From the Modern Age until the mid-twentieth century, in Spain and other European countries, a funerary ritual was practiced halfway between the religious and the pagan. In the Iberian Peninsula, his memory is still traced in the oral...
moreFrom the Modern Age until the mid-twentieth century, in Spain and other European countries, a funerary ritual was practiced halfway between the religious and the pagan. In the Iberian Peninsula, his memory is still traced in the oral tradition among the elderly. In the ritual were used containers with salt that were placed on top of the deceased during the wake or the funeral. On other occasions, the containers were introduced into the tomb. Although the justification was that the salt prevented the body from swelling, the objective was to prevent the spirit from returning to the body, favouring transit to the beyond or warding off the forces of evil. Sometimes they put open scissors in the shape of a cross on the bowl or the plate. The practice was favoured in Baroque times with the increase of concern for the transit of the soul to the beyond. The fear was based on the belief that the dead do not suddenly leave the world of the living, but reaches an intermediate stage that lasts the time that the body takes to decompose. As long as the dead man’s face retains his human features, his soul will be in danger. The salt acts as a protective element. The ritual was applied to both men and women, of all social classes, who lived in rural or urban areas. Among the written testimonies stands out a poem by Federico García Lorca, this describes the ritual in a wake, and a document of the War of Independence, on the funeral of an English general in the monastery of El Escorial (Madrid) in 1812. The pottery from the archaeological excavation of the ossuary of the church of Quintanalara (Burgos) -its origin, dispersion and its conception as everyday elements vs. funerary-, serves as a case study to deepen in this funerary ritual so scarcely known and studied as geographically extended, delimit it from the chronological and spatial point of view, and investigate its origin and meaning. Among the pottery productions are documented typical containers from pottery workshops of Villafeliche (Zaragoza), Talavera de la Reina (Toledo) and Olleros-Olivares (Salamanca-Zamora).
