Donkey funeral
|
This article was due to acute substance or form defects on the quality assurance side of the portal Christianity entered.
Please help fix the shortcomings in this article and please join the discussion . |
In the Middle Ages and early modern times, a donkey burial ( Latin sepultura asini , sepultura asinina , sepultura asinaria ) was understood to mean the dishonorable burial of a social outsider, usually a suicide . The term is derived from Jer 22:19 LUT : "He [the cursed, Jehoiakim, king of Judah] is to be buried like an ass , dragged away and thrown out of the gates of Jerusalem ."
Medieval judgment on suicide
According to the Jewish and later also the Christian view, suicide was a grave sin , because a person documents with it that he did not believe in the grace and goodness of God.
Among the Christians of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, suicide was an offense that not only caused great harm to the salvation of the person concerned, but also meant disaster for the community. According to popular belief, a suicide inevitably brought hailstorms, storms and drought over a village, and the dead suicide climbed out of his grave in the night as a revenant to torment the living, infect them with diseases and bring them to the realm of the dead. Anyone who came into contact with the corpse of a suicide became unclean and ran the risk of becoming an outlaw within the village or urban community.
That is why the corpse of a person who had hanged himself was usually cut off by the skinner or washer or even the hangman and taken outside through a window, the back door or the skylight, but under no circumstances through the front door, which only "honestly" died Was reserved for people. Otherwise the dead could find their way back into the house and cause harm to the living. Sometimes holes were even punched in the outer wall, which were then walled up again after the corpse had been removed to make it more difficult for the injured revenant to return.
The body of someone who had drowned could only be hauled out of the river with poles, hooks and nets.
The treatment of the corpse of a suicide
In the Middle Ages the dead suicide was subjected to regular court proceedings like a criminal, in which it had to be determined whether this person had committed suicide in order to evade another punishment, or whether he had acted out of desperation or out of “ melancholy ” or at the temptation of the devil . In the last two cases mentioned, the family could at least be spared the expropriation of their property and the desolation , that is, the destruction of the house. In any case, the body as the body was a living criminal to saddle Danger looped and "executed" there, and often hanging or beheading went wheels forward, were shattered in which all limbs. This measure was supposed to prevent the dead from climbing out of the grave in full physicality and taking revenge on the living. It was therefore not uncommon for the body to be tied up or pierced with a long hawthorn post and thus locked in its grave. A layer of thorns strewn over the dead could also serve this purpose. In any case, no Christian rites were allowed to be performed at the funeral. The dead was buried like a dead animal - just like a donkey. Often the corpse was also tied with the gallows rope and turned face down so that the damaging forces contained in it were diverted into the interior of the earth. If the suicide had been beheaded, the head was usually buried elsewhere or placed between the legs or on the feet of the corpse. Therefore, recurring suicides are often portrayed as headless horsemen or headless revenants in Western European folk traditions . Women who had killed their newborns and then committed suicide were often referred to as “headless Juffer ” in the Rhineland .
If the body wasn't buried at a crossroads or in the place of execution , or better yet, sunk in a swamp or moor , it could be put in a barrel and thrown into a river. Such a measure was referred to as “gutters” and was intended to move the sinful and therefore potentially harmful body as far away as possible from its previous fellow human beings. These and other dishonorable measures were only omitted if there were credible witnesses who confirmed under oath in court that the suicide had shown remorse for his act before his death .
Treatment of the corpse of a suicide in modern times
Post-mortem "execution" has not been carried out since the 16th century . In England and Scotland, however, until 1824 it was up to the justice of the peace whether he wanted to pierce the body with a stake and drag it behind a horse to a place suitable as a burial place outside of the inhabited area. The actual donkey burial, that is, the burial of the suicide without any ritual of a church burial and usually without the presence of a priest or other parishioners, became common. The burial took place before sunrise or after sunset and was carried out by the executioner or the gravedigger , who also had the status of an outsider due to his professional activity. In most parts of Western Europe, burying the suicide outside the cemetery was forbidden, but the burial was associated with all kinds of discriminatory ceremonies. In France, for example, the coffin was not carried through the cemetery gate, but lifted over the wall, being rotated several times as if to confuse the suicide and prevent him from returning.
Even in early modern times, the burial of a suicide in the cemetery was not accepted by the population everywhere. There are known cases in which the authorities had to enforce the proper burial by force of arms against the angry villagers. As a concession to the beliefs of the subjects, however, it was usually allowed that the deceased was not buried in consecrated earth, but found his resting place on the cemetery wall, often on the north side, which was traditionally regarded as eerie and "demonic". The stillborn and unbaptized children were also buried here.
Old ideas survive in the 20th century
Discriminatory forms of treatment of suicidal corpses can still be found in the 20th century. The grave was often fenced in with a low iron grille, or an iron stake was driven into the ground at the four corners. These customs are reminiscent of the once widespread fear that the suicide could return from his grave in the night as a revenant and would have to be held in place by spelling metal. In the Cotswolds of Central England , even before the First World War, people who committed suicide - as well as other dead people feared would return - used to place a long darning needle on the chest or press it into the foot before the body was lifted into the coffin.
literature
- Emile Durkheim : The suicide. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-28031-7 ( Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 431).
- Paul Geiger: The treatment of suicides in German custom . In: Swiss Archives for Folklore . tape 26 , 1925, ISSN 0036-794X , p. 145-170 .
- Dieter Feucht: Pit and pile. A contribution to the history of German execution customs . Mohr, Tübingen 1967 ( Juristic Studies 5, ISSN 0449-4369 ), (At the same time: Tübingen, Univ., Jur. Fac. Diss.).
- Bettina Hunger: The suicide funeral. From magical expulsion to psychology . 1995 (history and stories from the Basel area ).
- Craig M. Koslofsky: The Reformation of the Dead. Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450-1750. Palgrave, New York NY et al. 2000, ISBN 0-333-66685-2 ( Early modern History ).
- Nikolaus Kyll: The burial of the dead face down . In: Trier magazine for art and history of the Trier region and its neighboring areas . tape 27 , 1964, ISSN 0041-2953 , pp. 168-183 .
- Mary Lindemann: Poor and donkey burial in early European times, a method of social control. In: Paul Richard Blum (ed.): Studies on the subject of death in the 16th century. Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel 1983, ISBN 3-88373-035-1 , pp. 125-139 ( Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 22).
- Georges Minois : History of Suicide. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf et al. 1996, ISBN 3-538-07041-5 .
- Gabriela Signori (Ed.): Mourning, Despair and Contestation. Suicide and Attempted Suicide in Medieval and Early Modern Societies. Edition diskord, Tübingen 1994, ISBN 3-89295-581-6 ( Forum Psychohistorie 2).