Council of British Druid Orders - Reburial Officer statement.
The human remains of our ancestors have meanings that extend beyond those of data.
Burial communicates a final act, and this is seen in the methods and practice of
burial. The burial should therefore remain sacrosanct. Any un-natural disturbance must
be more carefully considered.
The grave is part of the Earth Goddess and burials are given into Her keeping. Druids
are the guardians and representatives of these living spiritual ancestral landscapes. Dis-interment
through un-natural processes violates the sanctity of the grave, and may therefore be viewed as
offensive to the spirit of Goddess, ancestor and Druid. Our hearts cry out! Reburial into Earth is
therefore the most loving and respectful act for landscape, ancestor and Druid.
We feel our spiritual concerns are presently under-represented and, through dialogue, this Council
seeks to address this imbalance.
Ideally, the best place for our ancestors is in the Earth where their human remains are embraced
and protected by the soils of the Avebury Complex. Reburial is therefore our preferred option.
By using plastic models and virtual reality displays in museums, we feel education is possible
without the unethical display or storage of our ancestral brothers and sisters.
Our ancestors are a whole part of the Avebury complex that is spiritually important within a European
context and should be respected by all and represented by those who understand the spiritual relationships
between ancestor, landscape and pilgrim.
Retention of our ancestral remains against the wishes of this Council on the basis of non-existent research
techniques that may or may not be developed is an unconvincing argument. Such reasoning suggests guardianship is
being used by the museum as an assumed authority over spiritual matters that are extant.
The human remains of our ancestors contain, within bone, the spirit of person. Bones are people and are living
links between land and transcended spirit.
Decay is an important spiritual process of life, with decay aiding the process of rebirth in the Otherworld
(spirit transcended into heaven, Avalon, the Underworld etc), and reincarnation back into this life. Display and
storage interferes with the natural process of decay.
Buried with meaning, and blessed with love, the bodies of our
ancestors help make sacred this Earth.
Through decay our brothers and
sisters become part of Her body. In return this Earth gives Her
spirit to the ancestor. Ancestor and
landscape become one.
As pilgrims, we enter into the ancestral landscape and through ritual
acts also become part of the
spirit of place. Through meditation,
poetry and prayer we respect and respond to all that is sacred – every stone,
tree,
flower, insect, bone, every ancestor.
And when we call to and honour our ancestors, they answer and part-take in our
ceremonies,
and when they come, they come as spirit people blessed
with the spirit of the land into which they
were placed – the womb of
the Great Goddess from which we are reborn. (i)
(i) The Council feels that though it is clear that no single form of words can ever express this matter adequately for all,
the substantial majority of its members would be unlikely to find in this description anything to which material objection
could be made, and further that for many it might well be found wholly acceptable as an expression of the dictates of their
individual conscience. CoBDO June 2007. Similarly, in the US and Australia, differing tribes have differing views on
ancestors and their remains.
The human remains of Charlie and the Kennet Avenue ancestors are everyone’s family and belong to us all. Modern
research on mtDNA from the University of Oxford clearly proves an unbroken genetic link between people today indigenous
to Europe and our long dead. Statistically, these range between 43% and 2%. Women therefore carry our ancestral line
from our deep past and into the future. Oxford also state that male DNA traces back through deep time. Until this
research is disproved I will assume that members of the Council, like all people indigenous to Europe, have a ‘close genetic’
claim for reburial as stated in the DCMS Guidance (ibid: 26). We all have a close and unbroken cultural and
spiritual relationship with the human remains of our ancestors. It is time to remember who we are - the ancestors reborn.
This genealogical claim therefore informs and underpins the main points of our request for reburial that are based upon
ethics and belief.
We feel an Ethics Advisory Panel would help to address any potential conflicts between archaeology and museology
and the views expressed above.
Paul Davis - COBDO Reburial Officer: