Burial of the Ancient
The Burial of the Ancient was an annual sophomore ceremony in June in which "the textbook deemed most hateful to sophomores was consigned to flames amidst much elaborate ritual". It first took place in 1860.
In April of 1880, Acta Columbiana noted that, "Every man should wear a high hat and a gown with emblematic figures attached. It gives more tone to the procession, and looks well to outsiders, besides the over-awing effect it has upon the freshmen. A burial is a grand thing when every minute detail is carefully attended to, but if only the principle points are looked after, many things fail to harmonize, and the general effect is marred."
Future university president Nicholas Murray Butler was elected chairman of the Burial Committee in 1880, and "flawlessly" organized "the two hour march up Madison Avenue to the campus [...] a platoon of police, a German brass band, a trumpeter, twelve mourners wearing academic gowns adorned with skulls and crossbones, four pallbearers chanting funeral songs and carrying in a small bier on their shoulders the loathed Anglo-Saxon reader to be consigned, and three hundred torch bearing students wearing their coats inside out" [1].
Each year, a Deadly Orator addressed the crowd on the text to be burned. Next, the grave-digger burned the text, after which point the Poet, "wiping his eyes with a huge black handkerchief," elegized the virtues of the dearly departed book.
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References
- ↑ Rosenthal, Michael. "Butler's School." The Blue and White, April 1999, page 55.
