You can blame my extensive knowledge of Death studies from a cultural anthropology perspective, on the fact that I was suicidal for many years, and upon discovering the library and looking up suicide, found only books about suicide prevention, and so learned to talk myself out of committing suicide amny times, however, looking up books about death took me down a different mental route. I learned about not just artistic studies of death, but about what can be called death culture. The beliefs, symbols, and mores of various cultures in relationship to death.
The problem with the information below is that I tried to make this a research presentation rather than just putting my personal opinion here. This website is meant to be a place for me to mouth off rather than give a damn about respectability.
I spent some time reviewing the decameron and trying to understand the cultural significance of death to Victorian society. But now I realize that that is not really what I want to do here. This place is supposed to be from what I already know and care about, not some broad overview of goth culture and history.
I am not making a tome to goth, I am creating a website I want to look at that doesn't piss me off.
Therefore,
the below may soon be removed. But also I might just leave it.
Some researchers suggest The Plague is where a decline in grief rituals in the West began.
high death toll impeded normal grief rituals and last rites to be given for the dead
ignorance about the cause of death made people hesitant to touch bodies of deceased for fear of contracting the disease.
This was counter to the traditions at the time, in which families
bathed the bodies at home after they passed,
laid them out on the bed,
invited folks over,
held religious ceremonies, and
planned the burial of their loved one with the local priest in the church’s cemetery.
The Decameron is one record of life with The Plague, "its hundred stories,
shared in ten days by ten young people escaping the Plague
in mid-14th-century Florence, it combines sheer entertainment with a meaningful
humanistic message. A tribute to human ingenuity, an epic masterpiece of a rising,
dynamic mercantile society that pursues pleasure while being threatened by sudden extinction,
the Decameron can be read as a transgressive and escapist manual of behavior as well as a breviary
of moral predicaments intended for a secular, unprejudiced reader."
-https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/the_project/about.php
The Victorian Era Made Grief & Death Fashionable
“It was during this time that there was a flourishing of funeral-related businesses including
coffin makers,
embalmers,
gravediggers
It was also during this time that burials
were moved to large parks in the country as
the cities no longer had room to continue burying the dead near their homes.”
The Rise of Science: Families Exchange Priests for Doctors
A Western Obsession with Everlasting Life – And What Happens to Us
When Our Loved Ones Don’t Achieve It
The Most Fascinating Grief Rituals Around the World
The Native American Lakota Grief Ritual & Rites Ceremony