Burial as a rite of passage and the Ancestor cult

Burned bones

“…In order to become an ancestor a person had to be destroyed both mentally and physically. When someone dies, his/her social persona disappears as well. In its place there is a body, a cadaver that will quickly start to decompose unless the body is disposed of by burial. The cadaver might also be frightening in the eyes of the society; it might be polluted, and hence certain rituals are needed in order to transform the body from one status to the next. The society has to help the body in this transformation process.

Arnold van Gennep’s theory of rites of passage (1909) follows this line of thought. When a person dies he/she is separated from the society, and slowly incorporated into the world of the dead ancestors. In order for this transition to happen the body has to be treated right in the burial process. The body is thus in a liminal phase when the deceased is neither a living person nor yet an ancestor. This might be seen as a frightening or dangerous phase and in order for everything to go right funeral rituals have to be performed. Only if the right rituals are performed the deceased is able to be transformed into an ancestor. This transformation process means that the deceased is being reborn again as an ancestor. He has thus got a new status and a new identity.” (Wikholm & Raninen.)

As the bodies were first cremated in a typical Iron Age burial, this would mean that the body of the deceased person would be visibly deconstructed, and thus the transformation process of disappearing, becoming unrecognizable by the living people and rejoining the collectivity of the ancestors would also be more tangible.

In the beginning of a new era – which nowadays is known as the Migration period – a new cemetery form appeared in Finland and Estonia, called cremation cemetery under level ground” (Fin. polttokenttäkalmisto; Est. madala kivistikuga põletusmatuste väli). This type of cemetery is recognized by the two typical characteristics: weak visibility above ground and collectivity. Collectivity in this case means that the burned bones and the broken artefacts have been scattered around the cemetery. Even though the practice was strong already in the early Iron Age Estonia, the collective character is a significant change in the Finnish funerary custom, as there are only sporadic signs of collective burials during the Roman Iron Age.

In the light of modern archeology, it has been found that the amount of burned human bones in these cemeteries is usually low. It seems that only a part of the burned body ended up in the cemetery, via a symbolic deposition. Even though some parts of the bones were likely left at the pyre, they could have been taken elsewhere instead of the cemetery.

The birth of iron

It is mentioned in Icelandic sagas that significant persons could sometimes be buried in several burial mounds in different locations in order to increase good fortune in farming. Also in Finnish folklore bones could be taken from graveyards to fields to increase the crop. When the harvesting was done, the bones were taken back to the graves. Some ploughing marks found in the bottom soil of the cemeteries are considered as marks of ritual ploughing. There is also another theory of the use of the bones, based on the idea of regeneration, due to the fact that many traces of smithy activity are found in the immediate vicinity of the cremation cemeteries in Finland and elsewhere in Scandinavia. Possibly, a cremation cemetery was considered as a powerful place, which was taken advantage of by the smiths. There is a strong symbolic connection between fire, cremation and the iron heated by the iron smith and the production of iron may be seen as a birth, and that the metal develops social qualities through initiations and ritual technique (there is also a Kalevala rune about the birth of Iron). When making steel, or carbonized iron, it was important to have the right amount of carbon in the iron to keep an edge sharp – this knowledge was very likely possessed by skilled iron smiths, who on the other hand kept their techniques in secret from others. When using bone-coal mixture as a catalyst, the carbon from the charcoal will incorporate into the surface of the iron more easily.

The hardening process, carbonization of raw iron, is part of the iron technology to make the iron more robust. However, people of the pre-Christian Northern Europeans did not separate actions, thoughts and technique; they were all interlinked in cosmology and revealed by rituals, which gave meaning to the material world. The role of the smith changed from 500 BC to AD 1500 and gave him a mystical status in European folklore. In Finnish national epic Kalevala, the hero Ilmarinen – a blacksmith, is sort of a demigod. The mystification of the blacksmith is also found in the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg, in which the hero of the story travels to Finland to get a powerful sword. The ritual of giving birth weapons from the dead ancestors’ bones could make the role of the blacksmith and his products even more mystified – and valued, in a pre-Christian society.

From collective burial to individual inhumation

“To change the burial customs from cremation to inhumation is an enormous ideological leap. It is a sign of change in the Afterlife beliefs. This must also have affected the conceptions concerning the body and the soul. Did the dead body become frightening in some way? Were special protective rituals needed? How did the community of the ancestors perceive this new way of disposal? Did they accept it?” (Wikholm&Raninen.)

The collective cremations were fused with individual burials during the 6th and 7th centuries, something that is found mainly in the Finnish level-ground cremation cemeteries. The custom seems to disappear again in the 9th century until the late Viking Age when individual burials appear again. Individuality in this case can be seen as concentrations of metal items at the burial sites. In other

words, there was a kind of bi-ritualism in which the collectively scattered bones and individual cremations were done in the same cemetery at the same period of time. This raises questions about how personhood, soul and ancestral existence were seen by the society.

That the individual burials were deposited in the older cremation cemetery suggests that there was continuity in the ancestor cult and the beliefs surrounding it, even though the rituals had changed. Perception of individualism regarding the graves can be only speculated, and perhaps it was only the most important thing for the ritual to simply incorporate the dead into a collective cremation cemetery. This would have given the dead the right to be a part of a shared past within a collective group of ancestors. In other words, it is the place of burial that matters. Perhaps, only certain only certain people were allowed to be individually buried inside the cremation cemeteries, because there has not been found that many inhumations at these cemeteries. Perhaps, the individual burials were also a sign of appearance of new features in the material culture, status-related differentiation and dualism in the conceptions of soul and ancestral existence.

Summarized from:

Anna Wikholm and Sami Raninen (2006) The broken people: deconstruction of personhood in Iron Age Finland. Estonian Journal of Archaeology. 10:2, 150-166.

Terje Gansum (2004) Role the bones – from iron to steel. Norwegian Archaeological Review. 37:1, 41-57.

The information about the national epics added by the writer.