For the Coming Season--Sedlec Ossuary

[alfreda89]

In honor of the coming holiday, more dark links to the shadowy depths of the human mind. Ossuaries--treasure houses of bones--have a particularly macabre appearance to modern folk. Knowing little of history, some people across the Internet are showing off pictures and writing...oddly...about these storehouses of the dead.

This is why your teachers (all those good ones) kept talking about understanding history, and where things are placed in time and space.

This church, and its population, survived the Black Death. We're talking that in Europe? Half the population died. HALF. This church survived more than a few wars, some of them the monstrous, razing the populations down to the soil kind of conflicts. To the men who built this church, recognizing that death was where everyone ended up, and that Death was King, was not the stuff of story or a late night movie to scare yourself.

It was life.

This is a fairly respectful article, and shows a lot of the inside of the church. It doesn't show the huge piles of skulls and leg bones, with a gold crown poised above them, but you can find those elsewhere.

Comments

[6-penny.livejournal.com]

For most of history people lived with bones (and blood,guts and gore) as part of their daily lives. Meat did not come in tidy plastic wrapped parcels. It had to be killed, the guts removed and parts of those prepped as well as the meat. People lived with as awareness of their mortality too as they often died at home from disease or accident, and not just when they reached old age. Many kids died from falling down wells or getting to close to an open fire. And young adults got in the way of large animals or agricultural implements.
Barbara Hanawalt's "The Ties That Bound, Peasant Families in Medieval England" is a fascinating analysis of data from church registers and the Domesday Book. According to her - if you survived childhood accident and disease, and young adult accident/childbirth -you had a good chance of a ripe old age. The concept of early medieval people mostly dying in their mid thirties is an artifact of averages - actuarial tables tell a different story.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Very true. From our vantage point, people seemed indifferent to children, but when children had a 50% mortality rate before 5 years old, then something like another 50% mortality before 18, it's not surprising that people were more likely to warm up to their children as they aged. We also know that a third of modern conceptions fail before the woman even knows she is pregnant. That makes one understand the eternal joy and celebration of fertility.

Cities intensified the dangers of disease. Until we started living so close together, the constants of death were hunting accidents for men (or war, should everyone be so unlucky--this became farming accidents as machinery became larger and dangerous) and childbirth for women. If you dodged those bullets, so to speak, you ran a good chance of living to a ripe age. Eventually pneumonia was seen as a friend to the aged. A point of view we have trouble with today.

To our ancestors, death was simultaneously mysterious--and just was death. There is a reason pagan societies looked upon the Fates as the powers behind the gods. There is only one law for the fates--all things must pass.

[6-penny.livejournal.com]

I love the painted skulls in the Royal Ossuary in Elizabeth Moons current series. It reminded me of one that Rick Steves showed on one of his travel programs - which she apparently saw after she had written the book. Another case of Ideas sleeting in from the reality of an alternate universe.
I've always found bones to be beautiful objects ... used to come home with the occasional sea bird skull from the beach!

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

Yes, Holly Lisle used painted skulls (actually soul holders) in one of her series. The way some people have decorated skeletons is stunning--there are chapels with skeletons dressed in jewels, the skulls covered with set stones.

And the little sugar skull candy is a reminder in a society where death is much closer, every day.

I think a lot of us collected skulls--I still have a javelina one somewhere! It should go to someone who will do anatomy sketches from it.