Researchers examined more than 250 human skeletons which were excavated since 2008 from a post Medieval cemetery in Drawsko, a rural settlement site in northwestern Poland.
Dating to the 17th and 18th centuries, the remains represented individuals of all ages and both sexes and included five unique interments with sickles.
“In four of these burials the sickles were placed on the bodies of the dead with the cutting edge tightly against the throat, while the fifth was located on the pelvis,” Marek Polcyn, a visiting scholar at Lakehead University in Canada, and Elzbieta Gajda, of the Muzeum Ziemi Czarnkowskiej, wrote in the current issue of the journal Antiquity.
The skeletons with the sickles around the throat were those of an adult male who died between 35–44 years of age, two adult females who died around 30–39 years of age, and an adolescent female who at around 14–19 years old.
There was also an adult female aged 50–60 years interred with a large, arch-curved sickle placed across her hips. A stone was placed directly on top of the throat, while a coin was found in her toothless mouth.
Previously, it was suggested these people were buried as “vampires.” In this view, the sickle placed across the throat was intended to remove the head, should the vampire attempt to rise from the grave.
But Polcyn and Gajda argue these burials should be rather interpreted as “anti-demonic.” They noted the sickle burials have none of the characteristics of so-called anti-vampiric practices.
They were interred in sacred ground following conventional Christian burial patterns, with the head placed towards the west, and their graves did not appear to have been desecrated.
“Confining the deceased in the grave by means of a sickle may have been a measure to prevent the demonized soul threatening the living, or could have been a reference to biblical symbolism in an attempt to prevent the soul from becoming demonized,” Polcyn and Gajda wrote.
Vampires were not the only mythical creatures feared in Poland in the 17th century. As wars, hunger, pestilence, and poverty devastated the country, Slavic pagan faiths resurrected.
“The development of the Counter-Reformation was a significant turning point as it brought cultural and intellectual regression, religious fanaticism and a growing climate of terror, deliberately stoked by Catholic clergy spreading fear of the devil and witchcraft,” the researchers wrote.
Evidence of “anti-demonic” funerary practices, with sickles placed around the throats of the deceased possibly to ward off demons, has been found in a 400-year-old cemetery in Poland.
Researchers examined more than 250 human skeletons which were excavated since 2008 from a post Medieval cemetery in Drawsko, a rural settlement site in northwestern Poland.
Dating to the 17th and 18th centuries, the remains represented individuals of all ages and both sexes and included five unique interments with sickles.
“In four of these burials the sickles were placed on the bodies of the dead with the cutting edge tightly against the throat, while the fifth was located on the pelvis,” Marek Polcyn, a visiting scholar at Lakehead University in Canada, and Elzbieta Gajda, of the Muzeum Ziemi Czarnkowskiej, wrote in the current issue of the journal Antiquity.
The skeletons with the sickles around the throat were those of an adult male who died between 35–44 years of age, two adult females who died around 30–39 years of age, and an adolescent female who at around 14–19 years old.
There was also an adult female aged 50–60 years interred with a large, arch-curved sickle placed across her hips. A stone was placed directly on top of the throat, while a coin was found in her toothless mouth.
Previously, it was suggested these people were buried as “vampires.” In this view, the sickle placed across the throat was intended to remove the head, should the vampire attempt to rise from the grave.
But Polcyn and Gajda argue these burials should be rather interpreted as “anti-demonic.” They noted the sickle burials have none of the characteristics of so-called anti-vampiric practices.
They were interred in sacred ground following conventional Christian burial patterns, with the head placed towards the west, and their graves did not appear to have been desecrated.
Read more at Discovery News
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