Of Obsequies and Etruscan Tombs - What Can We Learn from Ancient Funeral Practices
Recently, I encountered a new word related to funerary ritual: obsequies. Being the word-nerd that I am, I had to investigate its etymology.
Today, obsequies simply means funeral rites or ceremonies, usually in the plural. The English word appears in the late fourteenth century through Anglo-French and Old French forms such as obsequie and obseque, ultimately from Medieval Latin obsequiae. But its history is tangled with two related Latin ideas. Obsequium referred to dutiful attendance or service and derives from obsequi—to follow after or comply with—from sequi, “to follow.” Meanwhile, Latin exsequiae, meaning funeral rites, was related to exsequi, with the sense of following through or accompanying. Over time, these words influenced one another and helped give us obsequies in its funerary sense. Etymonline
What caught me was that underlying image of following.
A funeral is something we perform for the dead, certainly. But perhaps it is also something we do with them. We accompany them.
And then, in the delightful way of serendipity, a new article crossed my desk.
Maurizio Forte and Jacqueline Ortoleva recently published a fascinating study of two fifth-century BCE painted Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia: the Tomba del Gallo and the Tomba dei Demoni Azzurri, or Tomb of the Blue Demons. Rather than approaching the tombs primarily as collections of architecture and imagery, the researchers asked what happened when living bodies actually moved through them. They combined acoustic measurements, three-dimensional modelling, visual-attention analysis, reconstructed movement, and other computational methods to investigate the tombs as sensory environments.
Their results suggest that the two tombs produced quite different experiences. The Tomba del Gallo seems to have encouraged relatively ordered movement and visual attention. The Tomb of the Blue Demons, by contrast, could have been far more disorienting. Its acoustics produced substantial reverberation; sounds could travel between the burial chamber, entrance corridor, and outside world. Darkness, flickering light, painted supernatural figures, music, voices, lamentation, incense, offerings, and movement would all have contributed to an environment radically different from everyday life.
But what interested me most was not the technology used to study the tombs (although that is very interesting, indeed!). It was the authors' interpretation of them as transitional spaces.
Without explicitly organizing their argument around Arnold van Gennep's familiar tripartite model of rites of passage, Forte and Ortoleva describe something remarkably similar: separation from the ordinary world, destabilization within a liminal environment, and eventual reintegration.
The descending entrance corridor physically removes the participant from everyday space. Inside, ordinary sensory expectations are disrupted. Eventually, the living emerge again into the world above. The dead do not. And yet I do not think the distinction is simply that the deceased is permanently transformed while the mourners return unchanged. Everyone who enters the rite is altered.
The deceased passes from the social category of the living into whatever category that society constructs for its dead or ancestors. The mourners return to ordinary social life, but they do so as people whose relationships and identities have changed. A spouse becomes a widow or widower. A child becomes someone without a parent. A community becomes a community missing one of its members. Reincorporation does not mean restoration.
The passage is therefore asymmetric, but it is a passage for both the dead and the living.
This is where I found myself returning to that wonderful old word: obsequies.
Perhaps part of what funerary ritual accomplishes is to allow the living to follow the dead for a little while.
The Etruscan mourner descended from daylight into a subterranean world where sound behaved strangely, vision became uncertain, and images of beings associated with another realm surrounded the living. Forte and Ortoleva even suggest that the Tomb of the Blue Demons allowed the funerary participant to move through this transitional environment with the deceased.
The tomb, then, was not merely the place where a corpse was deposited. Nor were its paintings simply pictures illustrating Etruscan ideas about death. The entire environment could participate in making transition tangible. The mourner did not merely contemplate a boundary between worlds. For a short time, they entered it.
And perhaps that is something antiquity can remind us about funerals in the present.
Modern funerary practices can sometimes become focused on disposition: burial, cremation, the container, the cemetery, the paperwork, the logistics of what must be done with human remains.
Those things matter. But funerals have another task entirely.
They give us somewhere to go with the dead.
Not all the way. We cannot make that journey with them. But ritual can create a threshold at which the living and the dead travel together for a while before their paths diverge.
The dead continue beyond our reach.
The mourners return to the world of the living. But they do not return as the people who entered.
Perhaps that is what I like so much about obsequies. Buried within this nearly forgotten word is an image worth recovering: when someone dies, we do not simply dispose of their remains or commemorate the life that has ended. For a little while, we follow with dutiful service.
And then we come home changed.
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