Why The Dead Are Buried In White Slippers

2024 Author: Bailey Albertson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 12:53

Why is it customary to bury in white slippers

"White slippers" as a symbol of the funeral are known to almost everyone from a young age. But are the dead now really put on their last journey in these shoes? And if not, where do the legs of this expression grow from? We'll have to delve a little into history.

Why exactly white slippers

White slippers as shoes for the deceased are an exclusively Christian custom. It is believed that a deceased person will henceforth walk only in heaven, become a celestial - and therefore only white shoes will suit him. A darker color would allegedly desecrate the heavenly abode.

But why was this particular style chosen - sneakers? There are several reasons for this. The first is the lack of heels. It is believed that burying a person in shoes that make noise is not worth it. They explain this in different ways - for example, the deceased will wake up the rest of the dead in the district. Another plus of the slippers is the lack of lacing. Superstitious people are very afraid to tie knots or bows on the clothes of the deceased, because it is supposedly possible to tie his soul. And the last of the common reasons is home comfort. There is both a symbolic side (the grave becomes the last home of a person, and therefore household attributes are quite appropriate here), and a superstitious side (if the deceased is not comfortable in the grave, he can get up and disturb the living).

Giving a person white slippers is still prohibited by superstition - after all, it is supposedly possible to attract death.

It is impossible to establish the exact time of the formation of this tradition, but it definitely takes place in early Christian Russia. In the 20th century, the custom of dressing up the deceased in white slippers was almost forgotten. In the USSR, neither superstition nor religious rituals were encouraged, and therefore people were buried mainly in ceremonial dress, without fear of an uprising of the dead, or "tying" the soul of the deceased.

The Bible and the Church's Opinion

In the Bible, of course, there is no mention of white shoes. The white robes mentioned in the Revelation of John the Divine also have nothing to do with the funeral. Moreover, white slippers are unfamiliar to Catholics and Protestants - they appear exclusively in Orthodoxy. Therefore, we can assume that white shoes for the deceased were born not as a religious dogma, but as a primitive belief of the people.

The Russian Orthodox Church also does not consider white slippers to be an important attribute of Orthodox funerals. Church ministers always emphasize that physical objects (such as white slippers or food offerings for the grave) are not needed by the deceased, and therefore these ceremonies are not encouraged.

The origins of this custom are not biblical, but folk. The Russian Orthodox Church does not support such rituals, and not everyone adheres to them now.