Death becomes them: the bones of culture

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The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses

By Paul Koudounaris

‘Stop! Here is the Empire of Death.’ These words greet the visitor to the Paris Catacombs, the largest and probably best-known collection of human bones in Europe. According to Paul Koudounaris, the remains of at least 6,000,000 individuals were deposited there between 1786 and the 1880s as part of the clearance of the city's overcrowded cemeteries.

Yet in some respects the Catacombs are unusual by comparison with the other ossuaries that Koudounaris includes in his book: most were not part of great civic projects or hygienic undertakings but functioned as warnings, commemorations, genealogies or grand aesthetic arrangements. They range from the tiny to the enormous, from a single skull in a wooden box to the layout of one man's ancestry as 2,000 skulls topped off with Michelangelo's Pietà in aluminium. Given the variety on show in Koudounaris' book his title is well chosen.

The book is essentially a history of human bones and the different ways they have been used to convey messages to the living. Koudounaris aims to demonstrate that the post-Enlightenment West now treats its dead differently from in the past. This is a very European-focused book, highlighting that 500 years ago the bones of some of Koudounaris' readers would have been on display in their local churches. Neolithic man preserved the bones of his ancestors, decorating them and keeping them near him, sometimes under the floor of his dwellings; the skeletons of Mount Athos for example, still removed from their resting places once a year and washed with wine, are not so different.

This lack of difference between things that on the surface seem far apart is one of the main ideas behind displaying human remains in public. Many of the bone arrangements in Koudounaris' photographs are accompanied by texts of the ‘as we are now, so shall you be’ variety. Beyond the obviously Christian message that focusing on death is a way to live well, this gives a sense of continuity to the communities whose bones are on show. In parts of Austria as late as the 19th century children were introduced to their ancestors in the forms of decorated skulls stored in the church.

Being found mainly in churches, bone displays generally have a religiously focused style. Bone-decorated churches are mainly a Catholic phenomenon with the vast majority being in Italy, Portugal and southern Germany. Crosses, Golgothas and other forms of Catholic imagery are built of skulls and long bones, and combined with trumpet-blowing angels and the crucified Christ. The accounts of Protestant travellers in Europe quoted by Koudounaris are generally very scathing of the ‘idolatry’ and ‘superstition’ they saw. There are a few Protestant churches with skull displays assembled after the split from Rome, but the reasons for their presence are hard to establish and they are simple affairs compared with some of the overblown Italian and Portuguese examples.

Ironically, the local Catholic authorities were often not keen on the presence of human remains in their churches, on the basis that the bones were becoming a cult in their own right. Koudounaris shows us Neapolitans making offerings to certain skulls in the Naples Catacombs in the hope of being granted a dream of the winning lottery numbers, or fighting for the right to take care of skulls deemed especially lucky. Whatever their opinions of these sites, most travellers were also keen to gain admittance. Those with the most aesthetic or grand arrangements were the most popular. The fame of Sedlec in the Czech Republic, for example, was due to its complex display of vast numbers of bones. For all that the moral purpose of an ossuary was often to inspire a virtuous life through contemplation of death, they could also become monuments to artistic immortality. There are several examples in the book of monks and others experimenting with mummification, sometimes as a means to establish catacombs as a source of revenue.

Koudounaris spent over three years visiting and photographing all the sites in his book and it ends with a gazetteer of the featured ossuaries, complete with opening times. Given that many of them are open to the public the urge to view death-in-life is clearly still a strong one and his photographs give a fine impression of the lengths Western culture has gone to satisfy it. Readers desiring to see the gorgeously costumed skeletons of Waldsassen in Germany or Rome’s mummified monks in the flesh are here given the required information. Koudounaris speaks of a desire to re-establish relationships between living and dead; in  The Empire of Death  he has made the perfect start.

The Empire Of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses  by Paul Koudounaris is published by Thames and Hudson, 2011.  224 pp. 290 colour/131 mono illus. ISBN 0-5002-51782