The burning question – how cremation became our last great act of self-determination

From 18th century religious battles over the revival of cremation to colouring tattoo ink with ashes, Thomas Laqueur on how attitudes to human remains have changed

Cremation of the dead was the norm in the first century AD and the exception by the fourth. No one has explained why, although everyone agrees that it was not, as was long thought, due to the rise of Christianity. It is true that some early Christians had objections to cremation, and that their pagan opponents associated their strange Christian belief in resurrection with a need to put the dead body into the ground. But there were no theological grounds to believe that the prospects of a happy afterlife had anything to do with whether a body was burned or buried, or eaten by a lion. Besides, the new religion was too small to have had so great an influence on funerary practices so early on.

By the time of Charlemagne, in the ninth century, inhumation had become the mark of the Christian way of disposing of the dead, and cremation was associated with the pagans. The emperor insisted that the newly Christianised Germanic tribes abandon their fiery pyres. By the 11th century, in all of Europe – and much earlier in some places – the only proper place for a dead body was in a churchyard. Exclusion from burial in sacred ground and from priestly rites was understood as the most terrible consequence of excommunication or suicide. Only heretics, witches and other miscreants of the worst sort were burned – alive, not dead – and their ashes scattered, to symbolise the eradication of the evil they represented.

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