Killing the Dead

For the living to feel safe and secure, the dead have to die twice.

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Mourning is about much more than real biological death. It is also about laying someone to rest symbolically. When someone dies, we often behave as if they are not entirely dead. We talk in whispers around a coffin or grave and are careful not to malign the dead with malevolent or disrespectful remarks.

The burial rites studied by anthropologists show the same precaution: every measure must be taken to ensure that the dead don’t return to take vengeance on us. Heavy coffin lids or stones tied to the body, the breaking of leg bones to keep them immobile, charms and amulets to deter their attacks, and a whole range of sacrifices and tokens have this palliative, protective function.

Precious objects are often buried with the dead to make sure they are kept happy and distracted, and the custom of binding the limbs of cadavers—once understood as a sign of ritual murder—is now seen, most probably, as a measure taken to ensure they don’t return. Burying possessions is less a mark of devotion and respect than a warding off.

Many cultures require that the body of the deceased does not leave the house it died in through the main door, as this would allow it to return. It must leave through a specially built hole in the wall, which is then swiftly resealed. In some rites, mourners run in a zigzag pattern away from the grave so as to dodge the ghost of the departed. Anecdotal evidence has it that some Indigenous cultures saw the arrival of white men as the return of the dead, for the reason that they seemed so eager to kill people and cause harm.

At the same time, our culture is full of stories, books, and films about the dead never quite dying, from the ever-popular cycle of zombie movies to the endless tales of ghouls and vampires. This animism ascribed to the dead is yet one more sign that, at some level, we believe the dead are always just about to come back. To stop this, the undead need to die; and besides the figure of the greedy, blood-sucking vampire, we also find the sad, world-weary vampire who longs to be properly put to rest.

Killing the dead is central to many other aspects of popular culture. Is there a single major Hollywood film nowadays in which the villain only dies once? Even if the story has nothing to do with horror or science fiction, today’s bad guys will invariably get shot, stabbed, burnt, drowned, or thrown from some great height, yet this first “death” does not end up killing them. They always come back a bit later to threaten the heroine or hero and so have to be dispatched a second time.

Rather than seeing this as a cheap ploy to excite suspense, why not recognise the basic mechanism of laying to rest: for the living to feel safe and secure, the dead have to die twice.

Real biological death is thus different from proper, symbolic death. The anthropologist Robert Hertz documented the discrepancy here between mourning and burial rites. Many peoples employ rituals that address this separation, holding a second burial ceremony when it is judged that the deceased has reached their true destination and is finally at rest.

Greek tragedy is full of references to the fact that biological and symbolic death do not always coincide. For symbolic death to occur, the dead must be banished and kept at bay. They must take up a place in the world of their ancestors, or, in a more general sense, in the world of the dead. Some peoples will draw a circle around the dead to contain them, imploring ancestors to accept them and keep them there. The dead become relocated to a new role and function within the social group.

We find the same split in the Christian tradition. A major problem for Reformation thinkers was the question of what happens between death and the Last Judgement. Is the soul awake and active during this time, or asleep? What kind of life exists between these two poles? Could the soul even cease to exist as an independent entity after the death of the body? These debates show how biological death and laying to rest are never the same thing. The standard idea that the soul leaves the body at death to reside in the spiritual realms of heaven, hell, or purgatory—where it will await the Last Judgement—proved intolerable to many thinkers, as it left so many unanswered questions. What was asleep, and what was really dead? Was there a difference between extinction and a temporal pause in existence? Could the soul experience a syncope?

The distinction between real and symbolic death is perhaps confused for us today by the fact that, so often, the order seems reversed. Rather than biological death preceding symbolic death, it is as if the symbolic death often comes first. Deathbed scenes used to take place in homes and in the community, but today they increasingly take place in hospitals. The chances of someone dying in their community today are fewer than one in five. Isolated from their usual infrastructure and kept alive by a variety of technological and pharmaceutical means, the sick person dies symbolically before their body actually gives up the ghost.

Once they are dead biologically, on the other hand, rather than being laid to rest symbolically, there is an ever-increasing effort to keep the dead with us. Immediate destruction of the dead person’s possessions would seem odd in our culture, but not in many others where it is widely practised. Whereas in some cultures all the objects and mementoes of the dead person are destroyed, in ours we have a habit of keeping them.

It is as if by letting go of the objects we are letting go of our memories of the person. Even the images and voices of the dead are retained. Internet remembrance sites offer a kind of living memorial, where we can see and hear the deceased. TV shows commemorate dead celebrities, and a vast industry of remembrance has emerged in our time. There is less of an idea today that a line must be drawn between the living and the dead, and we are encouraged to maintain a closeness to the departed.

It is interesting here to see how much false information circulates about how non-Western societies mourn. We are told that, in African or Asian cultures, the dead are continually among the living, and that it is only in the West that the dead are forgotten. But this is largely untrue. A shared characteristic of many non-Western mourning rites is precisely their effort to banish the dead. They are no longer to inhabit the world of the living but must be kept at a distance. Alterity with the dead replaces continuity.

On the other hand, the dead are not forgotten in these cultures, since the social group registers their disappearance. The rituals inscribe loss within a community rather than as an individual experience. Funeral rites have this function: to turn the dead, restless being into a proper ancestor. As anthropologists have observed, the whole presence of ritual is to demonstrate that the dead do not automatically become ancestors.

After mourning and burial rites, social structures change, and formal rules govern the relationship of the new set of ancestors to their descendants. The key is that the dead are installed in the ancestral line: their rights and duties are redistributed, functions reallocated. Filiation matters here rather than continuity. The dead are not present via communication with the living but through a reordering of the social group.

This reordering always involves a separation of the immediate, everyday world and the symbolic, artificial space of culture, which is perhaps why so many mourning rituals include inversions of conventional social practices: kings become servants, men become women, children become adults for a day. When Westerners speak casually about the “childish” belief in ghosts and communication with the dead in Indigenous cultures, they may actually be talking about their own culture, where separating the living and the dead is often felt to be cruel and unnatural. Should that line be drawn—and if so, how?

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