- published: 10 Nov 2015
- views: 196960
A funeral is a ceremony for celebrating, sanctifying, or remembering the life of a person who has died. Funerary customs comprise the complex of beliefs and practices used by a culture to remember the dead, from interment itself, to various monuments, prayers, and rituals undertaken in their honor. Customs vary widely between cultures, and between religious affiliations within cultures.
The word funeral comes from the Latin funus, which had a variety of meanings, including the corpse and the funerary rites themselves. Funerary art is art produced in connection with burials, including many kinds of tombs, and objects specially made for burial with a corpse.
Funeral rites are as old as the human culture itself, predating modern Homo sapiens, to at least 300,000 years ago. For example, in the Shanidar cave in Iraq, in Pontnewydd Cave in Wales and other sites across Europe and the Near East, Neanderthal skeletons have been discovered with a characteristic layer of flower pollen. This has been interpreted as suggesting that Neanderthals believed in an afterlife, although the evidence is not unequivocal – while the dead were apparently indeed buried deliberately, the flowers might have been introduced by burrowing rodents.
(Liszt / Lyrics: Benson /Vocal : Daltrey)
Life is pain, pain is lost
Life is pain, pain is lost
Lost is mine for living wild
The innocent are dying
They were pure as pure as love
Ooh they were pure as pure as love
But now they're crushed before the weight of man's desire for self
Destruction.
War is waste and waste is guilt
War is waste and waste is guilt
Guilt is mine for watching while my countrymen are dying
My man is dead, my love's destroyed