The origin of this ceremony must undoubtedly be sought in man's natural desire to cover a dead body from the public view. The casting a handful of soil on the coffin is emblematic of the complete inhumation. The most ancient writings have allusions to the shamefulness of a corpse lying uninterred. Being thrown outside the walls of Jerusalem, with the burial of an ass (Jeremiah xxii. 19.), was regarded as the worst possible fate. Wheatly's observations upon this point, in his annotations on the burial service in the Prayer Book, are as follows: "The casting earth upon the body was esteemed an act of piety by the very heathens (Ælian, _Var. Hist._, l. v. c. 14.), insomuch that to find a body unburied, and leave it uncovered, was judged amongst them a great crime (Hor. l. i. od. 28. v. 36.). In the Greek Church this has been accounted so essential to the solemnity, that it is ordered to be done by the priest himself (Goar, _Eucholog. Offic. Exeq._, p. 538.); and the same was enjoined by our own rubric in the first Common Prayer of King Edward VI.: '_Then the priest casting earth upon the corpse_,' &c. But in our present Liturgy (as altered in Queen Elizabeth's reign, 1559), it is only ordered that it '_shall be cast upon the body by some standing by_:' and so it is generally left to one of the bearers, or sexton, who, according to Horace's description (_injecto ter pulvere_, vid. supra), gives three casts of earth upon the body or coffin, whilst the priest pronounces the solemn form which explains the ceremony, viz. '_earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust._'" The note in Horace upon the three words above quoted is very much to the point: "_In sacris hoc genus sepulturæ tradebatur, ut si non obrueretur, manu ter jacta terra, cadaveri pro sepultura esset._" (Vet. Schol.) The ancients thought that the spirit of an unburied corpse could not reach the Elysian fields, but wandered disconsolate by the Styx, until some pious hand paid the customary funeral rites. See the case of Patroclus (_Iliad_, xxiii. 70, et seq.). To lay the unquiet ghost, a handful of earth on the bodily remains would suffice: "_Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescent._" The indignity of a public execution is much aggravated by allowing the body of the criminal to remain exposed, as in the case of the five sons of Saul whose corpses were guarded by Rizpah (2 Sam. xxi.); and in our own recent custom of ordering pirates and the worst kind of murderers, to be gibbeted in chains, as a monumental warning.