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Gravedigging 101
51–52 of 52 posts
Re: Gravedigging 101
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a funeral officiant in the UK, inter alia. The traditional purpose of an ossuary is to save the skull and two femurs, which were thought to be the desirable minimum for the archangel Michael to work the resurrection on the day of judgement (hence the symbolism of the skull and crossbones). Most cultures don't have a need to do that for religious reasons, and either want to scatter ashes, or bury them in a very co…
It sounds like the history I'd thought I'd heard, and maybe even the terminology, for what I was trying to describe were way off. "Ossuary" sounded like the right word for "bone box," but the context in which I'd heard the idea was an old Jewish custom of reusing tombs. You'd put somebody in there, wait for a couple years until they were just bones, gather the bones in a box (which was what I thought was called an os…
An ossuary is usually something like a building (e.g. a charnel house), but apparently you are right in saying that it is applied to Jewish bone-boxes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary#Jewish_ossuaries). For the other meaning, they can be vast. I visited the Paris Catacombs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris) and estimated that the remains of about 3M people were down there.