IHS

The weather has taken a summery turn (well, it is summer), and I took a walk across Southampton Common to the Old Cemetery earlier in the week. The Old Cemetery is a classic Victorian burial ground, crammed with crumbling tombstones and the sort of elaborate memorials that few, if any, would contemplate as a worthwhile expenditure in these days of low expectations where personal survival, resurrection, judgement, and the whole Christian after-sales package is concerned. Although it's true that in the still active Hollybrook Cemetery there are now some very large memorials erected recently by traveller families, which include photographs, fenced astro-turf enclosures, and even benches. From a photographic point of view old cemeteries are a well-worked source of clichés, but when the light is right they are irresistible.

Something that has always intrigued me, but which I had previously always forgotten to look up by the time I got home, is the frequency of the letters "IHS" at the top of many of the standard-issue tombstones, often as a gothic-looking interlaced monogram. I had presumed it stood for "in hope of salvation", or something of the sort. For once, though, I did remember to look it up, and was intrigued by what I found.

It seems that despite being so universally present, there is no actual agreement on what it means. That may be going a little too far – it clearly doesn't stand for "Idiotic Hat Services" or "Indecipherable Handwriting Syndrome" – but there does appear to be more than one interpretation. The most basic version is that this is a "Christogram", i.e. the first three letters of Jesus Christ’s name in Greek: iota eta sigma (when capitalised, the letter eta looks like an "H"). However, the memorial masons were clearly not classical scholars, and often rendered the letters in a gothicky black-letter lower-case (lower-case eta does not resemble "h", more a swashed "n"), so it can also be seen as a Latin initialism for Iesus Hominum Salvator (Jesus saviour of mankind), or In Hoc Salus ("Salvation / Safety in this"), or In Hoc Signo (sometimes expanded to IHSV, for In Hoc Signo Vinces i.e. "In this sign you shall conquer", a reference to the vision of Constantine before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge). Alleged English-language interpretations include "In His Service" and "In His Steps", but I prefer my instinctive "In Hope of Salvation". In the end, I think the words we are looking for here are "overdetermined" and "backronym".

Whether or not this symbol on a headstone marks a Catholic grave is debatable, but I find it hard to believe the population of 19th-century Southampton was quite so numerously un-Protestant, unless I'm just drawn to the more decorative headstones, which happen to be in an area reserved for Catholics. Certainly, in both the Old Cemetery and Hollybrook there is a reserved Jewish section, whose gravestones have their own conventions. The most admirable of these, to me, is the custom of placing a stone or pebble on the grave whenever it is visited. Like all customs, the origins and purposes behind this are obscure, but I like this explanation which I came across on the Web:

A beautiful answer takes it cue from the inscription on many gravestones. The Hebrew abbreviation taf, nun, tsadi, bet, hey stands for "teheye nishmato tsrurah b’tsror ha- chayyim", a phrase usually trans­lated "May his soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life".

Yet tsror in Hebrew means a pebble. In ancient times, shepherds needed a system to keep track of their flocks. On some days, they would go out to pasture with a flock of 30; on others, a flock of 10. Memory was an unreliable way of keeping tabs on the number of the flock. As a result, the shepherd would carry a sling over his shoulder, and in it he would keep the number of pebbles that cor­responded to the number in his flock. That way he could at all times have an accurate daily count.

When we place stones on the grave and inscribe the motto above on the stone, we are asking God to keep the departed’s soul in His sling. Among all the souls whom God has to watch over, we wish to add the name — the “pebble” — of the soul of our departed.
(Why Jews Put Stones on Graves)

Other methods of "disposal" are available, it seems...