Special funeral
A special burial denotes a form of burial of individual deceased that deviates from the respective general religious , cultural or social norm as well as the treatment of the corpse before and during the burial. Occasionally, the term special burial is also used for an extraordinary burial.
Special burials differ in various properties of standardized burials, such as by the position of the people buried in the grave, it can meet the standardized in many cultures supine to prone position , (Engl. Prone burial) tied up , be weighted with stones. Special burials are often noticeable because of their location apart from the usual burial places such as cemeteries or grave fields . In the early Christian context, it was customary to bury or bury suicides on unconsecrated land outside the cemetery. The reasons for creating special burials are complex; they can be based on the fear of revenants , witches or vampirism . But they can also be understood as the result of a human sacrifice , the disposal of a crime victim or as punishment for a fellow human being who violated cultural or social norms during his lifetime. Occasionally there are also emergency burials in places deviating from the norm, where the deceased cannot be taken to a cemetery due to adverse circumstances, as in the case of Jan Spieker , who received a regular Christian emergency burial in 1828 due to the weather in a moor where he had previously had an accident.
literature
- Christine Peschel: Rule and exception: linear ceramic burial customs in Germany and neighboring areas, with special consideration of special burials . Leidorf, Buch am Erlbach 1992, ISBN 3-924734-27-5 (dissertation).