to go bake cupcakes with faces, or use some Hello Kitty motor oil, or do something else to remind me that the Japanese aren't only about horror films and death forests.

In Recent News: 150 Roman Graves Under a Garage in Kent

Image source and original news article

In looking for Archaeology of Death news, I ran across this story about a recent find in Canterbury, UK. In short, while digging up an old garage in order to develop a housing area, workers uncovered approximately a hundred adult and child burials on the outskirts of what was once a Roman settlement. Archaeologists believe that the graves, since they are east-west facing, must be Christian.

Archaeologist Paul Bennett describes the complexity of the site, where there are layers upon layers of human structures since the burials were placed.

"There are lots of modern foundations here but lots of the old buildings have also survived. It is a very complex site, with foundations cutting pits which are cutting graves."

In my opinion, the complications and issues that the archaeologists, as well as the land developers, working at this site are facing provides an excellent manifestation of a lot of the concepts that we have approached in class (specifically in week 12: March 22-25). What was meant to be a fairly routine project of demolishing an old building to make way for housing development was temporarily halted by the discovery.

Archaeologists at this site were faced with a time frame of only a few days in which they had to excavate and safely lift a hundred graves from the ground. Furthermore, after this time period the area will be redeveloped for housing and it will be impossible to make any more observations of the original graves and the placement of the bodies in them.

I think that instances like this one are particularly interesting because they speak to our relationship with the dead. In this case, the discovery of graves was enough to completely halt the building project for a few days, but after that it was back to business as usual. This fits in well with something I've been thinking about lately regarding the treatment of the dead by modern western and westernized cultures and that is that our relationship with the dead is mostly one sided. I think we relate to the dead for our own purposes (eg. remembrance of happy memories of deceased family members, reverence of deceased celebrities, or knowledge of past peoples), but in most instances do not consider the dead active and conscious participants in this relationship. In the case of the burials at Canterbury their value is in their contribution to the knowledge base regarding Roman occupation in England, but beyond that our needs (to build houses) supercede theirs (to stay put in their graves). I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with this position, I'm just saying that in my opinion this seems to be a commonly held attitude.

Also, popular film has taught us that removing graves prior to housing development is the best way to avoid this.

*Click images for news articles cited and original photo sources.