He goes on to say that to behead a corpse is to follow the path of Satan, and that it is God, not the lip-smacking corpse, who has the power over life and death. But the pastor seems to understand that simply banning the killing of corpses is not enough to stop this phenomenon. Superstitious beliefs must be destroyed so that their error becomes clear. Another Lutheran pastor explained to his parishioners how they had been led to superstitious, destructive beliefs. This had to do with how the Devil hates women. The pastor explained that the Devil is slandering and humiliating these women by promoting the belief in lip-smacking, and that the Devil is using these beliefs to create conflict in society, “because digging up someone’s relative and cutting off his head hardens and corrodes honest friendship.” The pastor also had another point of view: digging up the bodies of plague victims would lead to the spread of the disease, to the delight of the Devil.
These ways of dealing with the past (and the past) may seem foreign from the perspective of the present. But modern society is also rife with dubious diagnoses of social ills and unethical, ineffective or dangerous proposed treatments. For example, the demonization of immigrants in the United States stems from false arguments that they are the main perpetrators of violent crime. Autism, pandemics, school shootings, child abuse—all of these problems are responded to by some in ways that are only minimally different from understanding disease as the result of smacking the lips of dead women. Killing the Dead is an archaeological and anthropological study, but it is also a catalog of how our predecessors grappled with the problem of evil: where do diseases come from, why do children die, why do evildoers rise to power?
Blair reviews some more contemporary accounts, including some from the twentieth century. In a case that occurred in 1914 near the Polish-Belarusian border, a priest ordered the exhumation of a corpse that lay face down with its fingers “all bitten, as if it was “eating itself.” The priest prayed while the head of the corpse was cut off with a shovel. “War, revolution and collectivization then devastated popular culture,” Blair writes. The belief in corpses returning to haunt the living has largely disappeared, although some practices persist: in 2007, a stake was driven into the grave of Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia.
After reading Blair's book, I found that the various ways in which the dead were killed felt less like disturbing desecration and more like emotionally recognizable mourning. Death, fear and sadness unite disparate practices. In two essays published in book form in 1915, “Thoughts for the Times on war and deathSigmund Freud argued that the First World War led to a change in European views on death. Of earlier times he writes: “For all who listened to us, we were, of course, ready to affirm that death was the inevitable result of life, that everyone owes death to death.” But this was a superficial belief. “In reality, however, we are accustomed to acting as if things were different.” When death does occur, “it’s as if our expectations were greatly shaken.” War, he argued, made death undeniable: we are “forced to believe in it.” As war and death will continue, he asks if anything can be achieved by letting go of our illusions, whether this can make us as connected to life as we are to the idea of an imaginary soldier returning home safely. Referring to the adage that to preserve peace it is necessary to arm for war, he concludes: “If you want to endure life, prepare to die.” ♦
