The Fear of the Dead and the Dread ofRevenants

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hardly any information. It was thought that the purpose of cremation of the corpse was to prevent return, but the prevailing opinion currently is that it was a purification intended to facilitate the passage of the deceased into the beyond. Death is in fact a rite of passage whose primordial roots still survive in the word departed or in the viatic word (;viaticum) used to designate Extreme Unction. Burial and cremation coexisted for a long time, but since the end of the Iron Age, toward the eighth and ninth centuries BCEwe must remember that these ages did not coincide in the north and south (the northern region was noticeably behind)the dead were regularly interred beneath a tumulus or a mound. These mounds were solid: earth and good-size stones were piled on top of a wooden chamber framed by standing stones, as if it was necessary to prevent someone from leaving. If all we had were these archaeological testimonies, the fear of the dead would amount to a hypothesis, and for confirmation of it, we would have to turn to the primitive customs revealed to us by ethnology and anthropologythe preburial removal of flesh, for example, in which all the soft parts of the body were discarded and only the bones were interred.* But there are texts from the eighth and ninth centuries that confirm what archaeology allows us to presume. Proof of the Terror Inspired by the Dead "We possess extremely diverse testimonies from the Early Middle Ages to the nineteenth century proving that fear of the dead was no fancy. Even earlier, Tacitus left us an interesting observation about the mores of the Germans: "[T]he coward, the unwarlike, the man stained with abominable vices, is plunged into the mire of the morass with a hurdle put over
*As practiced in the fifteenth century, removal of the flesh essentially was used to facilitate the transport of cadavers. The bodies of Edward of York and the Count of Suffolk, slain at Agincourt, and that of Henri V, were dealt with in this manner, although in 1299 and 1300 Pope Boniface III had forbidden the custom. His successors granted the necessary dispensations.