6
LIVING WITH THE DEAD
Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, at the Tower of London, 2014
Let us begin at the end. Is there life of some kind for human beings after they die? Most societies for most of history have believed that there is. If we share that belief, other questions, which are as old as humanity itself, necessarily follow. How do the living stay in touch with the dead? Do they need our help? Or is it we who need their help? And, if so, how do we ask for it? Are the dead and the living bound, for a while at least, in a network of reciprocal obligations? We are used to asking how societies look after the vulnerable, the weak and the old. But on the whole we have lost the habit of asking how they look after what is possibly the most demanding – and for many the most helpful – group of all: the dead.
Once the rituals of burial and mourning are completed, it remains to be decided what the proper relationship between us and our ancestors should be. In medieval England, as across the whole of Catholic Europe, the position was clear. The community of the Christian faithful comprised both the living and the dead, two parts of the same body; and offering prayers and masses for the souls of the dead was one of the central duties of the living. Every congregation, every parishioner, played the part in this process that their means allowed. Elaborate chapels and chantries – indeed, in Oxford a whole magnificent college, All Souls – were built to house these ceremonies of intercession, which were designed to speed the souls of the departed through the pains of purgatory, and to secure for them, as swiftly as possible, the prize of salvation and a place in heaven. Vast legacies were left by the wealthy so that their souls, and those of their family, might be prayed for in perpetuity. The necessary rituals required the labour of enormous numbers of people – not least the priests needed to celebrate the masses. In England 500 years ago, the dead were major employers.
Medieval England prays for the souls of the dead: the Percy chantry at Tynemouth Priory
It was a pattern abruptly and brutally broken at the Reformation. Most Protestant theologians rejected the very idea of purgatory, where sins were to be expiated by long suffering, and so necessarily abandoned the notion that rapid release from it could be procured by prayer or by payment. Masses for the souls of the dead were abolished. The endowments that funded them were liquidated or confiscated. In Protestant Europe the living could, by the middle of the sixteenth century, do little to help the dead, from whom they were now separated by a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. The change in doctrine transformed the duties of the clergy and the economics of the church, and hugely enriched rulers and their favoured leading subjects. No less important, it reordered the relationship between present and past.
It is not evident what kind of connection we in Britain today have with the dead. Most of the millions who visit the British Museum every year come up the front steps to the main entrance. Few notice, as they move though the classical columns of the portico, that they pass on their right a memorial to Museum staff who died in two world wars (see this page). Their names are carved into the Portland stone, along with the familiar words, ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.’ It is a pattern found in public buildings across the country. In schools and railway stations, in corporate offices and clubs, usually somewhere near the entrance, the names of those who died in the two world wars are written in stone, with the same exhortation to all who enter: to remember them. It is less and less clear how many do so – and even less clearly articulated, is why they should.
‘They Shall Grow Not Old’ – the memorial at the entrance to the British Museum remembering staff who died in two world wars
Once inside the Museum, however, visitors soon encounter completely different ways of imagining and conducting the relationship between the living and the dead: not praying for them, not merely remembering them, but conversing with them on a regular basis – and not just as spirits, but in person, with the ancestors themselves physically present.
Jago Cooper, head of the Americas section at the Museum, has in his charge a number of bundles wrapped in dull brown cloth, each one a metre or so long, carefully packaged and tied.
These are mummy bundles from Peru, containing the remains of ancestors of the people that live there today. Inside each bundle is a mummified body, meticulously prepared and wrapped in textiles. It is a practice which went on for more than 6,000 years in Peru and northern Chile, and it enabled these ancestors to play a posthumous role in society completely different from any that we in Europe could imagine for our forebears – or for ourselves.
Because of the arid desert conditions which preserve dead bodies naturally, the practice of making mummies was widespread not just in Peru, but throughout the Andes, and it appears to be at least as old as the much better-known tradition in Egypt. After death, the soft tissue would be removed and the body usually placed in a crouching position before being wrapped. The ancestors in the British Museum bundles were probably mummified some time around 1500, not long before the practice ceased as a result of the Spanish conquests. The textiles have faded to a dull brown, but it is just possible to see that the blankets were once brightly striped, with an elaborate fringed edge: the pattern and colouring would have indicated both the status of the dead (inevitably only the elites were preserved) and the region from which they came. In addition, many of the mummy bundles had painted faces – schematized portraits – attached to them, so that when they were sat upright, there could be no doubt that these were still in a sense real people, honoured as individuals long after their death.
Peruvian mummy bundles topped with a ‘portrait’ of the ancestor, as illustrated in the 1880s
In this book we are looking mostly at objects, and what they can tell us about belief. But these mummy bundles are categorically not objects. They are dead people – the Museum tries to treat them with the respect paid to them by the Peruvians themselves until the coming of the Europeans in the 1520s. In ancient Egypt, the mummies, equipped with all the necessaries for the after-life, remained in their tombs, perhaps visited at intervals by members of their families who might come to feast with them or to make offerings. Peruvian mummies by contrast had an altogether livelier after-life. Preserved in caves or on high mountains, wrapped in their gaily coloured blankets made of cotton or alpaca wool, they would be taken out by their descendants on special occasions, paraded through the streets, and for a time brought back, almost as returning VIPs, into a society of which they were still very much a part. There they had a continuing, and significant, role to play in the affairs of state. First, in Jago Cooper’s words, they established the credentials of the ruling class:
To have your distinguished ancestor with you at the table during an important meeting was to proclaim your lineage and your ancestry: descent from them by direct bloodline was the basis of your own claim to power. You were heir not just to that person, but to their wisdom, power and authority. That continuing connection to ancestral knowledge was a fundamental building block of elites within the Inca Empire, where leaders would consult their ancestors directly as they made important political decisions.
The role of the mummies thus went far beyond merely demonstrating the status of their descendants. Sitting among the living, their experience and judgement could be invoked. Jago Cooper describes how they also added, by their very presence, a quite different understanding of the dimension of time:
For us, when our ancestors die they are in the past and our descendants are in the future. For the Inca and many cultures of the Americas, the thinking was – and often still is – fundamentally different. For them all time is together: the present, future and past exist concurrently, are always running in parallel, and it is possible, with skill, or sometimes in a trance, to move between the different times, and to draw on the insights that all three can offer. The mummy bundles of the ancestors would be brought into the room to contribute the wisdom of the past to the conversation. But also in the room, and part of the debate, would be the spirits of descendants not yet born. They too would help shape political decisions, in which they had such a large stake.
It is as though the bodies of Gladstone and Disraeli were occasionally brought out to sit round the Cabinet table in London, to remind ministers of both the weight of history and the claims of the future. Bringing the mummy bundles from the tomb to the council chamber gave uniquely physical expression to a compelling political idea – one best articulated not by a scholar of Peruvian history, but by the eighteenth-century political theorist Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France: ‘Society is…a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ Burke’s idea would have resonated as strongly with pre-Reformation Europeans as with pre-Columbian Peruvians.
It is therefore all the more surprising that this Peruvian practice of close contact with the bodies of the dead so deeply disconcerted the Spaniards when they encountered it. The Roman Catholic Mass is still celebrated every day over the physical remains of the dead. Every altar – even a portable altar-stone – should contain within it the relics of a saint, ideally of a martyr who died bearing witness to the faith. In the presence of (part of) the body of a saint the Mass will be said, and beside that physical body part worshippers will stand in prayer before God. In the Catholic church saints long dead are asked to help with every aspect of daily life, and to intercede with God for mercy on the souls of the departed. Sometimes their preserved bodies are still carried in procession, very like those of the Peruvian ancestors.This idea, that the world of the dead constantly intersects with our own, is found around the globe: from Mexico’s Day of the Dead to Japan’s Bon festival, families gather every year – in cemeteries or elsewhere – to eat, drink and be very merry with deceased relatives. Death is a division within, not a boundary of, the community. In China, where death changes relationships but does not dissolve them, an annual, domestic reunion with the ancestors has for centuries been a central family ritual. The bodies of the dead are not physically present, as in Peru, but their spirits are, and they come to dwell – for a time – in likenesses made specially to receive them: the whole history of portrait painting in China is inextricably linked to images made to serve in these ritual dialogues with the ancestors.
Saying Mass over the bodies of the dead: German portable altar, around 1200. On the back are the names of the saints whose relics, each carefully labelled (below), are contained in the cavity behind the altar-stone.
In the British Museum is a pair of paintings created for precisely this purpose: two ‘ancestor portraits’, painted on silk hanging scrolls, from the Ming dynasty – probably around 1600. A man and a woman, each seated on a wooden chair which is almost covered by their deep red robes, stare out from a background of plain dull gold. Each scroll is over two metres high – these dead ancestors are unquestionably larger than life. They are, however, anything but life-like: the faces are impassive, devoid of any emotional or psychological responses.
Ming dynasty ancestor portraits. The man wears a prominent badge that indicates his rank – or perhaps that of a descendant.
Jan Stuart is Curator of Chinese Art at the Freer–Sackler Galleries in Washington:
People wanted a portrait that would reproduce the heaven-endowed quality of a face, which would record the enduringly significant facial features, not as seen or encountered in any particular moment – so not frowning or smiling, not by daylight or by night. That is why there is no light or shade: these are intended to be timeless faces. The two portraits may well have been done after death, possibly by an artist who had never even seen the sitters. Often, artists would use physiognomy charts – not unlike our police identikit sketches, designed to put together a likeness and a personality. They showed how to draw high cheek bones, for example, and thus indicate that a person’s personality was full of power. Certain kinds of eyebrows would reveal intelligence. These charts showed classic facial characteristics – and what they told us about the person who possessed them.
Veneration was principally owed to the portrait of the father, but families would often request a portrait of the mother as well. They would be hung together, with the husband’s portrait always to the east of his wife’s – the place of greater honour. The similarity in scale and dress in these two portraits might suggest that these were husband and wife. But the fact that their chairs are different (the man’s is decorated in lacquer, the woman’s is of wood) indicates that they are probably unconnected, and that they were paired only much later in order to appeal to Western collectors – a marriage made not in heaven but by a dealer, for the art market. Yet whether singly or together, these portraits were made, as Jan Stuart describes, to enable the people they represented to play a role in the lives of their descendants for centuries after their death:
Portraits like these were brought out for specific occasions, of which the Chinese New Year is the most important. Lighted candles and burning incense would be placed below them, along with offerings of fruit and wine. Then the chief descendant, the oldest son, along with other family members, would pay obeisance to the portraits. They would kneel down and knock their heads on the floor in front of them, so that the deceased parent or grandparent would know that they were being honoured, that the family was still connected to them and would make sure that the departed souls were properly cared for.
People would have been well aware of what could happen if they failed in their duties towards paintings like these ones, and the people they represented. Ancestral spirits remained benign as long as they were cared for appropriately, and from time to time they would take up residence in these portraits to receive offerings. Decades, even centuries later, they would recognize themselves in the painting – hence the care taken to secure the timeless elements of their likeness – and so would know which one to inhabit. The man in our portrait has on his chest a panel of splendid embroidery, clearly a badge of rank. Fascinatingly, however, it may not be his own rank. Ancestors remained so closely identified with their descendants that if a son or grandson got a promotion in, say, the imperial civil service, the ancestor would – posthumously – also be promoted. A new portrait would be painted: a close copy of the first, but now featuring insignia of the higher rank, and the older portrait would be ritually burned.
Giving thanks in front of a portrait of an ancestor, in a painting by Yin Tang of around 1500
Ancestors not properly venerated could wreak havoc, causing illness or financial failure. On the other hand, if treated with proper reverence and allowed to share in the family’s continuing successes, they would bring good fortune to their descendants – from the birth of sons to long life and increasing wealth. After the annual ceremonies, portraits would be rolled up and carefully stored – which is why these paintings are in such good condition. Not until four or five generations had passed did a person’s relative become a ‘distant ancestor’, their spirit no longer requiring offerings of food and wine, their portrait no longer needing to be displayed. Only then could portraits properly be sold, as probably happened to these two in the course of the nineteenth century. Among other consequences of Mao Tse-tung’s ‘One Child’ policy is a widespread worry among those now old that there may be no one in the future to pay proper honour to their spirit.
China’s Communist leaders, especially during the Cultural Revolution, tried hard to suppress traditional religion, including the veneration of ancestors, which they viewed as a counter-revolutionary activity. But, in recent years, the Chinese dead have been making a comeback, and the ancient practices have been resumed. Many mainland Chinese, in common with the worldwide diaspora, today bring themselves at certain times of the year into the presence of their ancestors.
In doing so, they mostly use digital photographs – updating a portrait tradition that stretches back over 2,000 years. The offerings have been updated too, going beyond the traditional fruit and wine. Paper models of computers, cars and refrigerators, of luxury goods of all sorts, even of wi-fi routers, are now burned, so that the smoke will carry the necessary item to the spirit of the deceased. The ancient ritual is very much alive: an essential part of looking after the dead is keeping them in touch with the changes of modern life.
Modern gifts for the fashion-conscious ancestor: paper versions of luxury goods are burned to ensure that the dead have only the best.
When our pair of Chinese ancestor portraits arrived at the British Museum in the 1920s, the Curator of Oriental Prints and Drawings was Laurence Binyon, a pioneering authority on the art of the East. Binyon is now better known as a poet, and it is his words, from ‘For the Fallen’, written in 1914, that are carved on the war memorial beside the Museum’s main entrance – and on countless other memorials across the country. They are lines which are heard and repeated every year on Remembrance Sunday, at the heart of our most public and solemn act of national remembrance at the Cenotaph in Whitehall:
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
The nation pauses to remember, to honour the courage of those who died in battle, and to pay tribute to their sacrifice. But beyond that? To borrow the Chinese phrase, they have for most people now become ‘distant ancestors’. Only the very old can remember alive those who died in the Second World War, and we no longer ask them to play any part in our continuing communal life, neither sharing the joys nor shaping the decisions of the society they died defending. Other European countries remember with a clearer purpose: to reinforce or to change the behaviour of their citizens. In Russia, the triumphant celebrations of the dead of the Great Patriotic War 1941–5 play a key part in strengthening national (many would say nationalist) fervour; and in France the regular reanimation of La Flamme de la Nation under the Arc de Triomphe (Chapter 2) is a calculated exercise in the renewal of patriotic spirit. Germany by contrast dwells on the crime and folly that led to war, and uses remembrance to urge the present not to repeat the terrible mistakes of the past. For both France and Germany, reconciliation between former enemies is paramount in the rhetoric of commemoration.
In comparison, what underlies the British remembrance is less certain, and appears to have changed in recent decades. Paradoxically, as the memory of the war dead as individuals has faded, the sales of poppies and the number of commemorative events have steadily increased. It is as though remembering has itself become an object of nostalgia, that there is a desire to recapture the intense emotion and the sense of purpose with which previous generations mourned and commemorated a great moment of national history. In 2014, to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, a spectacular installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies – one for each soldier of the British Empire who died in the conflict – spilled into the moat of the Tower of London. Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red (p. 80) was a magnificent and moving sight, as the iconic building itself appeared to shed its life-blood in an unstaunchable flow. Yet appeals to extend the display were rejected on the basis that its transience was an essential part of the artistic conception. It was essentially – supremely – an aesthetic event, designed to touch the emotions, but not to endure. Our national commemoration, unlike that of other countries, does not demand that the lives lost should determine and change our behaviour, or inform the decisions we make in the present. We remember our dead, but we no longer live with them.