Burial society

A burial society is a form of friendly society. These groups historically existed in England and elsewhere, and were constituted for the purpose of providing by voluntary subscriptions for the funeral expenses of the husband, wife or child of a member, or of the widow of a deceased member. Some also allowed for insuring money to be paid on the death of a member.[1]

Not-for-profit burial societies still exist today. For-profit companies also provide funeral insurance.

Jewish communities often include a burial society known as the chevra kadisha, which also covers performing the necessary Jewish funerary rituals and ceremonies.

In antiquity

Burial society is a precursor to general insurance which is a recent innovation. Burial societies were first known to exist in ancient Rome and not before. In ancient Rome, various associations of a fraternal nature, as well as religious groups, political clubs, and trade guilds, functioned as burial societies. Terms for these include hetaeria, collegium, and sodalitas. The by-laws of one burial society are preserved by an inscription dating to A.D. 136. Discovered at Lanuvium, the lex collegia salutaris Dianae et Antinoi ("By-laws of the Society of Diana and Antinous") details the cost of joining the society, monthly fees, regulations for the burial of members, and the schedule for the group's meetings and dinners. Another example at Rome was the College of Aesculapius and Hygia, founded by a wealthy woman in honor of her dead husband. Inscriptional evidence exists for burial societies throughout the Empire, not just in the city of Rome.[2]

One of the ways that the Romans made sense of the earliest Christian groups was to think of them as associations of this kind, particularly burial societies, which were permitted even when political conflict or civil unrest caused authorities to ban meetings of other groups; Pliny identified Christians collectively as a hetaeria.[3]

19th century

Edmund Roberts mentioned the European and Burial Society when he visited Cape Town, South Africa in 1833. The society was founded in 1795 by Dutch settlers. He described it as "supporting poor and unfortunate fellow-countrymen, during their illness, and in the event of their death, to cause them to be respectfully interred". He also mentioned that the society had "considerable funds", during his visit to the area.[4]

gollark: - PotatOS uses a single global process manager instance for nested potatOS instances. The ID is incremented by 1 each time a new process starts.- But each nested instance runs its own set of processes, because I never made them not do that and because without *some* of them things would break.- PotatOS has a "fast reboot" feature where, if you reboot in the sandbox, instead of *actually* rebooting the computer it just reinitializes the sandbox a bit.- For various reasons (resource exhaustion I think, mostly), if you nest it, stuff crashes a lot. This might end up causing some of the nested instances to reboot.- When they reboot, some of their processes many stay online because I never added sufficient protections against that because it never really came up.- The slowness is because each event goes to about 200 processes which then maybe do things.
gollark: WRONG!
gollark: It doesn't reuse already allocated IDs.
gollark: Don't read too much into that.
gollark: EXPLAINING.

References
  1.  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Burial Societies". Encyclopædia Britannica. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 824.
  2. Maureen Carroll, Spirits of the dead: Roman funerary commemoration in Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 45–46.
  3. Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (Yale University Press, 1984, 2003), pp. 31–47 online.
  4. Roberts, Edmund (1837). Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam, and Muscat. New York: Harper & Brothers. p. 396.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.