Cairistiona

By Cairistiona1

From the past.

Took another version of this years ago now. Just so easy to shoot - and first thing in the morning too.

Just as well I did. Another abortive day carrying the camera into work and not getting the time / motivation to do anything with it.

However, I may have worked out where vampire / zombie myths came from. I was reading through some literature on suicide (cheery subject, I know) at work and discovered that in the early modern period there were two kinds of suicide identified: if you were deemed to be ill you were classed as incompis mentis. However if the deceased was found to be sane, the suicide was seen as a felony against the self - hence the term felo de se.

There was a distinction in the way the bodies of the deceased were handled. For those who were incompis mentis, they could be buried on church or parish grounds, but (I think) religious rites were withheld. In the case of those deemed to be felo de se, it was assumed that diabolic influences had been at work and the deceased were buried by highways with a stake pushed through the body to ensure that they could not return to this world.

Who says we don't remember the past? It seems as though traumatic events like this live on in cultural memory for a very, very long time.

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