A burial society is a type of benefit/

friendly society A friendly society (sometimes called a benefit society, mutual aid society, benevolent society, fraternal organization or ROSCA) is a mutual association for the purposes of insurance, pensions, savings or cooperative banking. It is a mutua ...

. These groups historically existed in England and elsewhere, and were constituted for the purpose of providing by voluntary subscriptions for the

funeral A funeral is a ceremony connected with the final disposition of a corpse, such as a burial or cremation, with the attendant observances. Funerary customs comprise the complex of beliefs and practices used by a culture to remember and respect ...

expenses of the husband, wife or child of a member, or of the widow of a deceased member. Some also allowed for insuring money to be paid on the death of a member. Not-for-profit burial societies still exist today. For-profit companies also provide

funeral insurance Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to hedge ...

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

communities often include a burial society known as the ''

chevra kadisha The term ''Chevra kadisha'' (Modern Hebrew: חֶבְרָה קַדִּישָׁא) gained its modern sense of "burial society" in the nineteenth century. It is an organization of Jewish men and women who see to it that the bodies of deceased Je ...

'', which also covers performing the necessary Jewish funerary rituals and ceremonies.

In antiquity

Burial society is a precursor to general insurance which is a recent innovation. Burial societies were first known to exist in ancient Rome and not before. In ancient Rome, various associations of a fraternal nature, as well as religious groups, political clubs, and trade guilds, functioned as burial societies. Terms for these include '' hetaeria'', ''

collegium A (plural ), or college, was any association in ancient Rome that acted as a legal entity. Following the passage of the ''Lex Julia'' during the reign of Julius Caesar as Consul and Dictator of the Roman Republic (49–44 BC), and their rea ...

'', and '' sodalitas''. The by-laws of one burial society are preserved by an inscription dating to A.D. 136. Discovered at

Lanuvium Lanuvium, modern Lanuvio, is an ancient city of Latium vetus, some southeast of Rome, a little southwest of the Via Appia. Situated on an isolated hill projecting south from the main mass of the Alban Hills, Lanuvium commanded an extensive vie ...

, the ''lex collegia salutaris Dianae et Antinoi'' ("By-laws of the Society of Diana and

Antinous Antinous, also called Antinoös, (; grc-gre, Ἀντίνοος; 27 November – before 30 October 130) was a Greek youth from Bithynia and a favourite and probable lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Following his premature death before his ...

") details the cost of joining the society, monthly fees, regulations for the burial of members, and the schedule for the group's meetings and dinners. Another example at Rome was the

College of Aesculapius and Hygia The College of Aesculapius and Hygia was an association ''( collegium)'' founded in the mid-2nd century AD by a wealthy Roman woman named Salvia Marcellina, in honor of her dead husband and the procurator for whom he had worked. It is known from a ...

, founded by a wealthy woman in honor of her dead husband. Inscriptional evidence exists for burial societies throughout the

Empire An empire is a "political unit" made up of several territories and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire (sometimes referred to as the metropole) ex ...

, not just in the city of Rome. One of the ways that the Romans made sense of the earliest Christian groups was to think of them as associations of this kind, particularly burial societies, which were permitted even when political conflict or civil unrest caused authorities to ban meetings of other groups; Pliny identified Christians collectively as a ''hetaeria''.Robert Louis Wilken, ''The Christians as the Romans Saw Them'' (Yale University Press, 1984, 2003), pp. 31–4
online.
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19th century

Edmund Roberts mentioned the European and Burial Society when he visited

Cape Town, South Africa Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest ...

in 1833. The society was founded in 1795 by Dutch settlers. He described it as "supporting poor and unfortunate fellow-countrymen, during their illness, and in the event of their death, to cause them to be respectfully interred". He also mentioned that the society had "considerable funds", during his visit to the area.

References

External links

End of EmpireFuneral Consumers Alliance
{{Insurance Burial