HISTORY OF ASHES

July 29, 2011 - Since times, if some human beings inspired terror because their terrible crimes and intrigues, sometimes, after their death they become more terrible and the fear they inspire when dead is so great that civil and military authorities decide to destroy in a radical way the bodies they feared and fought once when they were alive. One burns, one scatters, one immerses in secret places in order their memory extincts forever.

On July 27, 1793, Maximilien de Robespierre at the head of France, launched the event of Terror in the country. As a result, in one year, several dozens thousands of deads were registered, in reality a massacre of about 100.000 executions and crimes. Even the corpses of aristocrats were digged up in the cemeteries for putting the macabre remains in flag or simply to trample and scatter them. One year after, on July 28, 1794, it was the turn to Robespierre to be guillotined. One threw his head in a common grave in the Cemetery of Errancis and quicklime was spread on the body so he disappears forever.

On May 5, 1821, when Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte Ist, prisoner of Great Britain, died on the island of Sainte-Helene, the British government refused that his corpse returns to France because they said that Napoleon’s ashes would be undoubtedly the cause or the pretext for political troubles. The famous remains were restitued to France only in 1840. And it is told that the Britishs played a trick on their famous enemy -even in his death- restituting ashes that did not belong to Napoleon.

In 1949, in Japan, some former soldiers, subordinates of general Iwane Matsui implied in the Chinese massacre of Nankin in 1937, recovered a part of his ashes and buried them in the blessed boudhist place of Koa Kannon. Nowadays, the association for the safeguarding of this place still counts 13.000 members.

On May 2, 2011, Oussama ben Laden, from the Al-Qaeda Islamist Group, terrorist and ennemy no1 of the States, was killed and his corpse secretly scattered at sea by american militaries in order to cancel his memory and avoid his followers to make him sacred.

On the same way, on July 21, 2011 the remains of Adolf Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess were exhumed, cremated, and secretly scattered at sea in order to impeed his admirers and followers to commemorate the birthday of his death.

Considering these examples, one sees that some bodies play a great role in the development of the cult of personality. It can be so important that it becomes necessary to erase definitively any trace of what they were when alive. If not, there is a risk for the implementation of a worship. The veneration leading to the transfiguration of reality, there is creation of a myth which generates the multiplication of the followers. When the myth is become a religion and that there are no more countless thousands of followers but countless millions of believers, thus a new moral and political order stays in march with all the implications and upheavals which result from this situation.

It is why the authorities and governments in place are in a hurry to anticipate and are used to destroy the corpses of some public enemies, especially if these enemies when they were alive conveyed a political message through their crimes.

Those who proceed to the destruction of the corpses make only apply what noted the German philosopher Michael Ranft in 1728 in his work “De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulis” regarding the Austrian police report of Kisolova on the real or imaginary harmful influences of some deads on the alives: “When the thing is made (destruction of the corpses), all the operator powers cease working. And these capacities ceasing, cease also the evils/paints which they hung on the alives”. And again: “Because any trouble of mind constitutes a food for the magic operation. But in the event of failure, the best means will be, for ending, to exhume the corpse and to cancel its harmful operation by destroying it by the means which will like”.

But the radical destruction of the body of a man never guarantees at 100% the disappearance of his influence on the alives. The first characteristic of the man being his voluntee “to transmit” (as politicians, men of letters, artists), for little that the followers collect the objects and personal effects of the dead, his memory and cult of personality can be maintained, even thrive and survive to the great displeasure of those ones who wished to see his disappearance. Thus, we can mention the example of Vlad III the Impaler (1431-1476) whose remains have never been found with certainty. More than 600 years after his death, his myth goes on surviving through the modern literary myth of the vampire Dracula as well as the development of the cult and sects about vampyrism.

For to the finish, we’ll recall that: «The universe, as well as the Earth and Man cast off, periodically, serpent like, their old skins, to assume new ones after a time of rest. » (Secret Doctrine – Stanza III)