One of the advantages of being in the present is being able to reflect on the past.

In our own lives, we do this mostly while looking back on former questionable decisions

while asking ourselves, what was I thinking?

Drawing from personal experience, I can think of a few right off the top

layering for tank tops to a school dance, box dyeing my hair, dating that guy at 17, or going on the special K diet in high school.

Thanks, early 2000's media.

At a larger scale, we do this with eras past, and and as a society we really like to give

the Victorians in particular a lot of flack. Aside from their more serious

deep-rooted issues like extreme social inequality, lack of child labor laws, and selling off wives instead of simply

divorcing them, they also had some very bizarre practices.

Women would use arsenic lotion on their faces to keep their skin pale, strap raw meat to their

face to help with acne, or how about the old let's add Strick-9 on purpose to our beer to cut back

on the cost of hops. But there is nothing more intriguing than the

Victorian's obsession with death. From death photography, set mourning periods,

mandatory mourning attire attire party,

hiring professional mourners for funerals,

jewelry made out of the deceased's hair,

unrapping mummies brought back from Egyptian holidays

at gatherings like some sort of morbid Tupperware party and consuming

corpses for medicinal purposes, there's a lot to unpack here, but they weren't just

fanatic about death itself, but what comes after bodily death. And while that's not a Victorian thing,

humans have been quite obsessed with death and A, whether or not an afterlife exists,

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