How the Occult Brought Cremation to America
Cremation has become so popular in America that if current trends continue it will be the funerary choice of half of Americans within four years. Time Magazine reported this surprising fact in a recent cover story on the rise of cremation -- yet the otherwise probing story omitted, as do many studies of cremation, how the ancient and Eastern practice got its start in America. To understand this requires uncovering a leaf from occult history.
Cremation was introduced to America in the 1870s by a retired Civil War colonel, Henry Steel Olcott. As a Union Army staff colonel and military investigator, Olcott had amassed a distinguished record, which included routing out fraud among defense contractors and making some of the first arrests in the Lincoln assassination. In his post-military life as a lawyer and journalist, Olcott developed a deep interest in the esoteric and paranormal -- which drove his fascination with the then-exotic rite of burning the dead.
While cremation possessed ancient roots, it was little known among Victorian-age Americans. Indeed, to most late nineteenth-century Westerners, the concept of cremation seemed otherworldly and even un-Christian. Americans associated funeral pyres and crematoriums with pagan antiquity or the mists of the Far East. Modern people buried their dead, and that was that.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mitch-horowitz/how-the-occult-brought-cr_b_3880620.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
= new reply since forum marked as read
had these kinds of roots.
I'm sending the link to my dad, I'm sure he'll find it interesting as well.
(Side note) He once had a client (back when he was a practicing lawyer) who was in the funeral home business. The guy had a neat idea (for the time anyway) where he contracted with a company that made those paper based milk cartons. They would make coffin sized 'milk' cartons for the funeral home to use in the cremations, which cut down on costs and was more environmentally friendly. That was back in the late seventies to early eighties, so I'm sure they have better methods these days.
(please forgive me for rambling-on. The article reminded me of the story and I just felt the need to share 
)
Personally I'm still trying to find out if I can have a funeral where they set me out in a small skiff made to look like a longship at which point they shoot at it with flaming arrows, setting me aflame.
Those that I ask always give me funny looks or ask if I'm just trying to waste their time. 
