snow bones
funeral rites, incense, and baby teeth.
There is no practical purpose for burial. It would make more sense and take less effort to leave the body exposed to the elements, where the ecosystem cleans up after itself, but the living insist on hiding their dead.
We assume that Homo sapiens and their ancestors didn’t know about a rotting corpse’s potential for food and water contamination, so the act and subsequent ritualization of burial must come from a sentimental or spiritual place. Putting a body in the ground was only part of it— there were rites for when a member of the community passed on. Bodies were dusted in crimson ochre, heavily decorated with jewelry and tools and ceremonial clothing, and bent into certain positions on beds of flowers. Fires were lit around the grave and offerings were made to the deceased. Markers were placed on the grave so it can be found again. At one point in evolutionary history, so far back that we can no longer find it, we stopped burying people and started holding funerals for them.
Science can get us pretty far if we have remains. Our advancements in technology permit us access to the facts of a dead person’s life, age and diet and cause of death. Science cannot carry us into the realm of belief, though. We have no idea why we started burying our dead. We have even less of an idea why we started decorating our dead with things they weren’t going to use. Unless, of course, we thought that the deceased needed things after they died because they were going somewhere. The idea of an afterlife likely arose at a similar time that funerary rites did. If we continue down that road of assumption, spiritual beliefs must have been held previous to the advent of funerary rites, because a community would need to collectively agree on the treatment of a body relative to an afterlife for rites to come into play.
We can’t be fully sure if those rites were practiced because of a perceived afterlife, but if they were, it also implies the existence of something else— the soul. It’s unknown if early humans had a name for the soul or if it was just conceptual, but it’s the idea of something persisting after the body rots. It might live in the body, but once the flesh collapses, it’s able to continue into different forms and possibly even different realms. The body is decorated and equipped not only to show respect and care for that soul, but to prepare it for its journey into a new world.
You’re allowed to cremate a body with personal objects. As long as they’re not glass or rubber or a large piece of metal, the crematory operator will let you put a few things in the chamber with the corpse. Even when burial is taken out of the equation, we still find a way to decorate our dead— the little trinkets and tools they used in life have the opportunity to follow them to wherever they’re going.
I don’t even know what I would have wanted to be put in the chamber. Maybe the little beanbag lion that was on the dashboard, but that was probably launched out of the windshield and is either destroyed or rotting in a ditch now. The keys to the car are fucked. Neither of us wore jewelry except for the rings— I don’t know what they did with the ring. I can only hope it made it to the chamber.
Sometimes I wish they put me in the chamber, but even if it wasn’t against regulation, it’s far too late for that. The night air smells like carnival food and wood. I had to open a window— with all the candles, my room was starting to smell like fire.
You know, when you swipe your hand through a flame, you can feel something pushing back. It’s like passing through a membrane.
Caves were incredibly important to Homo sapiens. They were religious spaces. Cave art was not created casually, but as a holy communion. As far as we can tell, their belief system was based around the idea of a three-tiered cosmos, with the heavens on top, accessible by shamans or through dreams, the earth in the middle, and the underworld in the ground, accessible only through birth or death. The heavens and the underworld are two extremes on a scale of spirit to flesh, with the heavens being occupied by spirit without flesh and the underworld being occupied by flesh without spirit. Earth represents the meeting of the two. It’s the only place where you can get both meat and soul.
The idea that the first humans were made from dirt is something echoed throughout several creation myths. The Christian God made Adam from dust, Allah made Adam from mud, Prometheus shaped man from clay— the list goes on almost eternally. Religiously speaking, the origin of humanity is consistently thought to have a speck of the divine in it, as all of the dirt people were made either by or with help from gods, but the shape of the creation comes from below the ground. It’s difficult to say exactly how much the three-tiered cosmos belief played into those origin myths, but the flesh-soil connection is undeniable. And the early humans didn’t revile and reject the flesh the way that we do today— the flesh was seen as natural and sacred, and the only way to access that sacredness was by venturing underground. As Homo sapiens didn’t exactly have mining equipment, the only way to touch the membrane between the earth and somewhere deeper was through caves.
As a rule, painted caves were rarely lived in. Most of them are entirely unfit for human habitation. Some cave systems seem to have a sort of foyer where people ate and slept, but never for long— they stayed there briefly, but the caves were not dwellings and the art on the walls was not made from boredom. Typically, one has to make a long and difficult journey through the tunnels to even view the art, crawling on their hands and knees for long passages of time and inching along ledges. Unsurprisingly, we can only guess about why certain things were drawn on the walls, but many people— including Henri Breuil, who discovered one of Europe’s most notable selections of cave art in the Volp complex— connected it to spirituality. When Breuil reached the end of the caves in 1912, he found a drawing that he named “the Sorcerer”, and although he originally thought it was a depiction of some sort of shaman, he wrote in his journal that it must have been an early image of God.
Nothing can be said for certain about the Sorcerer or its place in Homo sapiens spirituality. The connection to God is not a difficult one to make, though— the Sorcerer is much larger than all the other drawings in that particular cave, and sits above them all like a commanding force. There is also evidence of spiritualism throughout the Volp complex, especially in the foremost chambers. Bones were burnt as incense. Flint blades and animal skin drums were both used as instruments.
We do not know the place that living things held in the three-tier system of belief. All we know is that the journey to touch the membrane was taxing, and they must have found something there to communicate with or they wouldn’t have kept going back.
Incense, mint tea, a journal, a margarita— it’s actually just margarita mix in sparkling water, but I don’t do alcohol anymore— a scientific magazine, a badly translated book about angels from the 1960s, two candles for light and one candle to be blown out. Set it all up and put it in the coffee cake. Make a wish. Happy birthday, baby.
About a week ago, I had a nightmare where I was trapped in a movie theater. The details aren’t important. All you need to know is the beginning, where I was staring at the walls and looking at the shadows of the screen move. Whenever I find myself in a movie theater, that’s usually how I end up watching the movie— excesses of light and sound and size give me headaches, so I stare at the reflection of the colors on the wall instead. I didn’t make the connection to Plato’s allegory of the cave until I dreamed myself doing it. I didn’t make the connection to the time I almost got lost in an ice cave until now because I had forgotten that happened. Nobody was supposed to go into those tunnels but I did. I’ve made smarter decisions, but I don’t regret it— the light moved through the trees and then through the ice, turning the entire world blue and collapsable.
You know me— I’ve never been able to kick the idea that whatever sort of reality we’re looking at isn’t what the world really looks like. Of course, there’s value in staring at the shadows. You can get a lot from a shadow. If we’re discussing life after death within the metaphor of the cave, I would imagine that ghosts are a type of shadow, a projection of light made digestible to the human brain.
I guess I’m still in that movie theater, in a way. I would’ve burned bones for you but all the bones I care about already got burned.
Ten thousand years ago, a baby died. These things happen— the baby was premature, and although it seemed fine at first, it passed away soon after it was born. This is a story that’s been told a million times through a million species of animals. Every group of creatures on Earth has experienced the premature death of a child.
The baby’s burial site was found in 2017 while an excavation team was working in an Italian cave. Analysis of amelogenin protein and DNA uncovered that the baby was female and belonged to the U5b2b haplogroup, a European genetic line. Histology of the teeth determined that the baby died forty to fifty days after birth and experienced stress in the womb. Its theorized that stress was caused by the mother, who likely underwent periods of illness, injury, or starvation— the baby’s teeth briefly stopped growing 47 and 28 days before she was born1.
The excavation team named her Neve. She was buried with her head facing west. She was not alone in her grave.
Despite her infant uselessness and her illness and her premature death, she was a valued member of the community. Her grave was filled with trinkets far older than she was, tools her hands would never learn how to use, and various other baubles and gifts. Her little body was wrapped in a shell-decorated leather cowl. Arma Veirana, the cave she was found in, is beautiful— the walls are marble and crossed by flowstone and the floor slopes upwards towards the middle like a raised dais, which is where Neve was found.
Her people loved her. Her grave wouldn’t have been so heavily adorned if they didn’t. Her community cried over losing her. Anthropologist Jamie Hodgkins, the project director for the excavation, cried over her, too— she had gone through a complicated miscarriage six months ago, and was just beginning the second trimester of a new pregnancy when they found Neve. Unearthing the tiny remains of fingers and baby teeth, stained brown from age and dirt, also unearthed a fresh wave of grief for a child who hadn’t been thought of in thousands of years.
Although Neve’s body is no longer where it was found, she sleeps on, facing the setting sun like she’ll be able to experience the twilight of her life one day.
If love could’ve saved you, you would’ve lived forever.