Somebody dies in the house. Within minutes, before anything else, the windows are opened.

Then the clocks are stopped. The mirrors are covered or turned to the wall. The fire is put out, or in some accounts kept burning without fail. The body is washed and laid out, and from that moment until the burial it is not left alone. Not for one minute, day or night, for two or three days.

People come. They sit with the body. They eat, they drink, they tell stories, they sing, and at intervals the women raise the coronach, the lament, and the sound of it carries down the glen so that everyone knows.

This is the Scottish wake, the caithris or faire, the watching. It is one of the most complete and most sophisticated bodies of practice in the whole tradition, and almost none of it survives.

I think that is a loss worth naming, because we have replaced it with something that does the job considerably less well.

What the practices were doing

Look at the components and the logic is unmistakable.

  • Open the windows. So the soul can leave. Immediately, before anything else, because the first thing that must happen is departure.
  • Stop the clocks. The household is out of ordinary time now, and will be until the burial.
  • Cover the mirrors. Reflective surfaces are boundaries. The soul in transition should not be caught in one, and the living should not look into one in that house.
  • Never leave the body alone. The faire, the watching. This is the core obligation and everything else is arranged around it. Someone is with them, continuously, until they go into the ground.
  • The lykewake. Food, drink, tobacco, storytelling, and often a great deal of noise. The Kirk disapproved of this for centuries and it went on anyway. Wakes were frequently loud, sometimes riotous, and occasionally involved games.
  • The coronach. The lament, raised by women, formally, at intervals. Keening in the Irish sense, caoineadh. Suppressed by the Kirk with considerable determination, and largely gone by the twentieth century.
  • Saining the body and the house. Water and smoke. This is the same rite used at birth, at the turn of the year and in illness, applied at the other end.
  • Carrying the coffin. Along a specific route, the coffin road, often with stops at particular cairns where a stone was added by each bearer. Many of these routes still exist as rights of way, and the cairns are still there.
  • The dead and living ford. The crossing used by both the living going about their business and by funeral processions. Water drawn there is the water used for saining. The whole of Scottish liminal water practice runs through the fact that the dead were physically carried across particular fords.

What it was for

Two things, and they are both worth saying plainly.

  • It gave the dead a passage. The soul is understood to be going somewhere, the going takes time, and the practices manage the journey: open the way, guard the body, keep it company, mark the route, hand it over.
  • It gave the living a job. This is the part I think we have lost most damagingly.

In a traditional Scottish death, the household is immediately busy. Windows, clocks, mirrors, washing, laying out, the watch rota, feeding the house full of people who arrive. Nobody has to decide how to behave, because everybody knows. The bereaved are not left alone with their grief and nor are they left alone with an empty diary.

Then the community arrives and stays. For days. Bringing food, taking turns at the watch, sitting up all night with the family. Grief is conducted in public, in company, at volume, with the body present in the room.

Compare that with the modern British death, which is: the body is removed within hours by strangers, the family is left in a quiet house, there is a gap of two or three weeks, then a forty-minute service, and then everyone goes back to work.

I am not being nostalgic. The old way had real costs: the wakes could be brutal for the immediate family, the drinking was a serious problem, and the expense of a proper funeral ruined people. But the modern arrangement removes the body, removes the time, removes the noise and removes the crowd, and I do not think it is a straightforward improvement.

The Kirk and the wake

Worth knowing, because it explains why so little survives.

The Kirk spent three hundred years trying to suppress the lykewake and the coronach. Kirk session records are full of discipline for wake behaviour: drinking, games, and above all keening, which was condemned as both disorderly and superstitious.

It largely worked. The coronach is effectively gone as a living practice. The full lykewake is gone. What survives in Scotland is a shortened version, mostly in the Hebrides and mostly Catholic, and a general cultural memory of the funeral tea.

The Clearances and emigration did the rest, because a wake requires a community within walking distance.

What can be recovered

Not the whole thing. Most of this depends on the body being in the house, which is legally and practically possible in Britain but rare and requires effort.

What is recoverable, and what I would actually do:

  • Open a window. At the moment of death if you are there, or when you hear. It takes two seconds and it is the oldest instruction in the tradition.
  • Stop something. A clock if you have one that can be stopped. Otherwise, deliberately suspend something in the household: the routine, the diary, the ordinary running of things. Mark that the house is out of ordinary time.
  • Cover a mirror. Or all of them. It changes a room profoundly and it removes something you do not want to be looking into.
  • Sit with the body if you can. Ask the funeral director. Many will arrange it, most people do not know it is possible, and time with the body is the single most consistently helpful thing in the whole tradition.
  • Keep the watch in whatever form you can. If the body is not available, hold the vigil around a photograph, a candle, an object of theirs. Someone awake, through a night, deliberately.
  • Feed people. The funeral tea is the last surviving fragment of the wake and it is the fragment doing the most work. Take it seriously. Cook rather than cater if you can.
  • Make noise. Sing. This is the hardest one for British people and it is the one the tradition insists on. The coronach exists because grief that is not voiced sits in the body.
  • Walk the route. If there is a coffin road, or a route they walked, walk it. Add a stone to a cairn.
  • Sain the house afterwards. Water and smoke, every room, windows open. When the funeral is done and the visitors have gone and the house is unbearably quiet, this gives you something to do with your hands that is not tidying.
  • Mark the year. The tradition has a rhythm: the month's mind, the year's mind. A deliberate return at intervals. Modern practice tends to have nothing between the funeral and forgetting.

On the ancestors

A note, because the language of ancestor work is everywhere at the moment and it sits oddly against the Scottish material.

Traditional Scottish practice around the dead is not primarily veneration. It is care, escort and boundary. You look after them, you see them off, you mark the route, and then you maintain a proper distance. The dead who come back in this tradition are usually a problem rather than a resource, and a good deal of practice is concerned with making sure the departure was complete.

That is a different relationship from the ancestor altar, and I would not blend them without noticing. If you want to work with your dead in the Scottish frame, the shape is: name them, feed them at the right times, keep their routes and their places, and do not summon them.

A last thing

If you are reading this because someone has died, I am sorry, and most of the above can wait.

Open a window. Cover a mirror. Let people feed you. Sit with them if you can.

The rest of it is a practice. Those four things are just what you do.

Sources

  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text. The death charms, the soul-leading and the saining of the body are in volumes I and III.
  • Campbell, J. G. (1900, 1902). Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Via Internet Archive.
  • Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn.
  • Bennett, M. (1992). Scottish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave. Polygon. The essential book on this subject, built on field recordings and first-hand accounts.
  • Banks, M. M. (1937–1941). British Calendar Customs: Scotland. Folklore Society.
  • Henderson, L. & Cowan, E. J. (2001). Scottish Fairy Belief: A History. Tuckwell Press. On the washer at the ford and the death omens.
  • Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches — recordings of wake customs, laments and funeral practice from tradition bearers. Search coronach, faire, lykewake.
  • National Records of Scotland — kirk session records, for the discipline cases against wake behaviour and keening.
  • Canmore — for coffin roads, cairns and burial grounds.
  • On practical rights in Britain, including keeping a body at home and arranging your own funeral: The Natural Death Centre.

If you are bereaved and struggling, Cruse Bereavement Support Scotland is on 0808 802 6161, and Samaritans are on 116 123, free, at any hour.

Related: [Saining]; [Holy Wells and Clootie Trees]; [An Dà Shealladh: Second Sight]; [The Silences]