'Appreciating each other's funerary practices allowed the Wendats and French colonists to find common ground where there seemingly would be none. This title analyzes these encounters, using the Feast of the Dead as a metaphor for broader Indian-European relations in North America." -- WorldCat.
This Oriental Institute Museum exhibit catalog looks at how the living commemorated and cared for deceased ancestors in the ancient Middle East. The focus of the exhibit is the memorial monument (stele) of an official named Katumuwa (ca. 735 BC), discovered in 2008 by University of Chicago archaeologists at the site of Zincirli, Turkey. Part I of the catalog presents the most comprehensive collection of scholarship yet published on the interpretation of the Katumuwa Stele, an illuminating new document of ancestor cult and beliefs about the soul. In Part II, leading scholars describe the relationship between the living and the dead in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Levant (Syria-Palestine), providing a valuable introduction to the family and mortuary religion of the ancient Middle East. The fifty-seven objects cataloged highlight the role of food and drink offerings and stone effigies in maintaining a place for the dead in family life.
When Evelyn Waugh wrote The Loved One (1948) as a satire of the elaborate preparations and memorialization of the dead taking place in his time, he had no way of knowing how technical and extraordinarily creative human funerary practices would become in the ensuing decades. In Funeral Festivals in America, author Jacqueline S. Thursby explores how modern American funerals and their accompanying rituals have evolved into affairs that help the living with the healing process. Thursby suggests that there is irony in the festivities surrounding death. The typical American response to death often develops into a celebration that reestablishes links or strengthens ties between family members and friends. The increasingly important funerary banquet, for example, honors an often well-lived life in order to help survivors accept the change that death brings and to provide healing fellowship. At such celebrations and other forms of the traditional wake, participants often use humor to add another dimension to expressing both the personality of the deceased and their ties to a particular ethnic heritage. In her research and interviews, Thursby discovered the paramount importance of food as part of the funeral ritual. During times of loss, individuals want to be consoled, and this is often accomplished through the preparation and consumption of nourishing, comforting foods. In the Intermountain West, Funeral Potatoes, a potato-cheese casserole, has become an expectation at funeral meals; Muslim families often bring honey flavored fruits and vegetables to the funeral table for their consoling familiarity; and many Mexican Americans continue the tradition of tamale making as a way to bring people together to talk, to share memories, and to simply enjoy being together. Funeral Festivals in America examines rituals for loved ones separated by death, frivolities surrounding death, funeral foods and feasts, post-funeral rites, and personalized memorials and grave markers. Thursby concludes that though Americans come from many different cultural traditions, they deal with death in a largely similar approach. They emphasize unity and embrace rites that soothe the distress of death as a way to heal and move forward.
'A writer of subtle, finely crafted supernatural tales.' - T.E.D. Klein '[H]is stories . . . build up a unique sense of unease.' - Brian Stableford '[T]ense, cryptic . . . brooding supernaturalism . . . unjustly forgotten.' - E. F. Bleiler Something is wrong with Colonel Habgood's young son Denis. Some mysterious force seems to be sapping his physical health, and his behaviour has become oddly evasive and deceptive. Habgood suspects the pernicious influence of Raoul, a sinister handyman with whom Denis has become infatuated, believing that the man may be corrupting and defiling his son. But even after Raoul's departure, the troubles continue, and Denis's strength continues to wane. In an old book of medieval legends, his father finds a possible, if implausible, answer in stories of a nameless horror from beyond the grave that feasts on the young in order to return to life. Or could what's happening to Denis have any connection to an unexplained death in the attic turret nearly eighty years ago? And isn't there something strange about the scarecrow out in the fields, which seems, barely perceptibly, to have moved . . . ? Originally published in a limited hardcover edition by the legendary Arkham House, John Metcalfe's The Feasting Dead (1954) is worthy of being ranked alongside The Turn of the Screw and the tales of M.R. James, L.P. Hartley, and Robert Aickman. This new edition of this classic novella, previously available only in expensive secondhand copies, will allow modern readers to rediscover the unjustly neglected Metcalfe (1891-1965).
