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

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

At life’s end, some of us would like to believe that angels, as our celestial companions, will bear us home. Not surprisingly then, angels are a common symbol in cemeteries. It could be argued that angels benefit the living more than the dead-they offer us comfort while softening the finality of death. Personally, I see them as the embodiment of the tension between freedom and confinement-a tension we all feel. These angels reside inside a crypt in Baltimore’s Greenmount Cemetery. They sit with heads bowed, as if guarding the bodies of the departed souls, alleviating the gloom of these below-ground family burial places.

Foo Dogs

Another type of protector–this one spiritual– is the foo dog, which guards Chinese graves. This lion-like creature resulted when Indian Buddhist missionaries described lions to Chinese artists (who were not familiar with such beasts!). These powerful mythic guardians have traditionally stood in front of Chinese imperial palaces, emperors’ tombs and government offices since the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). There are scattered Chinese divisions in cemeteries around Philadelphia (which has a Chinatown in its center city district). This image was made in Abington, PA (northeast of Philadelphia).

Star of David

Not only a sign of redemption, but the universal symbol of the Jewish people. Jews use the Star of David as it was used for many centuries: as a magical good luck symbol and as a sign of Jewish identity. It has only achieved this latter status since the Middle Ages. At that time it started to appear on flags, tombstones, and synagogue decorations. The Star of David, or magen David (‘Shield of David’) gets its name from the folklore that David carried a hexagram-shaped shield during his defeat of Goliath. Hence the symbol’s association with protection and good luck.

Read more:

• http://www.byzant.com
• http://www.menorah.org

Celtic Cross

When we look at the cross, we typically don’t think of death. More likely, we think of a holy afterlife. Christians think of redemption–salvation from sin through Christ ‘s sacrifice, allowing them entry into Heaven.

While one would assume that the cross itself originated as a Christian symbol (Christ died on a cross of wood), it may surprise you to know that the cross shape itself had been used by many ancient civilizations, long before the dawn of Christianity. Cari Buziak states that “Its four arms were perfect for denoting the four elements, the four directions of the compass, and the four parts of man – mind, body, soul and heart.”

The Celtic cross is the Latin cross with a circle over the intersection. While a commonly used Christian symbol, its origin is largely unknown and what it represents is open to interpretation. The addition of the ring around the cross has had many explanations, everything from sun worship and symbolism, to creating a shape with the cross that was well contained and aesthetically pleasing. Some hold that the Celtic cross was an ancient measuring instrument used for accurate navigation, astronomy and surveying. Others suggest that the great stone Celtic Crosses carved from the standing stones of the Druids were originally phallic symbols, just carved into crosses to disguise their original purpose. What historians do know for sure is that the symbol came into being around the ninth century, when Christianity was new to Celtic Britain and Ireland. The large stone crosses that dot the landscape of Ireland, Scotland, and other parts of Europe where Celtic Christianity originated are reminders of the early Celtic Church.

When seen in cemeteries, The Celtic or Irish cross may represent someone of Irish descent, but in a general sense it represents eternity-the promise of an afterlife.

Read more:

• http://www.celtarts.com
• http://www.world-mysteries.com

Further Exploration into the Afterlife

Is there more to our existence than this life on earth? Many like to think so. People may have contrived the idea of an afterlife simply because death, the great unknown, scares them. When asked where he expected to end up, Mark Twain said he preferred heaven for climate, the other place for company. (Excerpt From Captain Stormfield’s Visit To Heaven)

Symbolism is one of the ways we deal with our mortality, thus it runs rampant in funerary art. It’s a basic tenet of psychology that giving a name or a symbol to any idea makes us feel we have more control over the idea. It makes us feel better. People associate certain animals, plants, or other objects with specific attributes of our existence. A bird in flight may represent a soul borne aloft, a wreath, glory. We want an afterlife, it seems. But wait – is all this symbolism to comfort the living or honor the dead? Maybe it’s one and the same.

If you are curious about specific symbols you’ve seen, you may want to browse these sites:

• http://www.alsirat.com
• http://www.vintageviews.org

There is also a lovely book called Stories in Stone: The Complete Guide to Cemetery Symbolism, by Douglas Keister