Digital Dying By: Justin Nobel

by Justin Nobel

Bubonic plague victims exhibit the classic "buboes" that gave the disease its name. Many who died from plague were buried in mass graves that are disturbingly similar to those being dug right now outside Port-au-Prince for victims of the Haiti earthquake.

Dead bodies from Haiti's earthquake are being piled into dump trucks and unloaded in mass graves outside Port-au-Prince. This burial method dates back to the Middle Ages but according to the field manual, Management of dead bodies after disasters, produced by the International Committee of the Red Cross, burying bodies in mass graves can be traumatizing for survivors and lead to legal troubles later on, as family members seek to retrieve loved ones. The manual also notes an important misconception, one still being posited by some newscasters in Haiti: “The bodies of people who have died in a disaster do not cause epidemics…In most cases, those who have survived are more likely to be spreading diseases.”

It was fear of disease that led to some of the largest mass graves in history, those dug across Europe during the Bubonic Plague. A particularly virulent outbreak, called the Black Death, killed one-quarter to one-half of the European population in the mid-14th century. Flea-infested rats are believed to have spread the plague from the Gobi Desert to the Crimea, Constantinople and eventually all of Europe. Bouts of plague continued to erupt in the centuries to follow, with one of the last ones occurring in London, in 1665. In The Decameron, a bloody chronicle of the plague in 14th century Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio describes a scene similar to those presently being witnessed throughout Port-au-Prince.

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by Justin Nobel

Catherine de' Medici at a funeral in the 1560s. The Romans first wore black at funerals and for some reason the Western World has followed ever since. Some cultures wear purple or yellow.

“Wear Black in sunlight and you will roast as the Heat VIBRATIONS absorb easily. Hence Black is the most absurd colour for funerals & Hospitals: It attracts all sorts of Dark moods and energies and influences just when you need extra protection...In certain contrasts Black garments act as a Vacuum cleaner for Bad vibrations…MANY WOMEN WEAR BLACK HEAD TO TOE, THIS IS VERY DANGEROUS.”

These words come from Samuel Sagan, who pasted the lines in an email he dropped Funeralwise earlier this week. Sagan, author of books such as Bleeding Sun, Entity Possession and the Atlantean Secrets tetralogy, comes at it from an odd angle but raises a good question: why wear black at funerals? Read the rest of this entry »