We’re heading into the darkest days of the year, so maybe it’s only natural that my attention this week has turned toward the macabre. Winter is the season of death, after all — the leaves have all given us one last fanfare and most of the animals are gone. In winter, things are quieter, starker, clearer, colder. Perfect for contemplation.
Many cultural traditions use this part of the year as an opportunity to think about the end of life. It’s a natural impulse as the days shorten and the world becomes less vibrant.
It seems to me that a lot of cultures in the past faced death more forthrightly than we do. This makes sense — we’ve managed to create a world in which we don’t have to see or experience death very often, outside of movies and TV where it serves as a diversion. But in the not-so-distant past, death was all around, and people didn’t mind reminding themselves that the end of life lurked close by at all times. Sometimes these reminders could get quite intense, gory even.
Some of these traditions remain, especially in religion. When I was growing up Catholic, I went to church every Ash Wednesday to have my forehead smeared with ashes and be reminded — “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” A heavy message for seven-year-old me.
The Buddhist tradition contains a practice called Maraṇasati, the contemplation of death. Meditators imagine their own body going through the process of death and decomposition — they’re asked to picture themselves “swollen,” “blue,” “festering,” being eaten by animals, and eventually “rotten and become dust.” This is all meant to remind practitioners that “everything that arises passes away” — a key tenet of Buddhism.
These religious practices are examples of a long human tradition of reminding ourselves that we’re headed inevitably toward death. It brings us humility and perspective. For centuries, we’ve done this not just with ritual but through material culture — people throughout history have relied on physical trinkets or works of art to remind them of what’s coming at the end of their short sojourn on the planet.
Roman society was filled with death. The Romans themselves did a whole lot of killing, of course, and, like all ancient societies, dealt with much shorter life expectancies than we enjoy today. It is from the Romans that we get the phrase most associated with the contemplation of death — memento mori, remember that you will die.
This phrase seems to have originated with Roman triumphs, which were massive parades commemorating a military victory. The victorious general would ride at the end of the procession, wearing a purple-fringed toga that marked him as being close to a king, or even a god. To keep the general’s feet on the ground, a slave was tasked with whispering in his ear — “remember, you are mortal.” Here’s the emperor Marcus Aurelius enjoying his triumph in the late 100s CE:
Marcus Aurelius was one of the proponents of that most Roman of philosophies, Stoicism, which emphasized facing death head-on. Aurelius reminded himself in his Meditations that “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”
Though very few Romans experienced a triumph (or read philosophy), many of them kept humbler reminders. This cup, dating the time of Augustus, featured skeletons to remind its owner of death (and sported a lead glaze, which may have actually hastened its owner’s death):
Here are some less-poisonous cups with a similar message:
This famous mosaic from Pompeii shows a skull balancing on the wheel of fortune, which is liable to turn at any moment:
The late medieval period in Europe was a terrible one, if you wanted to stay alive. During the 1300s alone, the weather got colder, most of the cows died in the excellently named “Great Bovine Pestilence,” a terrible famine starved people to death, and, finally, the Black Death killed up to one-third of everybody who was left. Unsurprisingly, the people of this period contemplated death a lot.
People wrote books on ars moriendi, the art of dying, and composed poems like this one, by John Lydgate:
O yee folkes harde-hertid as a stone,
Wich to the worlde have al your advertence,
Liche as it shulde laste evere in oone —
Where is your witt, wher is your providence
To se aforn the sodeine violence
Of cruel Dethe, that ben so wis and sage,
Wiche sleeth, allas, by stroke of pestilence
Bothe yong and olde, of lowe and hy parage?
Deeth sparith not lowe ne hy degré.
Popes, kynges, ne worthy emperours —
Whan thei shyne most in felicité,
He can abate the fresshnes of her flours,
The bright sonne clipsen with his shours,
Make hem plunge from her sees lowe.
Magré the myght of alle these conquerours,
Fortune hath hem from her whele ythrowe.
But, mostly, people made art about death — it became a major theme in the 1300s and 1400s. Masaccio, an early Renaissance painter, contrasted the glory of the holy trinity in the top portion of this painting with a corpse below. Above the corpse is written: “What you are, I once was. What I am, you will be.”
This drawing from the Book of Hours shows death triumphant:
The images often got quite gory, as in this print from the Master of Zwolle:
Often, art about death took the form of the “danse macabre,” the dance of death, with skeletons frolicking wildly, as in this example from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle:
This German drawing shows finely dressed lords and ladies dancing hand in hand with death:
By the 1600s, the preferred memento mori in art was the vanitas painting — a still-life containing the ephemera of everyday existence, with a skull to signify the fact that death is waiting for us all.
Peter Claesz painted this one in 1628:
And here’s one titled “The Vanities of Human Life” by Harmen Steenwijck:
It’s one thing to paint a grand statement about the inevitability of death; it’s another to constantly carry a reminder of your own mortality with you. Many early modern people did this, purchasing little trinkets that prompted them to contemplate their own mortality. This rosary, for example, ended with a small sculpture of two young, prosperous lovers.
But when flipped over, it showed where all young people eventually end up:
Here we have another rosary, made in Germany around 1500. Each bead shows a wealthy person on one side; on the flip side is their grisly fate:
All of these artifacts — some silly, some gory, others matter-of-fact — served to remind people that death would come for them someday. In our modern society, we tend to ignore this fact. We want to live forever; some of us even think we can achieve that goal.
But, whether we ignore it or try to outrun it, death will get every one of us. We can ruminate on that fact, or we can allow it to depress us. But I don’t think that’s the point of a memento mori. Reconciling yourself with your inevitable death can be freeing. I can’t say it much better than the band Yard Act does:
It's all so pointless
It is and that's beautiful, l find it humbling, sincerely
And when you're gone
It brings me peace of mind to know that this will all just carry on
With someone else
With something new
No need to be blue…Death is coming for us all, but not today
Today you're living it, hey, you're really feeling it
Give it everything you've got knowing that you can't take it with you
I have the app We Croak on my phone. It posts a remembrance about death or living fully 5 times a day. This is based on the wisdom of the people of Bhutan who say if you contemplate your death 5 times a day you will live a happy life. It works for me.
That mosaic from Pompeii is awesome!