Wake

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A wake is the vigil kept over a dead body in the interval between death and burial — a watch in which the corpse is laid out and attended, by night as well as day, until it is carried to the grave. The word descends from the same root as waking and watching: behind it stand Old English wacu, a watch or vigil, and Old Norse vaka, the act of staying awake through hours meant for sleep. An older English term, lyke-wake, named the same thing more plainly, the lyke being the body — līc in Old English, the corpse, the same word that survives in the lych-gate of an English churchyard, the roofed gate where the bier once rested, and in lych, the dead body itself. At its core the custom is simple, and the simplicity is the point: the dead are not left alone.

“El Velorio” (“The Wake”), Francisco Oller, 1893 — a wake for a child crowded with food, drink, music, and mourners, the mixture of grief and sociability that defined the custom. — Francisco Oller, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Around that core gathered a great deal more. Across rural Christian Europe — in the Welsh gwylnos or wake-night, the Scottish late-wake, the lych-wake of northern England — and with particular density in Ireland, the wake became as much an assembly of the living as a watch over the dead. Neighbors came to the house, the body lay in an open coffin or on a bed with candles burning close around it, often a plate of salt set on the breast, and the company kept it company. They prayed; they also ate, drank, took snuff and smoked clay pipes, told stories, and at the older wakes played games. The watch ran by night because night was when watching mattered most, and it ran long — two and three nights were not unusual — because the body could not be left until the grave was ready and the kin had gathered from a distance.

The lych-gate of St George’s churchyard, Beckenham — the roofed “corpse-gate,” reputedly England’s oldest, where the bier once rested before burial. — Geograph Britain and Ireland contributor, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The watch and what it guarded

The first and plainest reason for the watch was custodial. A body left untended could be disturbed — by animals, by the malicious, in later centuries by the body-snatcher — and a watch by candlelight kept it whole and decent until burial. Underneath that practical care ran an older anxiety the folklore records keep returning to: the corpse in this interval was not yet safely gone, and the watch protected it from harm of a kind that could not be fought off with a stout door. The candles ringing the body, the continual smoke of the pipes, the salt on the breast, the stopping of the clock and the covering or turning of mirrors at the moment of death — these belong to a grammar of guarding the newly dead and easing the soul’s departure, a grammar far older than the rite that carries it. The body was watched, in this reading, because the dead person was at the most exposed point of a passage, and because the living owed presence at exactly the hour when presence was hardest to give.

What practitioners held, where it can be recovered, was that the dead in this interval were neither fully gone nor safely departed. The soul was thought to linger near the body, owed presence, prayer, and the proper observances before it could pass on; the watch served the dead as much as it comforted the living. Folklorists of death have set this within a wider pattern: the threshold between death and burial is the most dangerous, in-between stretch of a transition, a time when the one who has died belongs fully to neither the world of the living nor the company of the dead. Arnold van Gennep, gathering the world’s funerary customs under the rite-of-passage frame in 1909, made transition rather than separation the heart of the death rites, the corpse held in an ambiguous liminal state until the rites complete its passage; the worry encoded in the corpse-watch is the worry of that interval, and the wake is one local, deeply elaborated answer to it.

The Irish wake

In Ireland the custom flowered into its fullest form. The house was opened, the news carried, and the neighborhood came; the wake belonged to the whole community and not to the bereaved family alone. Women laid out and prepared the body and held the central place in the lament. The keen — the caoineadh, the formal cry led by women, sometimes by keeners called to the house for the purpose — voiced the grief the occasion required in a half-sung, half-spoken elegy raised over the corpse, its absence at a wake noticed and felt as a failure of duty to the dead. Alongside the keening and the prayers ran the food and drink, the tobacco and snuff handed round, the long night of talk; and at the older wakes the wake-games, a remarkable repertoire of storytelling, riddling, feats of strength and agility, courtship play, mimicry, and rough horseplay that turned a house of death into a gathering loud with life.

A staged stereoscopic view of an Irish wake, Strohmeyer & Wyman for Underwood & Underwood, c. 1894 — the neighborhood gathered around the body in the house of the dead. — Underwood & Underwood, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The mixture of mourning and merriment was no contradiction to those keeping the watch; it was what the watch was for, holding sorrow and sociability in the same room and carrying the household through the first shock of loss. Seán Ó Súilleabháin, archivist of the Irish Folklore Commission, gathered the surviving record of these games and amusements — first in Irish as Caitheamh Aimsire ar Thórraimh (1961), then in English as Irish Wake Amusements (1967) — and it remains the standard treatment: a catalog of a tradition already passing as he wrote it down.

The clergy and the wake

The practice sat uneasily with church authority, and the unease was old. In the medieval church the vigil over the dead had a sanctioned form — an all-night office of prayer and psalmody, the vigiliae from which the English wake in its churchly sense descends — and what the clergy objected to was the distance between that quiet office and the boisterous house-wake the people actually kept. Across the British Isles the same complaint repeats for centuries: the drink, the games, the lewd songs, the courtship and horseplay, the hired keeners, the sheer expense — all of it unfit, in the clergy’s view, for a house of death.

In Ireland the campaign sharpened with the reforming synods of the seventeenth century. The Synod of Tuam in 1614 opened the program; the Synod of Armagh in 1624 condemned the wake outright as an occasion of excess, feasting, obscenity, and keening; synods at Armagh and Tuam in 1660 moved against the hiring of women keeners; and the Dublin synod of 1670 pressed the parish clergy to quiet the clamor of the women at funerals. The customs proved durable enough that the campaign had to run for centuries — the older wake-games and the keen persisting into the nineteenth century and, in places, the early twentieth — before they faded, less from any single decree than from the long pressure of a clergy that wanted a devotional vigil where the people kept a festival of the dead. Where the Reformation took hold and prayer for the dead was set aside, the funeral wake lapsed; in Catholic Ireland, where the dead were still prayed for and the soul was still held to need the living, it endured.

The reading of the wake

Folklorists who recorded the older wakes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries treated them as among the richest surviving deposits of popular belief about death, reading in the games and the very prohibitions the traces of much older ideas about the perilous state of the newly dead. Ó Súilleabháin’s Irish Wake Amusements remains the fullest such record, and the anthropology of death has supplied the frame: van Gennep’s rite-of-passage scheme makes the unburied corpse a being in transit, held in the dangerous middle phase until the rites set it among the dead. The reference accounts of the wake trace the same arc — from custodial watch to social gathering — and the clergy’s long war against the wake-games is itself evidence for the reading: a practice fought for three centuries and not extinguished is a practice rooted below the level the church could reach. The same intuition — that the threshold between death and burial is a dangerous, in-between time demanding vigilance — recurs widely, and the corpse-watch is its common expression across cultures that otherwise share little. What the wake shares with those other watches is the worry, not a common ancestry: it is one local, deeply elaborated answer to a fear many peoples have arrived at separately, a convergence on the same threshold rather than the descent of a single rite into many forms.

The wake sits among the offices the living perform for the dying and the dead, and its neighbors mark its bounds. Before death, the dying were strengthened by the last sacraments — Viaticum, the Eucharist given as food for the road, and the Anointing of the Sick, the anointing that healed body and soul. The wake belongs to the next interval, after death and before the grave; the Christian burial that follows closes it. The prayers said over the body, and the conviction that they reached and aided the dead, rest on the doctrine that the soul’s passage could be eased by the living — the same ground on which purgatory and prayer for the dead were built, and the ground the Reformation cut away. The Eastern churches keep their own watch by the dead and their own care for the soul’s naming; the Dormition of the Mother of God, the feast of Mary’s falling-asleep, makes the death of the holiest a sleep and not an ending, and in the prothesis the names of the dead are spoken over the bread before the liturgy begins.

In modern usage the word has loosened. A wake now often means simply the gathering after a death, or after the funeral, with no body present and no night-long watch — the social half of the old custom surviving the vigil that gave it its name. The night by the body has thinned to an evening among the living; the keen has fallen silent and the wake-games are gone; but the impulse that filled the house has not changed its shape much, and the company a death still gathers is the old watch keeping itself, in a room where the chief mourner is no longer laid out but only missed.

→ Related: Anointing · Spirit · Consecration · Christian Burial · Viaticum · Anointing Of The Sick · Soul · Purgatory · Near Death Experience · Prothesis · Dormition Of The Mother Of God