ABSTRACT
In ancient and traditional times, the good death, usually in battle, was a semiotic limit on mortality as the eraser of individual human worth. Through the ages, death, mortality, and dying have been the official subjects of religions great and small. The Good Death was replaced with a “Well-managed Death” in which professions such as official authorities and lawyers, as well as clergy, played a major role. As the urban middle classes became increasingly privatized and sequestered from community involvement with the masses, so too did their attitudes toward death and dying. To overcome the bleakness and void that mortality threatens, even in the modern period human cultures sought shelter from what S. Kierkegaard calls the sickness unto death. A. Kellehear argues that, by nature, humans are not death denying and that historically humanity has evolved as a death-anticipating society through traditional customs and belief systems.
