Blurring boundaries: The significance of horse and bull iconography in Occitan and Provençal cemeteries

Abstract

This paper investigates how the use of horse and bull iconography in Occitan and Provençal Catholic cemeteries facilitates the expression of a more-than-human regional identity and, thereby, challenges the boundaries that separate humans from the nonhuman world. The presence of nonhumans in the way humans process and understand death across faiths and cultures is often explained by the fact that humans, as they deal with death, need to make sense of it by reaffirming the singularity of human life, in opposition to that of other beings. Relegating the use of animals in death rituals as a pagan practice associated with idolatry and metempsychosis, Western Christianism has largely banished animals and animal iconography from human deathscapes. However, research in twenty-two Catholic village cemeteries around the Camargue region indicates that, in this part of France today, animals – especially bulls and horses - are included in the religious and social practice of death. At first glance, the use of this symbolism in the Camargue region and its vicinity seems to subvert the Christian condemnation of animal imagery. Upon closer examination, however, rather than challenging Christian norms, the use of animal imagery merges with Christian signs, indicating that local cemeteries are spaces where humans can express both religious affiliation and regional spiritualism simultaneously. Moreover, by evoking narratives of more-than-human osmosis promoted by the Félibrige literature, this imagery also effaces the boundaries that separate 36 humans from animals and the environment. Therefore, the use of horse and bull iconography in those cemeteries not only blurs the conceptual boundaries between Catholic faith and fé biou (the “religion of the bull” to which the horse also participates), but also between humans and the nonhuman world.