Sesquiotica

It is Cinderella’s funeral. “Ashes to ashes,” someone says.* The mourner next to you leans over and says, sotto voce, “Cinders to cinders.” And you, knowing she started out in Italy as Cenerentola, mutter back, “Cenere a cenere.” Which, as your interlocutor may or may not know, changes the complexion of the matter.

Cinderella, being fairy-tale royalty, gets a requiem mass, in the old style. “Requiem æternam,” the choir begins.^† At length it moves into the “Dies iræ,” at which point the person next to you whispers, “Is she going to be buried or incinerated?” And you are about to reply “Cremated” when you pause and think about this.

Because, even if we normally speak of the human dead as being cremated, wouldn’t it be more apposite for Cinderella, la Cenerentola, to be incinerated? And why don’t we say “incinerated” for people, anyway? Why is it vaguely offensive to speak of the beloved dead as having been put into an incinerator, and just as vaguely offensive to speak of trash as having been cremated?

The word incinerate has a long tenure in English. Since the mid-1500s it has been used to mean ‘reduce to ashes’, which is its literal Latin meaning: in- for ‘into’ plus cinis ‘ashes’ – the ancestor of Italian cenere – but specifically cold ashes, what’s left after the fire has burned out and the wind has passed over. Latin had a different word for hot ash, and the choir has just sung it:

Dies iræ, dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla

Yes, favilla. What we would in English call cinders. Different from cinis. (We’ll come back to that.)

But when a body is reduced to ashes, first hot, then cold, why do we not say incinerate (not to mention infavillate, which is a word that you will find nowhere)? Why cremate? Are we reducing them to the cream of their ashes?

It is worth noting at this juncture that cremation, as such, is comparatively modern. People have been burned on funeral pyres since time immemorial, of course. But the human body is not so easily reduced to ashes. It was not until the later 1800s that an oven was developed that would get so hot that, after three or four hours, all that would be left of an ex-person would be white ash. In 1873, at the Vienna Exposition, Professor Ludovico Brunetti presented an oven that would be able to reduce an adult body to 1.7 kilograms of cenere – which he presented as proof. (We do not know whose cremains they were.) 

His timing was good: cities were becoming dense, graveyards were filling up, and there was the problem that, along with taking up space, decomposing corpses were environmentally toxic. As Sir Henry Thompson, FRCS, MB.Lond., put it in his book Cremation: The Treatment of the Body After Death, 

The process of decomposition affecting an animal body is one that has a disagreeable, injurious, often fatal influence on the living man if sufficiently exposed to it. . . . The grave-yard pollution of air and water alone has probably found a victim in some social circle known to more than one who may chance to read this paper.

He, a founder of the Cremation Society of England, considered graveyard interment nothing more than “laying by poison . . . for our children’s children, who will find our remains polluting their water sources.” And just around the same time as he was writing this, Brunetti was presenting his furnace, and in England one Charles William Siemens^‡ was also developing a regenerative furnace that was suited for the process. And it was just around then that cremate, cremation, and crematorium (and crematory, now disused) appeared in English.

Well, you know, people have feelings about funerary obsequies. Such an occasion is a special time, not common, and if one may use a word that is not the common word – especially for the new invention (new inventions always cry for the invention of new words to name them) – then so much the better. Why should your beloved be put in an incinerator? When there is a nicer-sounding, less besmirched word that can be used?

A word that comes from Latin cremo. Which does not mean ‘cream’. Indeed, cream is unrelated; it comes not from Latin but from French crème, which comes from a Gaulish word that was also influenced by Latin chrisma ‘anointing’ – a thing that one undergoes while still alive, even if it is done with a combustible liquid. No, although my Cremo brand shaving cream does not burn my face or give me an ashen complexion, Latin cremo means ‘I burn’ – transitively: the infinitive is cremare and it means ‘burn to ashes, destroy by fire’ and ‘make a burnt offering’.

And as you think about this, the text of the “Dies iræ” gets to

Ne perenni cremer igne

“That I not be cremated by eternal fire.”

And, after another stanza, it continues on to a familiar bit:

Confutatis maledictis,
Flammis acribus addictis,
Voca me cum benedictis.

Oro supplex et acclinis,
Cor contritum quasi cinis:
Gere curam mei finis.

Lacrimosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla
Iudicandus homo reus:
Huic ergo parce, Deus:

Pie Iesu Domine,
Dona eis requiem.

You can hear it in there: “Cor contritum quasi cinis,” “contrite heart crushed like (cold) ashes”; “Qua resurget ex favilla,” “which from embers will arise”…

And somehow, after being cremated, the cinders of Cinderella will cool to the cinis, the cenere, of la Cenerentola. But how did cold cenere become hot cinders anyway?

The same way the cream came to cremation: nothing but coincidence, and a fatal attraction of sound. Cinder is not related to cenere; it comes from an old Germanic root for ‘dross’ or ‘slag’. La Cenerentola became French Cendrillon, from cendre, which is cognate with cenere but sounds more like cinder. And in English we have Cinderella, who has become a hotter property than she was in the Romance languages.^§

And soon she will be consigned to the flames. Just one question remains: Will her glass slippers burn? 

The answer is no. As it happens, a crematorium typically reaches temperatures around 900°C, while glass generally melts above 1400°C. But that’s not why her slippers won’t burn. It’s because they aren’t in the casket with her. The prince has kept them… for some more fitting occasion.

* Not the priest, because that’s an Anglican saying, and Cinderella was Catholic.

† At Sleeping Beauty’s, it was “Requiem temporalis,” on the basis of precedent.

‡ Of the Siemens family, whose companies have made many technological things, including for transportation within this world, not just out of it.

§ I will not mention that her German name is Aschenputtel. It’s relevant, but I find it off-putting.