Yellow

has been the commonest mourning color, but white and black have been usual in Europe since our 12th century, and white is now usual in the East (see Colors), Next to the dire fate of being left unburied was that of not being placed in hallowed ground of the tribe, For the heretic there was no such burial; no bell tolled, as had become customary from about the 9th century; no proce ion followed the Cro , as was usual since our 4th century. As the pagan emblem of mourning was the funereal cypre , so the Christians symbolised “entering heaven” by strewing evergreens on the grave, and by the palm or olive branch. The earliest efforts of art were devoted to the adornment of the homes of the dead—to mausolea, cenotaphs, and temples in their honour; which has led some wrongly to conclude that man’s first worship was that of the dead, The pillar stone might become the home of the ghost: the cenotaph enabled it to rejoin those it loved on earth, though the body had not been recovered. The Rev. J. Sibree shows that the rude Malagasi cenotaph is a pillar or post, with an urn at the top, set in an enclosure (Jowrnal Anthrop. Instit., 2nd January 1892), To wander among the tombs was to commune with the dead. Churches were erected beside the older cemeteries, which they consecrated. The bodies of kings and priests were buried within them, and their spirits became guardians of the holy spots. They were sanctuaries in which even the criminal might not be seized. The early Christian chapels are in catacombs, and present emblems of the faith, with short texts or invocations invaluable to the student, accompanying the symbolic dove, fish, serpent, or palm, to which the “chrisma” was added later, while strange invocations of angels are mingled even with the ancient D.M., for “ Diis Manibus”—the Pagan manes. A survival of the old funeral pyres is notable in an entry found in the borough accounts of Sheffield, in 1590, giving compensation “‘for trees burned down at my Lordes funerall on xiiith January 1590.” The ancient Norseman was burned on a bal or pile of wood; and all his horses, arms and jewels were thrown into the fire; or he z F was sent out on his burning galley to the Western Sea (see Notes and Queries, April 1st, 1898). Death. Sce Immortality. Col. 554