Cremations in History

A columbarium in Oakland.

There is archaeological evidence of cremation in the Stone Age, around 3000 B.C. in both Europe and the near East. During the late Stone Age, the act of burning the dead spread across Europe and into western Russia. In the Bronze Age, 2500-1000 B.C., this practice found its way through the British Isles and the land that would be known as Spain and Portugal. Cremation was an elaborate Greek burial custom between 1000-480 B.C. that peaked in the time of Homer, around 800 B.C., when the country was ravaged by war. They would cremate the bodies of fallen soldiers in open fires and gather up the ashes and bones for burial when they returned home.

In Iron and Viking Ages, cremation was the practice used for the majority of funerals in Sweden. Around 600 B.C. Rome took to cremation and it became the standard method of disposing of the dead. More elaborate rituals evolved around their cremations, with days-long feasting and pyres 30 feet tall. Between 27 B.C. and 395 C.E. buildings called columbariums were erected to inter the cremated remains of the dead.

Early Christians considered cremation a pagan ritual and by 400 C.E., when the Roman Emperor Constantine had chosen to follow Christian beliefs, earth burials replaced the practice of cremation within the Empire. Six hundred years later, Iceland finally converted to this new religion. From that point on, in Western culture, cremations were extremely rare until the 1800s in Europe. They were performed only in times of emergency. Cremation was popular under Buddhist influence in both China and Korea until the 1300s, when Neo-Confucianism brought burials to the forefront of practice.

In 1656, when the Black Death crossed the European continent, 60,000 victims were burned in just one week in Naples. Two years later, Sir Thomas Browne of England promoted cremation as an acceptable means of honoring the dead. The first recorded cremation in Britain occurred September 26, 1769, but it was an illegal one. Honoretta Pratt was burned in her open grave at St. George’s Burial Ground. A plaque was later placed there saying that she believed the vapors of all the dead bodies were harmful to the populous so she asked that her body be burnt, that she might lead by example so others would follow. During the French Revolution, in the late 1780s, freemasons and anarchists promoted cremation as a means of reducing the church’s role in the funeral process.

Hinduism mandated cremation, in order to dispose of the body and free the soul into the next life or rebirth. Open funeral pyres were and are common in India. It was also a common practice to burn the widow of the deceased alive with him on his pyre, known as suttee. It is an English term derived from the word sati, which is what the wife of the deceased was called. There are documented accounts of suttees as early as the first century C.E. In Hindu belief, a sati was the opposite of a widow. Widows were bad because if they had been good wives, their husbands would not have died. For a woman to immolate herself as a sati was a way of winning back honor for her family. Often the eldest son would be the one to set the fire. In the early 1800s, in one year alone, 400 suttee deaths were reported within a 30 mile radius of Calcutta. It was outlawed by the British rule in 1825, though regular cremation for the deceased remained.

Everything changed in 1873, when Professor Brunetti of Italy exhibited a practical cremation chamber at the Vienna Exposition. A year later, Queen Victoria’s Surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson, founded the Cremation Society of England with fellow colleagues. In 1878, the first European crematoriums were built in Woking, England and Gotha, Germany. It wasn’t until 1885, seven years later, that the first official cremation took place in the UK, in Woking, for Mrs. Jeannette C. Pickersgill. The next year 10 more bodies were cremated.

Cremation was still illegal in Japan in 1876, when Dr. Julius LeMoyne built the first U.S. crematorium in Washington, Pennsylvania. There were only two recorded cremations occurring in the U.S. prior to 1800. The second crematorium opened in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1884, owned and operated by an established Cremation Society. By 1900, there were 20 crematoriums operating in the U.S. including Buffalo, New York City, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Dr. Hugo Erichsen founded the Cremation Association of America in 1913, when there were 52 working crematoriums and over 10,100 cremations performed that year.

The Roman Catholic Church renounced cremation, although it wasn’t against church dogma. It is perhaps because of how strongly the Protestants advocated for cremation, both as a means of limiting the church’s influence on funeral processes and as a call for a need in burial reforms at the turn of the century. The Church softened their position in the 1960s and allowed for the practice to be chosen without penalty.

In 1970, only 8% of dead were cremated in America. In 1975 there were over 435 crematoriums in the country and 150,000 cremations were performed. In 1999, cremation accounted for 25.39% of deaths, with over 1,468 crematoriums now in use and 595,617 services performed. Six states had a cremation rate of more than 50%: Arizona, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, and Washington. At this point, cremation had become a universal means of disposing of the dead in Japan, just one hundred and thirty years after it was illegal.

In 2001, the National Funeral Directors Association reported that, depending on additions to the service, the average cremation cost between $300-$3,000, much lower than the average cost of a burial funeral, which was listed as $6,130. There are now over 2,100 crematoriums in America and over 900,000 cremations are performed a year. Cremation occurs widely in at least 31 countries around the world: 97% in Japan, 75% in Switzerland, 70% in Great Britain, 65% in Scandanavia, 38% in Canada, 37% in America, 2% in Ghana, just to name a few.

Most opposition to cremation is religious in nature, specifically Orthodox Judaism and Islam. Most other religions allow for its members to choose what method of body disposition is most meaningful to them. In cremation, the body is placed into a durable container in the chamber and heated to 1,600-1,800 degrees. After two and a half hours, all that remains are bone fragments, called cremains. After they cool, the crematory breaks them down into fine particles through a mechanical process, after which they are placed in an urn or box. What we call ashes are actually these powdered bone fragments.

It is illegal to cremate more than one body at a time. Most funeral homes have to contract out to a third-party crematorium, which incurs an additional transportation fee, though it is possible to deal directly with the crematorium in these cases. Some funeral homes have the facilities to perform them on the premises. It is possible to be present when the body is placed in the cremation chamber. If a body is being cremated, but a viewing is desired beforehand, a casket can be rented for the viewing from the funeral home; you do not have to purchase one. After the cremation, the remains are yours to do with what you wish. You can put them on the mantle, bury them, inter them in a columbarium, or scatter them in a location preferable to the deceased. Cremations are becoming more popular in the US, as they cost about a third less that average funerals.

The reality is we can’t all choose cremation. It’s possible that part of the end of cremation in the Roman Empire had a little something to do with the resources of timber expended in their elaborate pyres for each person. In the modern age, we use gas and energy to fuel the cremation chambers; resources that are finite. Not to mention that 573 lbs of carbon dioxide are released into the air for each cremation, as well as .8-5.9 grams of mercury from dental work, and toxins from bodies that were embalmed first. Seventy-five percent of the mercury dissipates into the atmosphere but the rest of it falls back to land and settles in the earth and ground water. Multiply 573 lbs of carbon and .8-5.9 grams of mercury per person by the current U.S. population of 315,398,368 people... I can’t imagine there’s enough forest left in our country to transform that carbon dioxide into oxygen. Cremations release 1,000-7,800 pounds of mercury in the U.S. every year and we use enough energy in cremation in a year to travel to the moon and back 85 times.

Still, I cannot ignore the number of people I know who have no financial choice but cremation when a loved one dies, or the many cultures who are attached to the process. After the tsunami ravaged Japan in 2011, their crematoriums could not attend to the number of dead, which was over 19,000 known deaths with several thousand still listed as missing. Bodies were buried in shallow graves but families, who saw that as a desecration, were stealing the bodies of their beloved during the night and burning them in open fires in secret. But where will the line be where we have to put the cost of our choices to the earth beneath us ahead of our religious, spiritual, and aesthetic desires?