Pagan Roots in Modern Funeral Practices

A lone hair. One curly black hair wafts spinning through the air and lands on the cold white porcelain, looking to all the world like a tiny gobbet of flesh on a glistening rat’s tooth. The scientist-embalmer’s workshop’s bed was foul-sheeted and full of vermin, but no matter, for he was in love with death, and it was all part and parcel of the same universe. A smell of something akin to strong disinfectant awoke in him a memory of her ice-cold thighs with some pestiferous dew of vice slowly oozing to the surface. He thought it was bound to be thus, and it is no disparagement to say so, for ignorance continueth many in the dregs of superstition – the candy of the mortuary – the bitter sustentation of his living, known to but a few.

His work was his love. The globular, exopthalmic eyes with skin the color of retting straw. “Give them a semblance of life!” they howled with a strident, onrushing cacophony of overwhelming sound. To daily endure this hypocritical ritual, he began with a Plathian head-in-the-oven genuflection, his face agog with befuddlement and disillusion. He stared with mucid sibilance and torpid indifference at the most apocalyptic sight he had ever beheld, for the garish face was paralyzed in a rictus of manic hilarity. He couldn’t delegate the postmortem dissection, for modern funeral practices prohibited it. Besides, his adversarial relationship with the bereaved’s family made him feel as though his own flesh were being cut away by interior knives. He wished that the maniacal mischief of his undertaker’s life could be met with spurious vim in his infinity of mirrors, but here in the basement it was a muggy, moonlit night filled with gnats, moths, and maggots, and reading in each man’s bluing wound a dreadful portent of his own decay, all he saw before him was the yawning gash of a freshly dug grave.