The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death - Hardcover

Taylor, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807046728 ISBN 13: 9780807046722

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 2004

Synopsis

A global exploration and interpretation of the human rites and rituals of death spans human history as it discusses such topics as ancient rituals with reverberations in the present, human sacrifice, monumental sarcophagi, cannibalism, near-death experiences, vampirism, and the human separation of the body and the spirit that animated it.

About this title

Review

Blazingly smart and deeply human.--Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers
"Taylor makes sense of the ghastly and the seemingly insensible-African muti killings, human sacrifice, vampires, and triple-killed bog bodies. Archaeology was never so entertaining, and entertainment never so edifying. There is not a trite thought or lazy idea in this book."--Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
"The Buried Soul is an extraordinary immersion experience . . . I had always supposed that archeology was as dry as the dust and bones it traffics in, as pedestrian as the catalogs it compiles. On the contrary, when expounded by a masterly storyteller like Taylor, it resembles psychoanalysis at its best . . . I haven't space to illustrate how ingeniously Taylor assembles his interpretations, patiently working out the barely intelligible motives and beliefs of the creatures who became us . . . Wherever else you travel, you should consider a trip into 'deep time' with The Buried Soul."--George Scialabba, Boston Globe
"Learned and impassioned . . . the lesson of Mr. Taylor's unsparing book is that . . . for most of human history, our attempts to deal with death-to appease it, master it, or simply make sense of it-have been deeply irrational and often cruel. More than any other human experience, death makes us savage."--Adam Kirsch, New York Sun
"Absorbing and challenging . . . The Buried Soul is vast, ambitious, and contentious. It ranges over two million years, from a cut-marked skull of Homo habilis to the death of a young man in 2000."--Katherine Ashenburg, American Scholar

From the Back Cover

Archaeologist Timothy Taylor has spent his life sifting through the relics of our ancestor's encounters with death: early historical accounts of sacrifice, ancient rituals with echoes in the present, monumental sarcophagi, and bodies discovered in caves, bogs and on mountains.

In 'The Buried Soul', Taylor brings together evidence of how the ancients saw their universe and asks how we came to have not only a sense of the afterlife but also an image of the soul. After we began to speak, but before we could write, Taylor suggests that early humans, in an astonishingly conceptual leap, divided the body from the spirit that animated it. Thus arose a series of rituals that attempted to placate, tempt, scapegoat, destroy or contain this potentially malevolent spirit.

In Timothy Taylor's radical investigation of the human soul we encounter vampirism, cannibals, near-death experiences, modern day human sacrifice and the mummification of Lenin. His search spans the entire period from our prehistoric evolution to the present and interweaves the author's own experience of bewildering death.

A breathtaking work of narrative power combining cutting-edge science, personal insight and scholarship, 'The Buried Soul' is a radical voyage into sepulchral worlds.

Praise for 'The Prehistory of Sex':

"Taylor has written an illuminating and immensely entertaining account of one of the most fundamental aspects of humanity."
'Mail on Sunday'

"An intelligent, well-researched contribution to our understanding of past societies and, by extension, of how we view ourselves
'Scotland on Sunday'

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807046728
• ISBN 13: 9780807046722
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 353