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woman to the priest – knew and understood their role. Ariès identified the historical and social forces which led to death becoming ‘hidden’: industrialization and the consequent flight from the country to the city; the decline in religious belief, which began with the Enlightenment; the development of scientific medicine; the rise of the hospital; and the establishment of the funeral industry:
    For until now, incredible as it may seem, human beings as we are able to perceive them in the pages of history have never really known the fear of death. Of course they were afraid to die; they felt sad about it, and they said so calmly. But this is precisely the point: their anxiety never crossed the threshold into the unspeakable, the inexpressible. It was translated into soothing words and channelled into familiar rites. People paid attention to death. Death was a serious matter, not to be taken lightly, a dramatic moment in life, grave and formidable, but not so formidable that they were tempted to push it out of sight, run away from it, act as if it did not exist, or falsify its appearances.
    When it was tame, ‘death was not a personal drama but an ordeal for the community’. The community tamed death by ritual:
    The ritualization of death is a special aspect of the total strategy of man against nature, a strategy of prohibitions and concessions. This is why death has not been allowed its natural extravagance but has been imprisoned in ceremony, transformed into spectacle. This is also why it could not be a solitary adventure but had to be a public phenomenon involving the whole community.
    Ariès conceded, however, that ritual could go only so far in taming death: ‘Death may be tamed, divested of the blind violence of natural forces, and ritualized, but it is never experienced as a natural phenomenon. It always remains a misfortune, a mal-heur .’
    Ariès showed how ritual dominated pre-industrial life, and guided people through life’s crises: ‘Once, there were codes for all occasions, codes for revealing to others feelings that were generally unexpressed, codes for courting, for giving birth, for dying, for consoling the bereaved. These codes no longer exist. They disappeared in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.’ The codes were largely governed by organized religion: books about the art of dying – the ars moriendi – were popular in the Middle Ages and provided spiritual instruction on how to prepare for death. When we ceased to believe (or at any rate, to worship) we found ourselves rudderless, unsure about the ritual, without a script.
    Our ancestors regarded death as a process of transfer to another life. The people who lived in medieval Europe seem to have truly believed not only in heaven and hell, but also in such entities as purgatory and even limbo (abolished by papal decree in 2007). The Christian faithful went to extraordinary lengths to limit their time in purgatory, by buying plenary indulgences, going on pilgrimages, and in the case of the very wealthy, by endowing churches and monasteries.
    Ariès paints a bleak picture of death in the late twentieth century: ‘It [death] has now been so obliterated from our culture that it is hard for us to imagine or understand it. The ancient attitude in which death is close and familiar yet diminished and desensitized is too different from our own view, in which it is so terrifying that we no longer dare say its name.’
    Society and families, he believed, had abdicated their responsibility to the dying man, passing ‘this responsibility on to the scientific miracle worker, who possessed the secrets of health and sickness and who knew better than anyone else what should be done’. But the ‘scientific miracle worker’ was ill-equipped to deal with the reality of dying. Ariès wondered how traditional rituals about mourning all but disappeared in the twentieth century: ‘...the community feels less and less involved in the death of one of