Study Guide Death
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Burial Practice
Burial practices provide useful information about a community’s rituals and beliefs as well as insights into what people believe happened after death. Both Puritan and Wampanoag funerals delicately balanced the paradox of death: for Puritans this balance was between salvation and damnation or eternal life and eternal death, while for Wampanoags the balance death as both regenerative and destructive.
Puritan funerary rites reflect the delicate Puritan balance between belief in salvation and the damnation: the burials helped console the mourners that the deceased was in the hands of God (Stannard 100), but also reminded the living of their own need to repent. Although Puritans believed in a bodily resurrection, they did not feel a need to preserve the dead for that end (Stannard 100-101). The dead were usually buried within two days since bodies were often not embalmed (Stannard 110). The bodies were washed and dressed and laid out either at home or at church (Stannard 111-12). This practice emphasized the correlation between the dead and domestic and sacred space. Invitations to the funeral were accompanied by a gift of gloves: Andrew Eliot, the minister of New north Church in Boston, collected close to three thousand gloves (Stannard 112). Gloves were a sign of gentility in Puritan society and were often included in Portraits such as that of John Winthrop (1640) and John Freake (1671 and 1674). Gloves also marked a physical barrier between the living and the dead. The family walked in front of the hearse and coffin, and others followed behind: Mourners wore their gloves as well as mourning ribbons and scarves (Stannard 112). Coffins were decorated with funerary verses composed for the deceased, and were often distributed in broadside form at major expense (Stannard 113, 117). These verses, like Mayhew’s biographies, emphasized the presence of divine Grace in the lives of dead and hence reassured the mourners that the deceased was among the saved. The broadsides were often illustrated with iconography similar to that of gravestones with death’s heads, scythes, hourglasses, and the like (Stannard 117). These icons warned the mourner of the passage of time and helped prepare him for his own meeting with death. Funerary sermons were given either at the time of burial or a few days afterwards (Stannard 115). After the coffin was placed in the ground, a feast was held at the church or home and mourning rings were distributed (Stannard 113). All these rites helped the mourner envision the deceased as part of a new community and partaking in a new eternal life that, one day, the mourner himself would ideally join.
Funerary rites among the Native peoples of New England were also elaborate (Bragdon 1996: 233). These rituals emphasized the cyclical nature of death and life (Bragdon 1996: 234). For example, the food was stored in burial pits symbolically reflected the renewal of natural life after winter’s death; burial was also linked with the planting of corn (Bragdon 1996: 234). When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth they found several of these mounds that they quickly desecrated in the eager search for food (Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation). Possessions were often either burned after death, highlighting the regenerative power of fire (Bragdon 1996: 235). The dual nature of death as destructive and regenerative is reflected in the Massachusett word for death: amit was linked both to the idea of exceeding, going beyond, rotting, and the idea of m'anit: “sacred, spiritual force, god” (Bragdon 1996: 235. Quotes Trumbull 49). Bodies were placed in the grave with a southwestern orientation, the direction of Cautantowwit’s house (Bragdon 1996: 235; Simmons 1970). This orientation has been observed even in the graves of some Algonquian converts. Roger Williams reported that the Narragansetts felt that upon death “the soules of Men and Women goe to the Sou-west, their great and good men and Women to Cautantowwit his house, where they have hopes” (Bragdon 1996: 188; Williams 1936: 130). While Puritans gave the living goods to commemorate the status of the deceased, Wampanoags buried goods with the deceased that marked their “role and status” (Bragdon 1996: 236, Simmons 1970: 44). Rather than diminishing after colonization, Algonquian funerary rites increased, as did grave goods. One possibility is these rites were a way of revitalizing a belief system that was under attack and transformation (Bragdon 1996: 239; Nassaney 1989: 880). Funerary rites marked the community of the dead and the living: both the mourners and the deceased declared their allegiances to Christianity and/or Native practice through mourning and burial procedures.
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