Practically all peoples of the world have always had a special attitude towards death. So, in Russia, very important importance was attached to how a person died and how he was buried. And there were reasons for that.
Death is "right" and "wrong"
Most of all, the Russian man was afraid of dying a "wrong" death. The happiest was the death in the circle of relatives and friends, when the dying man was in his right mind and firm memory. This death was called heavenly grace.
But there were other types of death, completely undesirable for a Russian person. For example, our ancestors feared to die overnight, not expressing their last will, not saying goodbye to loved ones, not preparing to meet God. Such deaths included death from an accident - for example, if a person was killed by lightning, he froze in the winter cold, drowned, burned in a fire. Or if a person died from drunkenness, or became a victim of murder, or, God forbid, he took his own life.
The "mortgaged" dead
It was believed that one who died without repentance could turn into a so-called pledged deceased. The term was introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century by the famous Russian ethnographer Dmitry Zelenin, who found out that this belief was formed in the ancient Slavic era and was preserved in Russia in the Christian period.
Promotional video:
Semiradsky G. "The funeral of the Rus".
Elena Levkievskaya in the book "Myths of the Russian people" writes:
Drowned people become very pretty kikimors.
Another case. In one village a girl hanged herself. They buried her in the forest outside the village, as was usually done with unbaptized and suicides. But every spring, moans and crying were heard from the girl's grave. They said that it was crying, "crushing Pashka," and some said that they had met the gallows in the forest: in white, with her head down, she appeared by the road near her burial place … According to legend, the earth did not accept such dead people.
They told such a story. One woman was beaten by her own son, and his mother cursed him for raising his hand against her. Soon he died. Several decades passed, and for something it took to dig up the grave of this man. It turned out that the deceased was not lying, but sitting in the grave, and even talking! He said the following:
“I have been lying in my thirtieth year, and the earth does not accept me, and God does not give death to my mother for not forgiving me. If she forgives me, then the Lord will send her a mercury, and if she does not forgive, God will not send death to her, and my mother will not accept the earth.”
They called the man's mother, who was really still alive. After praying, she baptized her son, and he immediately turned to dust.
Fear of being burned
In pre-Christian times, cremation was a traditional method of burial among the Western and Eastern Slavs. He not only seemed to our ancestors more hygienic, but, according to beliefs, he helped the soul of the deceased to go to heaven as soon as possible. Sometimes the bodies were burned in a boat, which was then sent down the river. With the Baptism of Russia, the cremation ritual gradually began to go out of use as pagan. The fact is that this method of burial is at odds with the Christian canon, according to which a person leaves the earth and must return there.
If you artificially interfere in this process, then it will be difficult for such a person to resurrect after the Last Judgment.
Until 1917, cremation rituals were practically not carried out in Russia. But with the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, everything changed. Religion was declared "opium for the people", which means that all sorts of practices previously prohibited by church canons began to be welcomed.
In 1920, a competition was announced for the project of the first crematorium in Petrograd, held under the slogan: "Crematorium - the chair of atheism." The crematorium was opened in the building of the baths on Vasilievsky Island. True, a little over a year later, it was closed "for lack of firewood." During this short period, 379 dead bodies were burnt in the furnace of the crematorium.
In 1927, a crematorium was opened in Moscow, in the Church of Seraphim of Sarov at the Don Monastery. Later, crematoria began to appear throughout the country, and the procedure for cremating the dead became quite common.
Today, the Russian Orthodox Church does not categorically prohibit cremation, but it also does not approve of it. In any case, if a person bequeathed himself to cremating himself, then it is not recommended to have a funeral service. For this reason, believers rarely decide to cremate. But there are other reasons why many people are wary of cremation. What if a person is still alive and feels pain when his body is burned? The workers of the crematoria, who looked out the window of the furnace during the burning process, said that there are dead people “who were lying”, and there are “those who are jumping up”. Against the background of these eerie tales, the procedure of traditional burial in a grave looks “sparing”.
Smoke over the crematorium
In 1996, St. Petersburg television showed a program about an experiment conducted by scientists from one of the St. Petersburg research institutes in a crematorium. Before being sent to the oven, sensors were attached to the head of the dead man lying in the coffin, who died four days before the experiment, to study the bioelectrical activity of the brain. As the body approached the furnace opening along the escalator tape, the device began to draw curves indicating that some processes were taking place in the deceased's brain. The deciphering of the signals showed that they correspond to the emotion of fear. The dead man was afraid of cremation!
Crematorium at the Baikovo cemetery. Architect Abraham Miletsky.
An amazing story was told by Nikolai S., who worked as a doctor in the St. Petersburg hospital named after Mechnikov. One February evening, he was returning home from his daily watch. A half-empty bus approached the stop, the man got on it and dozed off. The conductor woke him up at the final stop. It turned out that Nikolai got into the wrong bus - tired, in the dark, apparently, he could not see the number well. The man got out and saw that the final stop was directly opposite the crematorium.
I had to wait for the return flight. While Nikolai was standing at the bus stop, he smelled an unpleasant smell. Smoke poured from the chimneys of the crematorium. The doctor realized that it was corpses being burned. With nothing else to do, he looked at the puffs of smoke pouring from the chimneys. And suddenly, with another portion of smoke, a silhouette appeared above the crematorium, surprisingly resembling a human figure! The doctor was not very scared; rather, he became interested. And he even missed the bus that came up, deciding to see if the phenomenon would repeat itself. And what do you think? Again a human silhouette unfolded over the chimneys of the crematorium … And then the smoke began to pour down without stopping, and the man counted as many as six figures in the sky!
But then a dark clot appeared next to the chimney of the crematorium and began to absorb the smoky silhouettes. Nikolai felt uneasy.
Subsequently, the doctor suggested that he saw the astral or mental bodies of the deceased, which became visible due to the fact that they are able to attract microparticles of smoke to themselves. Although this is just a guess. Who knows what actually happens after death to our soul?