Dark Magic

I love cemeteries. Walking around, especially in the evenings with a slight drizzle of rain, I feel safe, completely covered from the outside world. Honestly, I am completely pulled in by the tombstones. I read the dates, the inscriptions, the names. Wondering about the lives that lay ended beneath my feet.

I am in middle Tennessee right now, my place of origin. Yesterday, I found myself locked out of a house for quite a while, so I went on a walk. Straight to the cemetery down the road.

This cemetery, once ancient and old, has been kept up by the wrong people. Instead of preserving the historical points, they choose to leave broken headstones, replace antique fences with chain link (ugh), and allowing moss to completely cover the beautiful inscriptions. Death used to be so romantic in the 1800s and early 1900s. People actually cared about tombstones, things of importance. They were put up immediately. Maybe even made before your death, depending on your social standing. Whereas today, my papa still does not have a tombstone because my grandmother is too cheap. If I had the money...

I did not have my real camera in my possession, but I did have my less than inferior phone with camera. There were some shots I could not pass up...





Such as this broken twisted fence. My creative imaginative mind has all sorts of dark possibilities for the twisting of a cemetery fence...





This relief on the grave of a four year old little girl depicts a tree with one live bird perched on a branch. Lying below, a dead bird on the ground. I wonder if perhaps this little girl might have had a twin. Although morbid depictions like this were very popular in the 1800s. As was keeping a lock of the deceased's hair.







This grave yard also had some intriguingly different shapes for head stones. The concrete cylinder, very similar to the test cylinders we made in my material science class to test concrete strength, and the tree stump, perched on two concrete logs. Cool, huh?





Now... this is what caught my eye from across the rows. A pentagram perched on top of a woman's grave. In a cemetery behind a church, no less. But, this was not the pentagram I was more familiar with. Next to her, her husband's stone held the symbol for the Freemason society. Since they also utilized the five pointed star as a symbol of felicity and brotherhood, I could only infer that this couple was deep into that religious, secret sect. Searching on the internet later, I found this exact star, with the inscriptions inside, on a history of the Freemasons page. So I'm assuming my assumptions were correct.

Still... it would have been cooler the other way around.