Steven:> nice article sotthi - thanks. doesn't necessarily make an argument that you can either agree with or not - more of a set of musings - but ballard always has a different take on things if nothing else.
Ah, don't mention it. You are right that its more of a set of musings; though I am inclined to agree with the hamlet wisdom, too much truth can paralyze you.
oe:> I dont know if the same goes for proto-chinese or proto-indian civilization or if its even clear how much cultural exchange existed back then...
Thanks for the clarification.
Lycia probably was a good example to what you were saying:
"One thing that sets Lycian tombs apart from Hellenistic tradition is that whereas in Hellenistic culture the dead were placed outside of liveable areas (often flanking main roads into the cities), Lycian tombs are often integrated right into cities, displaying Lycia's ties with eastern traditions." http://www.lycianturkey.com/lycian_tombs.htm
On the other hand, to offer a reverse example,
"Between the ancient Japanese funeral customs and those of antique Europe, there was a vast difference,--a difference indicating, as regards Japan, a far more primitive social condition. In Greece and in Italy it was an early custom to bury the family dead within the limits of the family estate; and the Greek and Roman laws of property grew out of this practice. Sometimes the dead were buried close to the house. But in ancient Japan, men fled from the neighbourhood of death. It was long the custom to abandon, either temporarily, or permanently, the house in which a death occurred; there is reason to believe that the family-dwelling was at first permanently, not temporarily, abandoned to the dead.
...After all this had been done for the fixed period of mourning--eight days, according to some authorities, fourteen according to others--the corpse was interred. It is probable that the deserted house may thereafter have become an ancestral temple, or ghost-house,--prototype of the Shintô miya.
The custom of deserting the house in which a death took place would accord with the theory of a nomadic ancestry for the Japanese people: it was a practice totally incompatible with a settled civilization like that of the early Greeks and Romans...
The homestead in Old Japan was not a stable institution like the Greek or the Roman home; the custom of burying the family dead upon the family estate never became general; the dwelling itself never assumed a substantial and lasting character. It could not be literally said of the Japanese warrior, as of the Roman, that he fought pro aris et focis. There was neither altar nor sacred fire: the place of these was taken by the spirit-shelf or shrine, with its tiny lamp, kindled afresh each evening; and, in early times, there were no Japanese images of divinities. ...there were only the mortuary-tablets of the ancestors, and certain little tablets bearing names of other gods--tutelar gods. . . . The presence of these frail wooden objects still makes the home; and they may be, of course, transported anywhere. ..."
One interestin custom is also the gladiatorial fightings which began as an Etruscan funerary custom, a blood sacrifice for the dead, a religious rite before the Romans made this a public spectacle.
"The gladiators originally performed at Etruscan funerals, no doubt with intent to give the dead man armed attendants in the next world; hence the fights were usually to the death.
Gladiatorial duels had originated from funeral games given in order to satisfy the dead man’s need for blood, and for centuries their principle occasions were funerals. The first gladiatorial combats therefore, took place at the graves of those being honored.
To the Etruscans it was a ceremonial act to honor a prominent deceased leader. This was a way to help send the deceased to the afterlife, with a guardian and a servant. Such customs were very common among the Sumerians, Cimerians and Scythians who all buried servants and sometimes even family members with their rulers for the purpose of serving them in their afterlife.
The Bustuarii were a kind of gladiators in Ancient Rome, who fought about the bustum, or pile of a deceased person, in the ceremony of his obsequies.
At first, the practice was to sacrifice captives on the tomb, or at the bustum (meaning tomb or funeral pyre) of their warriors: instances of which are in Homer, at the obsequies of Patroclus, and among the Greek tragedians. Their blood was supposed to appease the infernal gods, and render them propitious to the remains of the deceased. In later ages, this custom appeared too barbarous; and in lieu of these victims, they appointed gladiators to fight, whose blood, it was supposed, might have the same effect.
A surviving feature of the Roman games was when a gladiator fell he was hauled out of the arena by a slave dressed as the Etruscan death-demon Charun. The slave would carry a hammer which was the demon’s attribute.
The battle was called a munus, or `duty` paid to a dead ancestor by his descendants, with the intention of keeping alive his memory."
Those are nice Sotthi. I remember reading that about the japanese. Theres a great book called "Death and Space" {Reagan?} that does an amazing job of cataloging these, great analyses too. There are some great examples of mezoamerican afterlife servants as well.
Ok, but why do I need an architect (or landscape architect, or...) to give me a huge expensive place for all those things to happen? aren't they already happening on their own, in the places where we already live our lives?
Well yes, of course they do, just like commerce happens whether you stack it all up in skyscrapers or not. Unlike most any other architype though, the cemetery hasnt really been critically analyzed in america for more than 50 years. Our culture has completely changed, and the old systems no longer function as they were meant to. Families are often spread all over the country, community doesnt gather in the ways that it used to, cremation has become a major force, and is often completely detached from the places of interment if not social life in general. A modern cemetery has to be able to reconcile all these things. More importantly, cemeteries function for hundreds of years, so in some small ways you must project trends to design for cultural changes over the course of the next century, not the last one. Of course memory happens in the home and always has and will. But we dont burry our relatives in the back yard. We use cemeteries because they gather and focus memorialization, give us a community space to remember loved ones as a social act. Its not arrogance, its our job to analyze these things and do everything in our power to make the best spaces we can.
oe, I don't disagree with anything you just said in your most recent post. but I have some difficulty going along with you all the way into the metaphysical realm and buying some of the claims you were making about what your design would be able to accomplish - encoding memories, enabling communication with the dead, etc. And the scale of what you were describing earlier (like a massive resort hotel) didn't quite resonate with me either. in my mind, people might go to resort hotels to get married, but they don't do it to bury. was the project intended to serve people in the local community or was it something you would fly in for?
of course I see the same problem you do, that families are spread out geographically and that there often isn't a strong tie to a specific place, so there is an inherent problem in creating interment spaces and maintaining a connection between those and the community. If I myself were hit by a bus tomorrow I have no idea where I ought to be buried; I have no family within hundreds of miles of the place I live, which has no relationship to anywhere I grew up, etc. even my nuclear family is all hundreds of miles apart from one another. I posted fairly jocularly about people making the ashes of their loved ones into glass paperweights and the like, but who's to say this is the wrong response to the problem?
it's primarily my own arrogance I wish to guard against.
About the scale I was mostly making fun of myself, because it became so much larger than I had originally intended. It was because of the social diffusion issue that I realized a modern cemetery really needs to play to a much larger sense of of community, and it became more of a northeastern necropolis. The hotel had only 12 rooms, 2 or 3 stories more or less, half of that below grade. The really tall objects were mostly empty, I just needed that cathedralic, piransesi effect for the crematory and library.
Have you ever been to Holl's Simmons Hall at Mit? Something about the scale of those windows makes it look like its 3 times as tall as it is when its far away. As you get closer you get this really strange feeling like the building is shrinking, you find it difficult to place yourself, difficult to know how big you are. When youre in barcelona pavilion you get this strange feeling like youre transpearent, almost like you dont exist at all, like the world is sealed from you behind a hundred miles of glass. When you drive a car, your mind merges with it. When you step out of a car on the highway youre amazed how wide the road is, how steep the inclines. Its not hokus-pokus, this is what life is. You can use effects like that, script them to distort and displace peoples perception of reality, to cut right to the bone of thier sense of self. Once youve got them by the heart its just a matter of nuance, chiaroscuro, dropping the floor out. Its like music, the emotions are all right there, just waiting to be articulated and empathised. One should feel with all of his or her being every laid flower, every crashing wave, every fallen tear. Architecture aught to sit beside us, with us, and in us, and revel in the sensations that make us what we are.
I mean of course its up to you the tack you take, but you cant be timid about these things. These are just tools at your disposal.
oe, as a landscape person I don't have exactly the same tools at my disposal as an architect, and probably don't think exactly the same way. I also work on the business side of my field currently. so although my remaining schoolwork might be my last chance to kick up my heels and not think about a client's needs (or, rather, to reverse-engineer an imaginary client whose needs exactly match what I want to do anyway), my perspective is still grounded in reality to the extent that I'm always thinking about how I could communicate x, y and z to a client in a way they'd find convincing.
I do appreciate the pure aesthetic point of view, even the metaphysical one, but I also want to be able to make a connection between those perspectives and a real-world situation.
"And that is the true Etruscan quality: ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life, no need to force the mind or the soul in any direction.
And death, to the Etruscan, was a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. It was neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment. It was just a natural continuance of the fullness of life. Everything was in terms of life, of living.
Yet everything Etruscan, save the tombs, has been wiped out.
B., who has just come back from India, is so surprised to see the phallic stones by the doors of many tombs. Why, it's like the Shiva lingam at Benares! It's exactly like the lingam stones in the Shiva caves and the Shiva temples!
And that is another curious thing. One can live one's life, and read all the books about India or Etruria, and never read a single word about the thing that impresses one in the very first five minutes, in Benares or in an Etruscan necropolis: that is, the phallic symbol.
Here it is, in stone, unmistakable, and everywhere, around these tombs. Here it is, big and little, standing by the doors, or inserted, quite small, into the rock: the phallic stone! Perhaps some tumuli had a great phallic column on the summit: some perhaps by the door. There are still small phallic stones, only seven or eight inches long, inserted in the rock outside the doors: they always seem to have been outside. And these small lingams look as if they were part of the rock. But no, B. lifts one out. It is cut, and is fitted into a socket, previously cemented in. B. puts the phallic stone back into its socket, where it was placed, probably, five or six hundred years before Christ was born.
The big phallic stones that, it is said, probably stood on top of the tumuli, are sometimes carved very beautifully, sometimes with inscriptions. The scientists call them cippus, cippi. But surely the cippus is a truncated column used usually as a gravestone: a column quite squat, often square, having been cut across, truncated, to represent maybe a life cut short. Some of the little phallic stones are like this - truncated. But others are tall, huge and decorated, and with the double cone that is surely phallic. ..."
the LA Times website (free registration required) is currently running a story about the efforts by Wiccans to get the VA to allow pentacles on official veteran tombstones (the VA allows a dizzying array of other religious symbols, and there's even a little atomic diagram for atheists)
and another article about a calendar featuring the shirtless studmuffins of the mortuary industry. proceeds go toward assistance grants for breast cancer patients.
"Cannabis was an integral part of the Scythian cult of the dead, wherein homage was paid to the memory of their departed leaders. After the death and burial of their king, the Scythians would purify themselves by setting up small tepee-like structures which they would enter to inhale the fumes of hemp seeds and resinous flower calyxes thrown onto red-hot stones.
Neolithic bowls probably used as brazziers for Hemp.
The Scythian Goddess holds the Tree of Life before a horseman.
Scythian Hemp brazziers and 'tripod' (half-size) (Schultes & Hoffmann 1979, Rudgley). http://www.dhushara.com/book/twelve/tw1.htm
In a famous passage written in ca 450 BC, Herodotus describes these funeral rites as follows: "Scythians have taken some seed of this hemp, they creep under the cloths and put the seeds on the red hot stones; but this being put on smokes, and produces such a steam, that no Grecian vapour-bath would surpass it. The Scythians, transported by the vapour, shout aloud."
Scythian tomb in Pazyryk, Western Altai, by Professor S. I. Rudenko. Digging into some ancient ruins near the Altai Mountains on the border between Siberia and Outer Mongolia, Rudenko found a trench about 160 feet square and about 20 feet deep. On the perimeter of the trench were the skeletons of a number of horses. Inside the trench was the embalmed body of a man and a bronze cauldron filled with burnt marihuana seeds. Rudenko also found some shirts woven from hemp fibre." http://www.geocities.com/amuse_amenace/scythia.htm
"Prolonged and demonstrative grieving followed the death of every Scythian tribesman. At the death of a king all Scythian tribes joined a show of stupendous grief that last 40 days. Men of the dominant tribe, the Royal Scythians, cropped their hair, lacerated their ears, forehead, noses and arms. After the king was buried with the best of all his weapons and possessions, the funeral party strangled one of his concubines, his cupbearer, his cook, his lackey, his messenger and his best horses and place all the bodies by him. Then the grave was to be covered with 60-feet hight mound.
Even then, the funeral was not over. One year later as many as 50 Scythian youths might be selected from among those who had directly served the king. They would be strangled and buried in a circle around the royal tomb." http://www.silk-road.com/artl/scythian.shtml
my father and i have always shared this obsession with cemeteries. when i was in high school we used to run (and then hike after he got a disease that made his bones preternaturally brittle) to the mount olivet cemetery in fort worth. it was three miles or so one way. nothing spectacular in terms of the architecture or the graves, except that the fort worth catholic diocese had purchased a very prominent site, put a giant crucifix up, and then used the surroundings as a burial place for priests, nuns and monks.
i moved to chicago and my first apartment was across the el from graceland cemetery. i could look out my window and see louis sullivan's grave. i could read the lettering, in fact.
my parents live right behind the cemetery on the chicago/evanston border, just east of the howard el stop. there's a coyote that prowls the cemetery at night. he's tame...we think.
The Poet, Khayyam's Tomb, 1934, Iranian architect Seihoon:
"In Arabic “Zikr†means remembrance, or to remember. This body of work is a visual reflection of this journey; the process of remembering a face (a state of being) that has been forgotten. Each piece is composed of a single line of poetry by a Persian Sufi poet, which is written over and over in a calligraphic style. ..."
"The worldly hope men set their hearts upon Turns ashes-or it prospers; and anon, Like snow upon the desert's dusty face, Lighting a little hour or two-is gone.
We are no other than a moving row Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go Round with the sun-illumined lantern held In midnight by the Master of the show.
Oh threats of hell and hopes of paradise! One thing at least is certain-this life flies; One thing is certain and the rest is lies; The flower that once has blown for ever dies.
Into this universe, and why not knowing Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing; And out of it, as wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
Ah, my beloved, fill the Cup that clears TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears: TO-MORROW!-why, to-morrow I may be Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand Years."
the transformation in the 18th century from divine resurrection to natural decay did wonders to diminish these sites as desirable for architects. this we do not see them "designed" or planned like we used to. the fear of death and death itself are not the same, but they do influence each other in a way that makes them desirable for some of us.
Cemeteries
Steven:> nice article sotthi - thanks. doesn't necessarily make an argument that you can either agree with or not - more of a set of musings - but ballard always has a different take on things if nothing else.
Ah, don't mention it. You are right that its more of a set of musings; though I am inclined to agree with the hamlet wisdom, too much truth can paralyze you.
oe:> I dont know if the same goes for proto-chinese or proto-indian civilization or if its even clear how much cultural exchange existed back then...
Thanks for the clarification.
Lycia probably was a good example to what you were saying:
"One thing that sets Lycian tombs apart from Hellenistic tradition is that whereas in Hellenistic culture the dead were placed outside of liveable areas (often flanking main roads into the cities), Lycian tombs are often integrated right into cities, displaying Lycia's ties with eastern traditions."
http://www.lycianturkey.com/lycian_tombs.htm
On the other hand, to offer a reverse example,
"Between the ancient Japanese funeral customs and those of antique Europe, there was a vast difference,--a difference indicating, as regards Japan, a far more primitive social condition. In Greece and in Italy it was an early custom to bury the family dead within the limits of the family estate; and the Greek and Roman laws of property grew out of this practice. Sometimes the dead were buried close to the house. But in ancient Japan, men fled from the neighbourhood of death. It was long the custom to abandon, either temporarily, or permanently, the house in which a death occurred; there is reason to believe that the family-dwelling was at first permanently, not temporarily, abandoned to the dead.
...After all this had been done for the fixed period of mourning--eight days, according to some authorities, fourteen according to others--the corpse was interred. It is probable that the deserted house may thereafter have become an ancestral temple, or ghost-house,--prototype of the Shintô miya.
The custom of deserting the house in which a death took place would accord with the theory of a nomadic ancestry for the Japanese people: it was a practice totally incompatible with a settled civilization like that of the early Greeks and Romans...
The homestead in Old Japan was not a stable institution like the Greek or the Roman home; the custom of burying the family dead upon the family estate never became general; the dwelling itself never assumed a substantial and lasting character. It could not be literally said of the Japanese warrior, as of the Roman, that he fought pro aris et focis. There was neither altar nor sacred fire: the place of these was taken by the spirit-shelf or shrine, with its tiny lamp, kindled afresh each evening; and, in early times, there were no Japanese images of divinities. ...there were only the mortuary-tablets of the ancestors, and certain little tablets bearing names of other gods--tutelar gods. . . . The presence of these frail wooden objects still makes the home; and they may be, of course, transported anywhere. ..."
http://www.integrativespirituality.org/postnuke/html/static-docs_Books-Shinto-Japan_An_Attempt_At_Interpretation-jai05.htm
One interestin custom is also the gladiatorial fightings which began as an Etruscan funerary custom, a blood sacrifice for the dead, a religious rite before the Romans made this a public spectacle.
"The gladiators originally performed at Etruscan funerals, no doubt with intent to give the dead man armed attendants in the next world; hence the fights were usually to the death.
Gladiatorial duels had originated from funeral games given in order to satisfy the dead man’s need for blood, and for centuries their principle occasions were funerals. The first gladiatorial combats therefore, took place at the graves of those being honored.
To the Etruscans it was a ceremonial act to honor a prominent deceased leader. This was a way to help send the deceased to the afterlife, with a guardian and a servant. Such customs were very common among the Sumerians, Cimerians and Scythians who all buried servants and sometimes even family members with their rulers for the purpose of serving them in their afterlife.
The Bustuarii were a kind of gladiators in Ancient Rome, who fought about the bustum, or pile of a deceased person, in the ceremony of his obsequies.
At first, the practice was to sacrifice captives on the tomb, or at the bustum (meaning tomb or funeral pyre) of their warriors: instances of which are in Homer, at the obsequies of Patroclus, and among the Greek tragedians. Their blood was supposed to appease the infernal gods, and render them propitious to the remains of the deceased. In later ages, this custom appeared too barbarous; and in lieu of these victims, they appointed gladiators to fight, whose blood, it was supposed, might have the same effect.
A surviving feature of the Roman games was when a gladiator fell he was hauled out of the arena by a slave dressed as the Etruscan death-demon Charun. The slave would carry a hammer which was the demon’s attribute.
The battle was called a munus, or `duty` paid to a dead ancestor by his descendants, with the intention of keeping alive his memory."
http://www.maravot.com/Etruscan_Murals.html
Those are nice Sotthi. I remember reading that about the japanese. Theres a great book called "Death and Space" {Reagan?} that does an amazing job of cataloging these, great analyses too. There are some great examples of mezoamerican afterlife servants as well.
Ok, but why do I need an architect (or landscape architect, or...) to give me a huge expensive place for all those things to happen? aren't they already happening on their own, in the places where we already live our lives?
Well yes, of course they do, just like commerce happens whether you stack it all up in skyscrapers or not. Unlike most any other architype though, the cemetery hasnt really been critically analyzed in america for more than 50 years. Our culture has completely changed, and the old systems no longer function as they were meant to. Families are often spread all over the country, community doesnt gather in the ways that it used to, cremation has become a major force, and is often completely detached from the places of interment if not social life in general. A modern cemetery has to be able to reconcile all these things. More importantly, cemeteries function for hundreds of years, so in some small ways you must project trends to design for cultural changes over the course of the next century, not the last one. Of course memory happens in the home and always has and will. But we dont burry our relatives in the back yard. We use cemeteries because they gather and focus memorialization, give us a community space to remember loved ones as a social act. Its not arrogance, its our job to analyze these things and do everything in our power to make the best spaces we can.
oe, I don't disagree with anything you just said in your most recent post. but I have some difficulty going along with you all the way into the metaphysical realm and buying some of the claims you were making about what your design would be able to accomplish - encoding memories, enabling communication with the dead, etc. And the scale of what you were describing earlier (like a massive resort hotel) didn't quite resonate with me either. in my mind, people might go to resort hotels to get married, but they don't do it to bury. was the project intended to serve people in the local community or was it something you would fly in for?
of course I see the same problem you do, that families are spread out geographically and that there often isn't a strong tie to a specific place, so there is an inherent problem in creating interment spaces and maintaining a connection between those and the community. If I myself were hit by a bus tomorrow I have no idea where I ought to be buried; I have no family within hundreds of miles of the place I live, which has no relationship to anywhere I grew up, etc. even my nuclear family is all hundreds of miles apart from one another. I posted fairly jocularly about people making the ashes of their loved ones into glass paperweights and the like, but who's to say this is the wrong response to the problem?
it's primarily my own arrogance I wish to guard against.
About the scale I was mostly making fun of myself, because it became so much larger than I had originally intended. It was because of the social diffusion issue that I realized a modern cemetery really needs to play to a much larger sense of of community, and it became more of a northeastern necropolis. The hotel had only 12 rooms, 2 or 3 stories more or less, half of that below grade. The really tall objects were mostly empty, I just needed that cathedralic, piransesi effect for the crematory and library.
Have you ever been to Holl's Simmons Hall at Mit? Something about the scale of those windows makes it look like its 3 times as tall as it is when its far away. As you get closer you get this really strange feeling like the building is shrinking, you find it difficult to place yourself, difficult to know how big you are. When youre in barcelona pavilion you get this strange feeling like youre transpearent, almost like you dont exist at all, like the world is sealed from you behind a hundred miles of glass. When you drive a car, your mind merges with it. When you step out of a car on the highway youre amazed how wide the road is, how steep the inclines. Its not hokus-pokus, this is what life is. You can use effects like that, script them to distort and displace peoples perception of reality, to cut right to the bone of thier sense of self. Once youve got them by the heart its just a matter of nuance, chiaroscuro, dropping the floor out. Its like music, the emotions are all right there, just waiting to be articulated and empathised. One should feel with all of his or her being every laid flower, every crashing wave, every fallen tear. Architecture aught to sit beside us, with us, and in us, and revel in the sensations that make us what we are.
I mean of course its up to you the tack you take, but you cant be timid about these things. These are just tools at your disposal.
Yahoo news , Today.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061009/ap_on_sc/vatican_necropolis
oe, as a landscape person I don't have exactly the same tools at my disposal as an architect, and probably don't think exactly the same way. I also work on the business side of my field currently. so although my remaining schoolwork might be my last chance to kick up my heels and not think about a client's needs (or, rather, to reverse-engineer an imaginary client whose needs exactly match what I want to do anyway), my perspective is still grounded in reality to the extent that I'm always thinking about how I could communicate x, y and z to a client in a way they'd find convincing.
I do appreciate the pure aesthetic point of view, even the metaphysical one, but I also want to be able to make a connection between those perspectives and a real-world situation.
From 'Etruscan Places', by D.H.Lawrence
"And that is the true Etruscan quality: ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life, no need to force the mind or the soul in any direction.
And death, to the Etruscan, was a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. It was neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment. It was just a natural continuance of the fullness of life. Everything was in terms of life, of living.
Yet everything Etruscan, save the tombs, has been wiped out.
B., who has just come back from India, is so surprised to see the phallic stones by the doors of many tombs. Why, it's like the Shiva lingam at Benares! It's exactly like the lingam stones in the Shiva caves and the Shiva temples!
And that is another curious thing. One can live one's life, and read all the books about India or Etruria, and never read a single word about the thing that impresses one in the very first five minutes, in Benares or in an Etruscan necropolis: that is, the phallic symbol.
Here it is, in stone, unmistakable, and everywhere, around these tombs. Here it is, big and little, standing by the doors, or inserted, quite small, into the rock: the phallic stone! Perhaps some tumuli had a great phallic column on the summit: some perhaps by the door. There are still small phallic stones, only seven or eight inches long, inserted in the rock outside the doors: they always seem to have been outside. And these small lingams look as if they were part of the rock. But no, B. lifts one out. It is cut, and is fitted into a socket, previously cemented in. B. puts the phallic stone back into its socket, where it was placed, probably, five or six hundred years before Christ was born.
The big phallic stones that, it is said, probably stood on top of the tumuli, are sometimes carved very beautifully, sometimes with inscriptions. The scientists call them cippus, cippi. But surely the cippus is a truncated column used usually as a gravestone: a column quite squat, often square, having been cut across, truncated, to represent maybe a life cut short. Some of the little phallic stones are like this - truncated. But others are tall, huge and decorated, and with the double cone that is surely phallic. ..."
http://www.ereader.com/product/book/excerpt/12913?book=Etruscan_Places
Turkmenistan cemetery:
http://www.masoudsoheili.com/Research/CeremonyGoddesses/CeremonyGoddesses.html
Ireland: http://www.beyond-the-pale.org.uk/phallic.htm
well, D.H. Lawrence, after all.
the LA Times website (free registration required) is currently running a story about the efforts by Wiccans to get the VA to allow pentacles on official veteran tombstones (the VA allows a dizzying array of other religious symbols, and there's even a little atomic diagram for atheists)
http://www.cem.va.gov/cem/hm/hmemb.asp
and another article about a calendar featuring the shirtless studmuffins of the mortuary industry. proceeds go toward assistance grants for breast cancer patients.
http://www.menofmortuaries.com/
In the Beginning was Cannabis...
"Cannabis was an integral part of the Scythian cult of the dead, wherein homage was paid to the memory of their departed leaders. After the death and burial of their king, the Scythians would purify themselves by setting up small tepee-like structures which they would enter to inhale the fumes of hemp seeds and resinous flower calyxes thrown onto red-hot stones.
Neolithic bowls probably used as brazziers for Hemp.
The Scythian Goddess holds the Tree of Life before a horseman.
Scythian Hemp brazziers and 'tripod' (half-size) (Schultes & Hoffmann 1979, Rudgley).
http://www.dhushara.com/book/twelve/tw1.htm
In a famous passage written in ca 450 BC, Herodotus describes these funeral rites as follows: "Scythians have taken some seed of this hemp, they creep under the cloths and put the seeds on the red hot stones; but this being put on smokes, and produces such a steam, that no Grecian vapour-bath would surpass it. The Scythians, transported by the vapour, shout aloud."
http://www.cannabinoid.com/boards/politics/media/33/33246.gif
Scythian tomb in Pazyryk, Western Altai, by Professor S. I. Rudenko. Digging into some ancient ruins near the Altai Mountains on the border between Siberia and Outer Mongolia, Rudenko found a trench about 160 feet square and about 20 feet deep. On the perimeter of the trench were the skeletons of a number of horses. Inside the trench was the embalmed body of a man and a bronze cauldron filled with burnt marihuana seeds. Rudenko also found some shirts woven from hemp fibre."
http://www.geocities.com/amuse_amenace/scythia.htm
"Prolonged and demonstrative grieving followed the death of every Scythian tribesman. At the death of a king all Scythian tribes joined a show of stupendous grief that last 40 days. Men of the dominant tribe, the Royal Scythians, cropped their hair, lacerated their ears, forehead, noses and arms. After the king was buried with the best of all his weapons and possessions, the funeral party strangled one of his concubines, his cupbearer, his cook, his lackey, his messenger and his best horses and place all the bodies by him. Then the grave was to be covered with 60-feet hight mound.
Even then, the funeral was not over. One year later as many as 50 Scythian youths might be selected from among those who had directly served the king. They would be strangled and buried in a circle around the royal tomb."
http://www.silk-road.com/artl/scythian.shtml
my father and i have always shared this obsession with cemeteries. when i was in high school we used to run (and then hike after he got a disease that made his bones preternaturally brittle) to the mount olivet cemetery in fort worth. it was three miles or so one way. nothing spectacular in terms of the architecture or the graves, except that the fort worth catholic diocese had purchased a very prominent site, put a giant crucifix up, and then used the surroundings as a burial place for priests, nuns and monks.
i moved to chicago and my first apartment was across the el from graceland cemetery. i could look out my window and see louis sullivan's grave. i could read the lettering, in fact.
my parents live right behind the cemetery on the chicago/evanston border, just east of the howard el stop. there's a coyote that prowls the cemetery at night. he's tame...we think.
dh lawrence shrine at the dh lawrence ranch in taos new mexico...
yes! finally i got it!!!!
- this is a series of diagrams i made of the brion-vega cemetery (scarpa)while on a site visit 3 summers ago
- should of posted this earlier - i have been working on my website lately and just recently put my sketches from europe on there.
check it!
The Poet, Khayyam's Tomb, 1934, Iranian architect Seihoon:
"In Arabic “Zikr†means remembrance, or to remember. This body of work is a visual reflection of this journey; the process of remembering a face (a state of being) that has been forgotten. Each piece is composed of a single line of poetry by a Persian Sufi poet, which is written over and over in a calligraphic style. ..."
http://www.iranian.com/Arts/2006/June/Zikr/index.html
"The worldly hope men set their hearts upon Turns ashes-or it prospers; and anon, Like snow upon the desert's dusty face, Lighting a little hour or two-is gone.
We are no other than a moving row Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go Round with the sun-illumined lantern held In midnight by the Master of the show.
Oh threats of hell and hopes of paradise! One thing at least is certain-this life flies; One thing is certain and the rest is lies; The flower that once has blown for ever dies.
Into this universe, and why not knowing Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing; And out of it, as wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
Ah, my beloved, fill the Cup that clears TO-DAY of past Regrets and future Fears: TO-MORROW!-why, to-morrow I may be Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand Years."
--translation by Edward Fitzgerald
http://www.iranian.com/Arts/2004/March/Ovissi/8.html
Also,
Dead in the Water: A Floating Cemetery
http://www.fastcompany.com/1654972/dead-in-the-water-designer-floats-harborside-columbarium-in-hong-kong
the transformation in the 18th century from divine resurrection to natural decay did wonders to diminish these sites as desirable for architects. this we do not see them "designed" or planned like we used to. the fear of death and death itself are not the same, but they do influence each other in a way that makes them desirable for some of us.
This thread is as good an excuse as any to post my desktop background:
I love this cemetery. Feels imposing yet peaceful. Maybe the most beautiful postmodern structure I've seen.
(lots of negative space for desktop icons too)
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