[smeej]

Maybe not the place for this question, but I've been wondering about it recently:

From what I think I understand, cremation usually leaves the bones, which are then ground to produce the "ash" that goes into the urn.

Why not just bury the bones in an ossuary? It would be much smaller than a typical grave, and that's what ends up in the vast majority of coffins eventually anyway (certain "incorruptible" bodies notwithstanding), so why not just start there and skip the grinding step?

[tengwar2]

I'm a funeral officiant in the UK, inter alia. The traditional purpose of an ossuary is to save the skull and two femurs, which were thought to be the desirable minimum for the archangel Michael to work the resurrection on the day of judgement (hence the symbolism of the skull and crossbones). Most cultures don't have a need to do that for religious reasons, and either want to scatter ashes, or bury them in a very compact personal grave or vault (by vault, I mean an pre-constructed underground concrete boxes, which would usually be part of a row with plaques on top). An ossuary would generally be communal, so not a great place to visit for an individual family member. If it were private, it would be larger than the very small vault used for burying ashes, so more expensive. Hence leaving out the grinding step makes the remains harder to dispose of, and doesn't really have any advantage. Having said that, there are some cultures for which the bones must not be cremulated (ground).

[smeej]

It sounds like the history I'd thought I'd heard, and maybe even the terminology, for what I was trying to describe were way off.

"Ossuary" sounded like the right word for "bone box," but the context in which I'd heard the idea was an old Jewish custom of reusing tombs. You'd put somebody in there, wait for a couple years until they were just bones, gather the bones in a box (which was what I thought was called an ossuary), and then over time store lots and lots of family members' bones in their separate boxes in one tomb. It made a lot more sense to me than burying each body in its own body-sized casket forever.

I'd heard of early Catholic opposition to cremation and cremulation, but also that some cultures did it to mock the belief in resurrection, sort of a, "Let's see anybody resurrect this!" sentiment. I'm not sure about St. Michael, though. He's not traditionally believed to be directly involved in the raising of the dead.

[tengwar2]

An ossuary is usually something like a building (e.g. a charnel house), but apparently you are right in saying that it is applied to Jewish bone-boxes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossuary#Jewish_ossuaries). For the other meaning, they can be vast. I visited the Paris Catacombs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombs_of_Paris) and estimated that the remains of about 3M people were down there.