Stephen Prothero Purified by Fire, A History of

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.The functional equiv-alent of burial, cremation minimized the ritualization of death.Scatter-ing was merely the quickest way to return what remained of thephysical body back to earth.If cremated remains were scattered sufficiently widely (for example,on the ocean), the dead person was quite literally displaced.This dis-placement of the dead satisfied early cremationists both theologicallyand practically.From a practical perspective, the dematerialization ofthe dead, who via scattering disappeared with nary a trace into nature,made postmortem memorialization difficult if not impossible.At leastin cases of widespread scattering, there simply was no place to go tomourn obsessively, and there certainly was no body left to “listen” to146Bricks and Mortar, 1896–1963your prayers or “see” your tears.Scattering was also economical, inso-far as it obviated the needs for an urn, a columbarium niche, and per-petual care.Scattering was equally efficacious from a theological per-spective.More than any other method of disposal of the ashes, it was inkeeping with the view that personal identity resided in spirit.Crema-tionists regularly complained that the emerging embalm-and-bury re-gime, by lavishing undue attention on the material husk of the deceased,amounted to “spiritual materialism.” Scattering ashes to the wind, onthe other hand, wonderfully exemplified the belief that the real personhad already passed into immortality.He or she was to be rememberedspiritually, not attended to materially.Cremationist logic may have initially demanded scattering, but eventhe early cremationists were not always entirely logical.Though it mayseem odd for a lot so passionately opposed to burial, many saw to it thattheir ashes were buried in cemeteries, and over time that practice becamecommonplace.At the crematory at Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery at theclose of the nineteenth century ashes were usually buried.In fact, Grace-land officials could think of only two cases of scattering.Early in thetwentieth century the Massachusetts Cremation Society estimated thatout of the first 2,500 cremations in its Forest Hills crematory, ashes hadbeen scattered in a nearby pine grove in only 200 cases.(In “many in-stances” they were buried in a cemetery.) At the close of World War I thecrematory at Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee was burying ap-proximately half of its ashes.Burying ashes was also the norm aroundthe same time at the Detroit Crematorium.In the early 1930s W.B.Cur-rie of Chicago’s Oak Woods Cemetery conducted a study of thirty cem-eteries in the Midwest.Most of Currie’s respondents did not keep rec-ords of the disposition of their facilities’ cremated remains, but thosethat did reported that 11 percent of cremated remains were scattered, 11percent were placed in a columbarium, and 8.5 percent remained withthe undertaker.A significant portion (29%) were kept at home, but themost popular option (31%) was burial.Cremation was “not intended todo away with any of the sacred ceremonies attendant upon burial,” ad-vocates of urn burial pointed out.Apparently, among the “sacred cere-monies” slotted to endure was burial itself.38The trend away from scattering and toward some other form of me-morialization must have pleased the nation’s undertakers and cemeterymanagers, who vehemently opposed scattering.The emphasis on me-morialization at a sacred site therefore simultaneously accommodatednot only traditional Christians, for whom scattering was a scandal, butThe Memorial Idea147also death professionals, for whom it was an economic threat.It alsohelped to commend cremation to women, who were historically incharge of tending to the graves of kin and who may also have beenslower than men to give up the traditional psychosomatic conception ofthe person for the utterly spiritualized self.Whereas the first generationof cremationists saw incineration itself as a method of disposing of thedead, the second generation was coming to view cremation (much asothers saw embalming) merely as a method of preparing the corpse forits final disposition.No longer a substitute for burial, cremation was be-coming a prologue to it.The Memorial IdeaAs the American cremation movement shifted from the social reformagenda of the nineteenth century to the business agenda of the twen-tieth, a great silence fell over the cremation question.By the mid-1890smost newspaper editors had decided that ordinary cremations were nolonger newsworthy.All three leading cremationist publications hadceased to be, and many of the pioneering cremation societies were de-funct.The cremation movement was now in the hands of practical busi-nessmen.For the first two decades of the twentieth century, those busi-nessmen had focused on building and operating crematories, notspreading the good news of cremation.Moreover, the CAA had assidu-ously followed a no-propaganda policy.Because many members werealso cemetery operators, the CAA was intent on promoting cremationwithout disparaging burial [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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