Just as cheerleaders are hired to cheer the crowds at cricket, and baseball matches, professional mourners are hired to cry when someone dies. Those who mourn professionally are called moirologists.
Death, in many cultures and continents, is a ritual – mourned, celebrated, and dramatised. This is not necessarily a modern day phenomenon. The act of professional mourning has been in existence for thousands of years – across cultures and continents. The Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, as did people in the western world – pay people to mourn death. It’s a ritual, embedded as a social construct.
Moirologists in Ancient Egypt. Maler der Grabkammer des Ramose – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. Image: Public domainIn ancient Egypt, for example, two professional women in the role of Ancient Egypt Gods, Isis and Nephthys, did the mourning rite for granting resurrection. As Anne Capel writes in her book, Mistress of the House, Mistress of Heaven: women in ancient Egypt who take on the role of mourners would make “an ostentatious display of grief which included loud wailing, beating exposed breasts, smearing the body with dirt and dishevelled hair; all signs of uncontrolled behavior, the disorder of sorrow.”
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