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# Rachel Sterling eats her mother Diana Rigg's ashes before every premiere
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/endokannibalizm-tak-po-nauchnomu-nazyvaetsia-poedanie-ostankov-umershikh-chlenov-sobstvennoi-sotsialnoi-gruppy-ili-semi/
- Published: 2026-10-12T08:02:08.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T08:20:17.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Observations, Mores, Pop Culture, Ethnography, Humour

Endocannibalism is the scientific name for the consumption of the remains of deceased members of one's own social group or family. The Yanomami of the Amazon add the ashes of a dead relative's bones to banana soup and eat it so that the spirit of the departed may remain in the family. The Fore of New Guinea ate their dead until the middle of the twentieth century and paid for it with an epidemic of kuru, a fatal disease of the brain, from which, rumour has it, some American celebrities now suffer. In Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, apothecaries sold "mummy", that is, a powder made from human remains, as a medicine. And in 2007 Keith Richards announced that he had snorted some of his father's ashes together with an illicit substance, and then called it a joke.

The actress Rachel Sterling, daughter of Olenna Tyrell, otherwise known as the British actress Dame Diana Rigg, has written in the Guardian that before every opening night she eats a few grains of her mother's ashes. Rigg died in 2020\. Her ashes were scattered over the fields of England, in a garden in France and by the actors' church in Covent Garden, and the remainder, in a small tube, her daughter carries about with her. At the first opening night after her mother's death, Sterling accidentally spilled the ashes on the dressing table, licked her finger, gathered up the grains and placed them on her tongue. She has repeated it before every performance since, from Noël Coward's "Private Lives" to Broadway, and calls her ritual communion. She gave her book about her mother the title All About My Mother, like Almodóvar's film "All About My Mother", in which a mother mourns a child and takes refuge in the theatre.

I shall not make a diagnosis on the strength of internet news, the more so as I am no psychiatrist, but hovering somewhere between such conditions and deviations as the urge to eat the inedible, cannibalism, prolonged grief disorder and recourse to magic where people cannot control the outcome, the ritual the actress describes looks like something not merely very unhealthy but positively ghastly.

Grief, more or less, is understandable, but the revelation of a wild habit of swallowing the ashes of a lost loved one is already something on the level of Freud's "Totem and Taboo", in which the sons ate the father in order to appropriate his strength. But the chief and most foolish thing about the whole story is that it does not help at all. Have you ever, in fact, heard of such an actress? And would you have heard of her, were it not for a scabrous nastiness in the news? Where are her brilliant roles, or has she not yet eaten her fill?

Of course, we remember how Artemisia II, Queen of Caria, mixed the ashes of her husband Mausolus with wine and drank them, and then built one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the one called the Mausoleum, but in this case the legend slides down to something like an anecdote from a pioneer camp. What times we live in, as they say...