Mourning Dove

Indigenous to North and Central America, this member of the pigeon family is known for its mournfully plaintive call, “cooOOoo-coo-coo-coo” and the whistling of its wings as it takes flight. It’s interesting that this term came up in our keyword searches for cemetery-related items–I always thought it was morning dove!

In Christianity, the dove represents the Holy Spirit, but is has had many different cultural meanings throughout history. For instance in Jewish history, a dove was sometimes sacrificed for a mother’s purification after childbirth. In Slavic culture, the soul turns into a dove at the moment of death. In the John Prine song, Jesus, The Missing Years, Jesus takes out his guitar and writes a song called “The Dove of Love Fell off the Perch.”

Roadside Memorials

The mourning rituals practiced by today’s fast-moving society are quite novel. Though one rarely feels uplifted by the sad bouquet of soggy stuffed animals tied to the telephone pole, we should respect the fact that people are finding their own ways to deal with loss. Spontaneous memorials like this roadside cross seldom stir up images of a life well spent and a just reward. Rather, they indicate sudden, unexpected, and usually violent death. These are abrupt memorials marking an abrupt loss of life.

People take comfort in ritual. These spontaneous memorials honor the memory of the deceased and provide us with ritual closure. Their purpose is no different from a heavily orchestrated church memorial service, though they are much more informal and personal. While spontaneous memorials may be outside the bounds of social decorum, they are free and low-key )sort of like burying your relative’s ashes on the sly, next to the family grave marker).

Further Reading: A Lively Look at the History of Death

Urn -Vessel of the Soul

I would hazard to guess that urns were the most common sculptural symbol in Victorian-era cemeteries. A Greek symbol of mourning, the urn represents the body as a container of the soul. In ancient Greece, the urn was a repository for the ashes of the dead, so it has quite a literal and functional meaning in a cemetery.

Often the urn is draped with a pall (seen in background), a cloth sometimes used to drape a closed casket. A coffin or casket can also be called a pall, by the way (hence pallbearers). The practice of draping is not isolated to urns, as you can see from this image.

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep – Further Exploration into the Symbolism of Death

The heading of this final section is the title of Mary Elizabeth Frye’s famous bereavement poem, reprinted below. As lives are concluded, we mourn the loss. Everywhere we look, we are reminded of the deceased, until time heals the wound. We feel it’s unfair to forget them, but we must get on with our lives. Quite possibly, the grave marker serves this purpose for many people. Subconsciously, at least, we officially mark their place on this earth so no one thinks us callous, and then we get on with our lives. Monuments and symbols become coping mechanisms, cemeteries become landscapes of memories. The world becomes a continual reminder of what once was.

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep – by Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sun on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning’s hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there; I did not die.

The verse has abundant symbolism, all related to the tension between letting go and holding on. While some cemetery symbols we’ve seen in this article can depict both the end as well as a beginning (e.g., the hourglass with wings), we’ve seen others that simply lament the fact that we are mortal. As we wrestle with our own interpretations of symbols, death, and the afterlife, it is best to consider what (the 17th Century English author) John Milton said:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.”

To read more about the psychology of mourning, you may want to read: Remembering Well: Rituals for Celebrating Life and Mourning Death (Hardcover)

by Sarah York

If you ever feel the need to feast on the lion’s share of funerary symbolism, visit Arlington Cemetery’s Mourning Arts Museum in Drexel Hill, PA (outside Philadelphia).

Wolf Tables – More than Markers of Burial Plots

While not so much a symbol as a practical device, wolf stones and wolf tables do remind us of the mortality of the flesh. These devices were used where thin soil and/or rocky terrain prevented the digging of deep graves. Here’s a photo of me sitting on a wolf table at a cemetery in Camden, NJ.

(Before this cemetery received an overhaul, it had a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood at the entrance, on which was painted the message: “No unauthorized burials permitted.”)

Stone slabs over graves offered some protection from scavenging wolves. Ben Franklin’s grave in Christ Church burial ground in Philadelphia is an example of a wolf stone. While it may seem a quaint practice to toss a penny onto his grave (“A penny saved is a penny earned”), the Christ Church Preservation Trust actually rakes up about $1800 a year, which helps defray the cost of site maintenance!

Cemetery Gate (Through which Souls Pass)

Another guardian of the grave is the cemetery gate. As you can see from the photo, cemetery gates can be just plain creepy, whether they be an entrance to a fenced family plot or a main gate. A gate or a barred entrance can symbolize the gates of Heaven; the entrance of the departed into the afterlife. This gate is that of the Baltimore National Cemetery.

In the late 1800s, people were just dying to get into Historic Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. One of the entrance gates had to be equipped with a turnstile in order to control the flow of horse-drawn carriage visitors into the cemetery!

In the Victorian era (roughly 1837 to 1901), the cemetery was the place to spend a quiet afternoon, as there were no arboretums, parks or museums to provide bucolic getaways from the noisy cities. That is, until the time came that the huge number of visitors and tourists forced Laurel Hill to begin issuing gate passes to lot holders and restricting Sunday visits to family members! (Read more about Laurel Hill Cemetery.)

Read more: The Very Quiet Baltimoreans: A Guide to the Historic Cemeteries and Burial Sites of Baltimore

Women and the Art of Mourning

As men are not allowed to be wholly emotional beings in Western society, women appear to be the designated grievers. This is why there are so many more melancholy women than men depicted in symbolic cemetery memorials. Apart from the odd centurion or archangel, men are typically characterized as their successful earthly selves.

For more on this topic, please see the book Saving Graces: Images of Women European Cemeteries by David Robinson.

Babies, Children, and Cherubs

Another of the famous rural Victorian garden cemeteries (actually the first of its kind in the U.S.) is Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mount Auburn Cherub was photographed here. Babies, Children, and Cherubs typically represent the untimely death of a child. As such, the symbol can invoke only sadness and death.

Walking through old American cemeteries, it is not unusual to see many hundred-year-old tombstones of children who died before they were two years old-sometimes from the same family as we see in the photo to the left.

We don’t see this as much today since childhood mortality is much lower than it was in the 1800s–mainly due to better living conditions, prenatal care, and vaccinations. Mount Auburn Cemetery (est. 1831), just outside Boston on the Harvard campus, is the nation’s first landscaped or “garden” cemetery. The inception of these outdoor sculpture gardens became a catalyst as well as repository for symbolism new and old.

Read more about Mount Auburn Cemetery: Portsmouth Cemeteries (Images of America) by Glenn A. Knoblock

This is not surprising, as Western society appears to be much more fascinated with death than with the afterlife (a quick scan of popular music and literature should make this plainly evident). In one place we are presented with historical, religious, architectural, genealogical, demographical, and sociological manifestations of society’s desire to memorialize the dead.

We’re all familiar with such symbols as the Star of David, and variations of the cross, but what about broken trees and wolf tables, i.e., symbols of death rather than the afterlife? In this article we’ll have a look at some common and some not-so-common symbols, all associated with letting go. So let’s first look at Mortality, that’s the big one.

Father Time

Much like the Grim Reaper, Father Time is often depicted with a sickle or scythe. Will this mythical personification of time use the instrument to cut us down in our prime? No. Father Time had his origin as Saturn, the Roman Deity of Time and an ancient Italian Corn God known as the Sower (the Greeks referred to him as Cronus or Kronos). Male ruler of the Roman Gods before Jupiter, Saturn’s weapon was a scythe. The Roman holiday of Saturnalia was a celebration of the harvest, hence the scythe. It was not until the Middle Ages that the Grim Reaper depictions familiar to us came into being.Father Time’s old, bent body reminds us that time is the devourer of all things and that, like the sand in the hourglass, his physical vitality will eventually run out -as will ours.In the image “Father Time,” atop a Masonic monument in Queens, NY, the sculptor seems to have taken liberties with symbolism. Angel wings? Your guess is as good as mine. Letting the imagination soar is not an uncommon thing in funerary sculpture. It is the one place where sculptors and architects are not required to follow any one particular style.

Hourglass

As long as we’re on the subject of time, let’s look at one of its symbols–the hourglass. In addition to actually being used as a timekeeping device, the hourglass in the mourning arts conjures the notion of time’s passing and the inevitability of death. Again, time flies, as seen on this cemetery gate emblem (Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia). One of the most amazing funerary sculptures I’ve ever seen is on the rear gatehouse of Baltimore’s Louden Park Cemetery-a huge hundred-plus-year-old wooden carving depicting the hourglass with wings. An hourglass indicates the person’s time on earth ran out and suggests that we should embrace life because it, much like the flow of the sand in an hourglass, is finite and will eventually end. Other funerary symbols that essentially say the same thing are the cut tree and the broken pillar.

Human Bones

Another example of the hourglass is depicted above crossed bones, on this stone in an old Quaker churchyard cemetery in Philadelphia. Both symbols are of rudimentary design and therefore were easy to carve. Crossed bones remind us that our earthly bodies will someday die.

According to Wikipedia, actual skulls and bones were long used to mark the entrances to Spanish cemeteries. The practice, dating back to the 1700s, led to the symbol eventually becoming associated with the concept of death. It is interesting to note how the skull and crossbones (depicted on headstones in the 1700s) evolved into the cherub head with wings by the mid-1800s. The change is coincident with society’s changing (i.e., less terrifying) attitudes toward death.

Weeping Willow Tree

Most plants and trees in cemetery ornamentation symbolize the positive, goodness, the afterlife. My father used to refer to death as “pushing up daisies,” a happy notion. The willow, however, is one of the few plants that is plainly indicative of sorrow and mourning. “Nature’s lament,” is how the weeping willow is referred to in Rochester’s Glossary of Victorian Cemetery Symbolism, but why this association with death? Well, cemetery trees in general have a mystique about them. Edgar Lee Masters, in his “Spoon River Anthology” writes how people “…move into the soil and into the flesh of the tree, and into the living epitaphs…” As for the willow itself, Greek mythology has it that the sorceress Circe had a cemetery planted with willow trees dedicated to Hecate (perceived for the most part as the goddess of witchcraft or evil) and her magic. Here men’s corpses were left exposed in the tops of the trees for the birds and elements to devour. From this association with grief and death came the practice of placing willow branches inside coffins, and the planting of young saplings on graves of the departed.

According to the Wiccans, the ancient Celts believed that the spirit of the dead would rise up into the sapling planted above, which would grow and retain the essence of the departed person.

Truth be told, you don’t generally see the willow carved onto tombstones after the 1850s. Prior to that it appeared to be a fairly common symbol. This tattoo belongs to a member of the AGS, Association for Gravestone Studies.

Further reading: The Complete World of Greek Mythology by Richard Buxton

Getting approval was the easy part. How to actually move the bodies is proving more difficult. Cemetery officials have hired surveyors and contractors to figure out the best way to move the graves, but they are concerned that the drop off is so unstable, that it may give way if people try to unearth the bodies.

Source: LiveScience

New Orleans has always respected the dead, but this isn’t the reason the tombs of our departed loved ones are interred above ground. Early settlers in the area struggled with different methods to bury the dead. Burial plots are shallow in New Orleans because the water table is high. Dig a few feet down, and the grave becomes soggy, filling with water. The casket will literally float. You just can’t keep a good person down!

The early settlers tried by placing stones in and on top of coffins to weigh them down and keep them underground. Unfortunately, after a rainstorm, the rising water table would literally pop the airtight coffins out of the ground. To this day, unpredictable flooding still lifts an occasional coffin out of the ground in those areas generally considered safe from flooding and above the water table.

Shannon Lee Dawdy, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, worked with FEMA from October-December 2005 to record the damage done to the city’s 20 National Historic Register Districts. In the article, she reflects on both Katrina’s destruction and the numerous other disasters in New Orleans’ past – 6 major hurricanes and floods, two major fires, and 3 yellow fever and cholera epidemics – and how after each, New Orleans rebuilt.

In 1722, just after the first French buildings were constructed, New Orleans experienced a major hurricane. Le Blond de La Tour, the city’s first engineer, saw it as a rebuilding opportunity, saying

“All these buildings were old and provisionally built, and not a single one was in the alignment of the new city and thus would have had to be demolished.”

Interestingly, most of the buildings that make up the French Quarter were constructed in the Spanish colonial (1769-1803) and American periods (post 1803). About 80% of the French structures burned to the ground with a devastating fire of 1788.

For more info on Katrina’s effect on New Orleans’ cemeteries, visit SaveOurCemeteries.org

Cemetery and Penitentiary Photography
by Ed Snyder
July 3 – 31, 2006
Mugshots CoffeeHouse
21st & Fairmount Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19130
(267) 514-7145

See website for hours:
www.mugshotscoffeehouse.com

Mugshots CoffeeHouse in the Fairmount section of Philadelphia will be hosting a show of Ed’s work.

As Mugshots is right across the street from the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, Ed will beexhibiting images from his ESP portfolio, in addition to his angel and cemetery photography. And you thought the cemetery photography was creepy…

All work will be for sale.

After an investigation by Lebanon’s public prosecutor, Saeed Mirza, the mass grave was discovered to be an old cemetery, with bodies dating from 50 years ago to 350 years.

Source: “Mass grave” was 17th-century cemetery

People walk off with flowers, shrubs, flags, vigil lights and other items left on the graves of veterans by family and friends. It’s almost as busy as the weeks before Christmas, when small trees, lights and other holiday displays and memorials vanish from grave sites.

And the worst part – many of the thieves sell their goods back to cemetery visitors along the roadside, never mentioning that they’re getting second hand goods. Thieves can also sell the bronze flag holders to junkyards in exchange for cash.

While apparently cemeteries don’t keep track of the costs of stolen merchandise, we can assume it’s quite expensive.

Vigil lights cost about $75. The price of a bronze flag holder can reach about $60. Solar-powered crosses that illuminate grave sites go for about $30. Some floral arrangements run more than $100.

Some cemeteries are curbing theft by recommending that buyers sink part of the bronze holders in a coffee can of quick-set cement before placing it in the ground to anchor it. Others recommend writing their names in permannt marker on solar-powered crosses, which are becoming popular.

Aside from installing expensive surveilance systems – something most cemeteries can’t afford – there’s not much else that can help. A proposed Assembly bill is in the works in New Jersey that would include fines of between $1000 and $25,000, community service, and jail time for anyone caught stealing cemetery monuments and memorabilia.

The bill, sponsored by Assemblyman Jack Conners, D-Burlington, Camden, was inspired by the acts of Adam Jensen. Jensen stole more than 700 bronze flag holders from 4 cemeteries in Burlington Township and sold them for scrap for about $.65 each. Conners is hoping it will raise public awareness about the problem and deter would-be thieves.

Source: PressOfAtlanticCity.com

The American painter and designer, Louis Comfort Tiffany, essentially brought new high quality, high technology stained glass as an art form to the world in the late 1800s. Prior to that time, most of the stained glass used in windows came from Europe, and then only as seconds. European craftsmen kept the best quality glass for themselves. Tiffany manufactured new types of colored glass in over 5,000 colors!

In the late 1870s (sometimes referred to as The Gilded Age in the U.S.), European-made stained glass windows were highly prized by the American elite. Tiffany’s experimentation could not have happened at a better time. It also corresponded with the enormous religious fervor that was spreading across America, resulting in the construction of thousands of High Gothic churches. Deceased parishioners and clergy needed to be memorialized, and stained glass became the medium of choice. As the U.S. population spread westward on the North American continent, new municipal buildings, colleges, and libraries were built and needed to be decorated. Demand for windows made by Tiffany’s company skyrocketed, offering the proud owner social status and panache.

In this excerpt from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website, we see that tiffany had much more to offer than the technology to colorize the glass:

“Tiffany also introduced new subject matter into his windows. While continuing to provide figural windows of saints and biblical themes for churches, he at times eliminated the figure altogether, conferring religious significance on the landscape and the natural world itself. Memorial windows in churches and mausoleums often featured verdant woodland themes, streams meandering through mountain valleys, or floral motifs. Tiffany’s lifelong preoccupation with gardens inspired some of the most naturalistic depictions of flowers and plants in all of stained glass.”

Today, collectors and admirers of this art form are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction for Tiffany windows, lamps, and other artwork. Hence the allure for thieves. What easier target than an old mausoleum’s Tiffany window in an abandoned cemetery?

Why do they call it ‘stained’ glass? Is it actually stained with a pigment? Well, that’s the process Tiffany perfected. Rudimentary experimentation with color began in the Middle Ages, but much of the early ‘stained’ glass was just clear glass painted on with shades of translucent paint. Tiffany evolved the process of coloring glass in the late 1800s to the point where he was able to make thousands of different colors. Metallic oxides are mixed in with the molten glass to color it-copper was found to create a greenish hue, nickel for purple, manganese for violet. Use of the glass in creating stained glass windows was advanced by the Arts and Crafts movement and its leader William Morris in England.

In 1879, Tiffany’s contemporary, John LaFarge, invented opalescent glass, the medium for which Tiffany is most noted. Opalescent glass is glass that is not transparent–you can’t see through it because of its dense color. Look at the Shell Glass image as an example (this is from a mausoleum in Philadelphia). Tiffany popularized a new art form based on opalescent glass to international applause and success, much as the Japanese popularized consumer electronics based on the (American-designed) transistor! As the great philosopher David Bowie said, “It’s not who did it first, its who did it second.”

Read more:

• Wikipedia
• StainedGlass.org

The first 2 Tiffany Stained Glass pictures are from Wikipedia – here and here.

Another symbol intended to help prepare us for the great beyond is the stained glass window. Does this come as a surprise? In the mid-1100s, Abbot Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis (the royal abbey of France) believed that the presence of beautiful objects would lift men’s’ souls closer to God. This medium for artistic religious expression arose when substantial church building began back in ninth century Europe. By the 10th century, depictions of Christ and biblical scenes were found in French and German churches and decorative designs were found in England. The images “BVM” and “Stained Glass” were made from mausoleums in a Queens, NY cemetery.

When I first began photographing in cemeteries, the workers were rather suspicious. At times, I had to show identification, sign papers, or was asked to leave! As I got into discussions with the caretakers I came to find out that “vandalism” didn’t just mean kids running through the grounds knocking over tombstones. Old historic cemeteries are on guard against something different. People have been known to photographic valuable sculptures or Tiffany stained glass in mausoleums, so that someone could come back at night and steal the item! Gives new meaning to the term “grave robber.” Tiffany windows were passe by the 1940′s and went unnoticed until the 1970′s. One sold at Christie’s Auction for $662,500 in 1999.

On March 10, 2000, Alastair Duncan, expert on Tiffany stained glass, was sentenced to 27 months in prison for conspiring with a Queens grave robber and antiques dealer to pilfer rare stained-glass windows from cemetery mausoleums and sell them overseas

The results of such crime can be seen in the two images to the left. Apparently the graffiti artist believes in an afterlife (we can only hope that at some point he’ll become intimately involved with these characters).

In another (more closely guarded) cemetery across town in Philadelphia, we can see a similar mausoleum in better repair. This is its window, photographed from the inside. A similarly shaped stained glass was no doubt stolen from the blocked-up one. The ornate bronze doors appear to be targets for theft as well.

Read more:

• museum-security.org
• thestorefinder.com

Read more: Philadelphia Area Cemeteries (Paperback) by ALLAN M. HELLER