The Perils of Killing the Already Dead

He goes on to say that to behead a corpse is to follow the path of Satan, and that it is God, not a lip-smacking corpse, who holds power over life and death. But the pastor seems to know that merely forbidding corpse-killing is not enough to stop it. The superstitious beliefs need to be undermined, to have their error made clear. Another Lutheran pastor explained to his parishioners how it was that they were being led to superstitious, destructive beliefs. It had to do with how the Devil hates women. The pastor explained that the Devil slanders and demeans these women by spreading the belief in lip-smacking, and that the Devil uses these beliefs to breed conflict in the community, “for it embitters and corrodes an honest friendship to dig up someone’s relative and cut off their head.” The pastor had another point, too: digging up the bodies of plague victims would spread the disease, also to the Devil’s delight.

These ways of dealing with the passed (and the past) can seem alien from the perch of the present. But contemporary society, too, abounds in questionable diagnoses of societal ills and unethical, ineffective, or dangerous proposed remedies. The demonization of immigrants in the U.S., for example, follows from false arguments that they are the primary perpetrators of violent crime. Autism, pandemics, school shootings, child abuse—all these problems are responded to by some in ways that differ only minimally from understanding illness as following from the lip-smacking of dead women. “Killing the Dead” is an archeological and anthropological study, but it is also a catalogue of how our predecessors wrestled with the problem of evil: Where do diseases come from, why do children die, why do villains rise to power?

Blair considers some more modern reports, including a few from the twentieth century. In a case from 1914 near the Polish border with Belarus, a priest ordered an exhumation of a corpse found to be face down with its fingers “all bitten as if he had been ‘eating himself.’ ” The priest prayed while the corpse’s head was cut off with a spade. “Thereafter, war, revolution, and collectivization devastated folk-culture,” Blair writes. Belief in corpses that return to bother the living mostly fell away, though a few practices remained: in 2007, a stake was driven through the grave of Slobodan Milošević, the former Serbian President.

After reading Blair’s book, I found the varied ways of killing the dead less like unsettling desecrations and more like emotionally recognizable mourning. Death, fear, and sorrow unify the disparate practices. In two essays published in 1915 as a book, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Sigmund Freud argued that the First World War was bringing about a shift in how Europeans thought about death. Of the beforetime, he writes, “To anyone who listened to us we were of course prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes nature a death.” But this was a surface conviction. “In reality, however, we were accustomed to behave as if it were otherwise.” When a death does occur, “ it is as though we were badly shaken in our expectations.” The war, he argued, had made death undeniable: we “are forced to believe in it.” Since war—and death—will continue, he asks if something might be gained by letting go of our illusions, if this might make us as connected to life as to the idea of the imagined soldier returning home safely. Invoking the saying that to preserve peace, arm for war, he concludes, “If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.” ♦