An ossuary is a space designed to be the final resting place for
post-burial skeletal remains. It was most commonly used as a practice due to
overcrowding on cemetery grounds thus excavating the previously buried and
transferring them to the ossuary helped condense the bodies and expand spaces
available. Sizes of the space can range from boxes to buildings and can be seen
all throughout the world. What really catches peoples attentions about
ossuaries are the architectural arrangements in most, it is a shock factor to
see a wall lined with skeletal heads, or in the Sedlec ossuary a magnificent
chandelier made from the bones of hundreds of people. Death has been transformed into an art form,
the human skeleton has transcended its meaning has being the basis of a body
and now visually takes on another meaning. Ossuaries have drawn so much
attention that countries with prominent ossuaries have industrialized seeing
the dead and it thrives as being a tourist attraction. Why does death attract
so many people? Why are humans so intrigued by the human skeleton and what can
we interpret about these interaction with these spaces?
Death is on display and has the eyes
of thousands of people on it every day.
This blog explores two different ossuaries spaces: Sedlec Ossuary
and
the Talpiot tombs. The ossuaries that will be talked about through this
blog all have religious connections, where it be a church or have supposed
connection to Jesus which definitely has effect on their intrigue. The display
and practice of human remains after-death has been intrinsically connected to
religious beliefs of some sort. In early European Christian context there was a
moral and spiritual connection with the skeleton and which it operated as a
‘momento mori’ (Hallam 475). Yet what other factor does viewing death draw a
person in, we all should be relatively aware of what the skeletal body looks
like yet its eerie presence and confirmation that after death we are all doomed
to be nothing but bones. Why are people so intrigued? In an answer to such
questions I believe that the imagery of a skeleton has a strong connection as a
reminder of the inevitable, but also brings a sense of connectivity that we are
all one. The transience of life is projected and timelessly so through these
constructions.
Bones are the architecture of the human body and have been transformed
to being an architectural foundation for an out-of-body material construction.
In looking at the concept of the rites of passage, a body is first separated
from the community and buried after death, it then has to go through transition
of being exhumed and cleansed of the remaining flesh and materials the body was
buried with to be reincorporated into the realm of the ossuary where it
takes on a new identity. Through the exhumation the body still has connection
to a human, a familial connection that with that brings grief and connection
with the living, in some ossuaries this connection has been kept alive with
marking the bones in some sort, be it engraving or painting to personalize the
now unrecognizable. As will be discussed
the Talpiot tombs did have some engravings on the containers yet none on the
bones themselves and neither did the Sedlec. The Sedlec goes to almost the
opposite spectrum of being unable to identify or connect on a personified sense
due to its intrinsic usage of bones. The way people now are able to look and
attempt to articulate the physical construction of skeletal remains emotionally
is all relative to how they are designed.
The designs of ossuaries as visual stimuli effect the emotional response
of the on-lookers, even without ancestral connectivity there is a connection
between the dead and the living that does bring on a feeling of fear and
sadness. Elizabeth Hallam in her essay, Articulating bones: an
epilogue, she is quoted saying bones This labour
with bones “produced tangible, embodied emotions made all the more powerful by
the sense of ‘shared substance’ with the deceased formed through blood ties and
nurturing” (Hallam 479). When the designs are so complex like those in the
Sedlec, it is hard for the eye to articulate something that is so familiar yet
transformed and separated into the strange entities. The way the bones are
condensed together, taking hundreds of different people’s bones and groupings a
display accordingly, makes the naked eye articulate the imagery differently. In
some ossuaries the skeletal body is remained intact, to encompass the
anatomical skeletal arrangement, which allows the viewer to gain more of an eerie
understanding and connection. The bones of humans, which are regularly seen as
connected to a person is now materialized into designs that portray household
items. The attempt to comprehend the almost beauty of craftsmanship to the
relation of a human being is drawing emotional experience that I feel is one of
the main reasons that bring such tourist and social attraction.
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