Fandango’s One Word Challenge: TEMPTING

When I see pictures of ’embracing skeletons ‘ in acheology articles I for one do not assume I am looking at two individuals locked in an enteral lover’s embrace.

It’s tempting to believe that there are people out there who were so devoted to each other in life ( it’s in books and movies and songs and plays! It must be true!) that it touched the heartstrings of the community they lived in and wanting to preserve that when the lovers died,  their friends or family reconstructed their bodies-

and then tossed them in a grave and covered them with dirt.

Beep beep reality check time-

In the pictures I’ve seen, one figure appears to be entwined around the other figure  ( like a snake squeezing the life out of it’s prey )  or one has a  hand on the other’s face and they are nose to nose. Like they’re coming in for a bite. It’s creepy.

So I did a little digging around ( ha ha ) and found that there is a theory based on a ancient burials in Staryi Tartas village, in the Novosibirsk region of Siberia where scientists discovered tombs of skeletons in the ‘lovers embrace’ that these individuals could have been sacrifices tied to reincarnation or fertility rituals.

I know, call  me a wet blanket, but right away these questions  should have popped up when people got excited about these ‘eternal lovers’-

did all of those couples at the  site is Siberia  love each other so much they were posed in an eternal embrace at their death? And did they conveniently die at the same time because the work involved in digging up one body in the process of decomposition or fully skeletonized and posing it with a newly dead individual would be a Herculean task.

You have to ask yourself really?

Professor Lev Klein of St Petersburg State University has proposed the coupled burials are linked to reincarnation beliefs possibly influenced by deeksha rituals. ‘The ‘deeksha’ was considered as a ‘second birth’ and to complete this ritual the sacrificing one made a ritual sexual act of conceiving’. Picture: Vyacheslav Molodin, Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

I know- we all want to believe in true and eternal love. We want to believe in fate and destiny. But for real. Who would put bodies back together just because two people were ‘ in love.’

I really wanted to have a little doubt about my opinion in this matter so I noodled around and found this next picture and without a doubt we are looking at true and eternal love and it really is touching.

Grover Krantz donated his body to science with the proviso that he be reunited with his best friend ( who had passed away before him ) when the study he gave his body up to was completed.

His request was honored

In life and death Grover and Clyde-

it’s possible I may have to rethink my feelings about true love.