Sacrum

Sacrum: The large heavy bone at the base of the spine. The Romans called this bone the "os sacrum" and the Greeks termed it the "hieron osteon," both meaning the "holy bone." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the anatomic "sacrum" entered English minus the "os" in 1753 to designate: "A composite, symmetrical, triangular bone which articulates laterally with the ilia, forming the dorsal (back) wall of the pelvis and resulting from the ankylosis (fusion) of two or more vertebrae between the lumbar and coccygeal regions of the spinal column." The female sacrum is wider and straighter (less curved) than the male. These differences in sacral anatomy are of value to childbearing. Several thoughts exist about why the sacrum was sacred: The afterlife: Thanks to its great size, the sacrum is usually the last bone of a buried body to rot. The ancients may thus have believed the sacrum to be the nidus around which the body could be reassembled in the afterlife. A temple: In Greek "hieron" meant not only sacred but also a "temple." It was the temple in the sense that within its bony concavity lay, in the female, the ovaries and uterus, the sacred organs of procreation. A sacrificial vessel: There is some archeological evidence to support the use of the sacrum as a vessel to hold the sacrifice in ancient sacred rites.