The time when we visit cemeteries is a time of encounters - both with our deceased loved ones and with the living who visit them. These encounters have been present in human cultures for thousands of years, as have customs related to burial and commemorating the dead. We talked about the earliest known rituals, their probable significance - both for the deceased and for the living community - and their traces in the modern world with prof. dr hab. Andrzej Piotr Kowalski from the Department of Polish Ethnology and Historical Anthropology at the Institute of Anthropology of the University of Gdańsk.

Karolina Żuk-Wieczorkiewicz: Funeral rites, a way of communing with the dead, with ancestors, have been part of human culture for thousands of years. It seems that such rites were already present among Neanderthals, doesn’t it?

prof. Andrzej Kowalski: Yes, that's true. There are Neanderthal graves known throughout Eurasia. In the most spectacular ones, the remains of the deceased were placed and sometimes even sprinkled with a special mineral: red ochre. This is explained by the fact that ochre was supposed to prevent the corpses from being treated as lifeless, pale and insipid. Perhaps they wanted the substance that is blood to continue to circulate in the bodies of the deceased in some way, and sprinkling the body with red dye was supposed to make the deceased show signs of life in some way.

- What else was found in Neanderthal burial sites?

- They were specially secured, for example, with a stone enclosure. There is a child's grave from Asia, from the Teshik-Tash site, where mountain goat horns were placed. It is believed that they may have played a magical role, that is, (as sharp objects) to protect the burial from the influence of evil forces. Of course, these are ideas attributed by archaeologists and religious scholars, which we later encounter throughout the long millennia of burial history. However, the oldest ideas concerned the deceased, who, although they die, do not completely leave us. They may go away somewhere, but it is not as if they disappear. I would call it a kind of ‘otherness’.

There is talk of the idea of a ‘living corpse’ (Latin: defuncti vivi). It was assumed that the deceased had the same needs as the living - that is, they needed food and clothing - so they had to be provided for accordingly. Sometimes these are referred to as grave goods, but they are not gifts, rather equipment which, it was believed, simply belonged to the deceased, as is the case in certain special situations in the community of the living.

- What situations are we talking about?

- I am thinking here of various kinds of celebrations - when we dress up and feast. All these material accessories also found their way into the grave, because the occasions were similar. We refer to funeral rites as an example of a category of rites called rites of passage. They are associated with a change in a person's status, place or role in social life. In order to make this change, a person must go through the appropriate rites. Similarly, the deceased must also be treated appropriately.

- Is this where funeral rituals come from?

- Yes. Funeral rituals are one example of a rite of passage, i.e. leaving the world of the living and moving to the world of the ‘otherworld’ of the deceased. However, the perception of the deceased in ancient times was completely different from that in the modern, materialistic world. Those ancient people, living thousands of years ago, presumably did not assume that the deceased simply ‘annihilated’. They still exist in some way.

- I understand that rituals associated with the dead have changed over the centuries. Which elements are the most enduring?

- One of the most enduring elements is, for example, that the deceased lies on a deathbed. It is worth noting that even the names for death in the ancient languages of European or Indo-European peoples show that there is a certain fluctuation, a certain similarity between words referring to death and illness. The deceased was treated a bit like someone who had fainted and still needed help.

- So this ‘help’ to the deceased had a material dimension?

- Very much so. Just like mummification in ancient Egypt: it was an attempt to react to death and tame it, based on the belief that as long as this physical life, materially available to us, continues, so long does this person live and is present. And just as actions are taken to keep the deceased person, especially their body, in a state of non-decomposition, so too did leaving food or drink for the deceased have a similar character. We say ‘to feed oneself’, which actually means ‘to revive oneself’, to do something that serves life. I think this is a very old association, and in many languages, including ancient ones, we have similar semantics.

- You mentioned language. I understand that language research is used in some way to interpret archaeological findings?

- Archaeology is a silent science. Finds do not speak for themselves. We can try to reconstruct, of course, at a certain level of generality and with a sufficiently critical attitude, the ideas and views of our ancestors, drawing on the monuments of their language. Entire groups of vocabulary are reconstructed, for example, those related to dying or burial. On this basis, we can try to reconstruct ancient beliefs about what death is.

- And what (probably) is death according to ancient beliefs? What can we try to deduce from language?

Death is a kind of slow fading away. The word for death itself is very old. We have the Slavic ‘mrzeć’ (to die), but also ‘zamorzyć kogoś’ (to kill someone); in addition, we have ‘mór’ (plague), ‘pomór’ (death), and even “mrok” (darkness) or ‘zmrok’ (twilight). Therefore, death concerns many phenomena in our lives or in our environment, including physical phenomena such as the fading of light: dusk. Looking at death through the experiences of our ancestors, which have been remembered in their language, we see that it is a process that affects virtually all of existence in its various forms. So what disappears, what loses its clarity and intensity, is death. The root mer, which is contained in the words ‘die’ and “darkness”, can also be found in the Greek word ‘Morpheus’. Morpheus is the one who appears in some form. This is the Greek word morfe, meaning form. Some believe that it refers to some outline, some shape of a figure that is becoming less and less distinct. And the limit of this distinctness, if it is completely blurred, is precisely this ‘mer’, darkness, death. Perhaps attempts to ‘save’ the physicality of the deceased's body were connected with attempts to protect it from disappearing.

- How have death rituals changed throughout history?

- A very interesting and important change in this area took place in Europe around 1300 BC. At that time, cremation, the burning of the body, became widespread across a large area of Europe.

- Where did this change come from?

- We do not fully understand this change. There are several explanations suggesting that perhaps the dead were once worshipped by burning fires, and the corpses that caught fire from these fires were burned. For me, the most convincing explanation was proposed by French anthropologists of antiquity. They compared the cremation ritual, recorded, for example, in Homer's poems, with sacrificial rites. As we remember, Prometheus outwitted Zeus by giving him bones wrapped in fat - from then on, these parts of the sacrifice were to be given to the gods, and the meat was to go to the people. The researchers noted that no transgression had taken place here.

- Why?

- Because Prometheus maintained certain classifications characteristic of these ancient cultures. Namely, the gods are immortal. They are therefore entitled to the part of the sacrifice that does not easily decompose: fat, bones and smoke. On the other hand, what is bloody, i.e. meat, which spoils easily, is left to humans. In this way, the sacrifice maintains the division between humans and gods. The only difference is that in the case of cremation, these signs are reversed. Now the gods receive the corpse, i.e. what decomposes, and humans are left with ashes and bones, which cannot be further reduced physically. One could say that, in a way, they contain immortality. Perhaps this is a new answer to the question of death (in this era of cremation), of disappearance, of the dying that I mentioned earlier. There is a certain inversion of the sacrificial rite that we had in the myth of Prometheus, a reversal of signs: what previously belonged to the immortal now remains as a memory for humans. This is a new quality - and it is being accepted in Europe.

Of course, there are other interpretations. Some say that the living dead were feared as beings who were extremely troublesome after death, perhaps coming back as vampires, strzygas or strzygons to torment people if their needs were not met. But when you burn it, it will no longer have any ‘physicality’ - at least not like a skeleton, on which you would have to perform some anti-vampiric procedures.

- You raised the subject of return. On the one hand, we talk about communing with our ancestors - in Christianity, for example, we have the communion of saints, and there were also customs associated with Dziady, where the souls of ancestors were invited to celebrate together - and on the other hand, we have the deceased, whose return we fear.

- The ambivalence is evident. If we look at it historically, we can see certain common elements among different European peoples, such as the Celts, Germanic peoples and Slavs. The oldest ideas associated with the dead and the afterlife are very unsystematic. What seems to be common is the concept of the grave: the tomb, the burial. This is where people gather, as exemplified by the Slavic Dziady, celebrated several times a year, always in cemeteries. The grave is therefore a place that, to some extent, shapes the image of the world beyond it. It is a bit like stepping out of our temporal, ordinary time and place for a moment and, as a ritual community, entering ‘the scenery of that world’ in a certain way. These are encounters on the border. The spirits arrive and we feast with them. The same is true of the Germanic peoples. For example, the Goths had ‘witches’ who were experts in the mysteries or secrets of the grave, as well as necromancers, most likely those who contacted the dead through their physical remains and tried to read something from them. Among the Celts (at least the Irish), we have sidh, or places where the dead would gather. And there is a period, a kind of open time, when contact with the dead is facilitated: one can communicate with them and even coexist with them. That is, feast with them. This aspect of feasting (from ‘to honour’) is very important.

So, to sum up, the common element of these earlier cultures is the grave, which is a place where the community consolidates. There are no specific ideas about the afterlife or the afterlife. This is a later, medieval vision, very often motivated by Christianity.

- So the grave is the basis?

- Yes, there must be a cemetery, a grave, a tomb. You don't summon a spirit just anywhere. Germanic, Celtic and Slavic traditions have a lot in common in this respect. It is worth noting that in these cultures, the deceased was buried not so much for their ‘future good’ in the afterlife, but for the good of the community of the living. The point is that this community should have the opportunity to perform rituals or hold meetings that may serve its good, e.g. so that the deceased would magically act for the good of this community. And that is basically what the grave is for: to provide a place for meetings and communication. Even if someone died somewhere in a distant country, so-called cenotaphs (Greek kenotaphion), symbolic graves, were made so that contact with the deceased could be established.

- This is somewhat reminiscent of Christian prayers, requests for intercession.

- The saints of the Catholic Church are still attributed with some kind of influence, intercession, which may be an archaic feature. Of course, theologians may have their own explanations, but as an ethnographer, I can point to certain elements common to other cultures.

- We talked a little more broadly about Europe, but what was it like in Poland?

- The first graves of agricultural peoples that we find are associated with the so-called ribbon ceramics culture. Entire clans lived in long houses, several dozen metres long. In this culture, there were no separate cemeteries, and the dead were buried under the floor. So these people had their dead close to them. This is somewhat reminiscent of Chinese customs. Only with time did separate cemetery sites begin to emerge.

The word ‘cemetery’ (which comes from the Greek koimeterion, from the Indo-European word ‘to lie’) meant ‘we lie together’. This is reminiscent of giving someone accommodation and feasting again - remember that the Romans feasted lying down, which ensured better contact with the ground. These separate places of ‘lying together’ are only noticed in the later Neolithic period.

In turn, around the fourth to third millennium BC, impressive graves began to appear in Poland, associated with the so-called funnel-beaker culture. Impressive stone structures, called megalithic, were built. These tombs are several dozen metres long and resemble the trapezoidal outline of the houses of early agricultural peoples, except that usually only one person is buried there (which indicates the beginnings of social stratification). This is an interesting approach to immortality. It seems to me that these people believed that the stone used here as a building material for the tomb had some kind of resistance, indestructibility, and that the deceased was to merge with it, that this ‘indestructible’ particle was to pass into him in some magical way.

- Has anything from those times survived to this day?

- For example, we also make gravestones from durable materials. In my opinion, there is a kind of resistance to time, transience and death, to this slow decline, this darkness. Only philosophy (e.g. Plato talking about the permanence of mathematical truths or ideas) proposes immortality in a different, non-material form.

- So, the Neolithic period is about tombs. What happened later?

- The Bronze Age arrives, when people start smelting metal. We begin to see cremation. The Lusatian culture, once associated with the Proto-Slavs, develops in Poland. The Bronze Age is the period of the so-called urn fields. The deceased is placed on a pyre (we talked earlier about the symbolism of the ‘reversed sacrificial rite’), and their ashes are placed in an urn or urn, which is then placed in a grave surrounded by stones, often covered with a mound. But there are also those who are not subject to this ritual. As with the Celts, noble people and aristocrats are not cremated. Perhaps there was no fear that they could cause harm, but on the contrary, that they could somehow influence the living for the better.

Perhaps the introduction of cremation is related to the culture of war, warriors, the conflagration of war, and the violence of death. One can look for connections between cremation and sacrifices to Zeus or another sky god. Perhaps the deceased passed into another reality through fire. Some believe that during this period, some idea of the soul or spirit began to emerge, which was not purely material.

- How long did this custom last?

- The cremation ritual lasted from the Bronze Age, i.e. from the Lusatian culture and urn fields, until the Christian Middle Ages. It was Christianity that prohibited the burning of the dead. However, it seems that this was simply part of the Christianisation struggle and a way to separate themselves from the pagans, to distinguish themselves from them. Instead of cremating the dead, we will bury them again, as the mighty once did.

- What else from ancient history, apart from tombstones, has survived in our contemporary traditions?

Folk culture has long preserved many elements from before Christianity. We have, for example, the ethnography of the rural population, written down at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is difficult to assess this today, as globalisation and a certain ‘levelling of views’ have taken place so quickly. However, perhaps with advancing secularisation, with a certain desacralisation of some experiences of our existence, including death, there is a return to the cult of the body. I believe that it was only Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment materialism in Europe that changed the way we perceive the body, mind and soul. We have rid ourselves of dilemmas concerning the afterlife, but the cult of the body that we observe today reminds me of that old, persistent clinging to immortality in matter. From a materialist point of view, life ends, and goodbye, the light goes out, the programme ends. Even corpses become merely ‘objects for disposal’. Hence, perhaps, this cult of health and youth, the desire to hold on to it as long as possible, to live intensely, to live life to the fullest.

People need some kind of attraction when they no longer know their own traditions well, i.e. when they do not practise them for various reasons. I think that the modern world is a pursuit of attraction, of novelty, of something interesting and new. Ancient cultures were rooted in tradition, which is where they found their strength. If we are able to cherish something, it means that our life is successful and rich.

- Thank you for the interview!