A Certain Slant of Light

You probably don't much like thinking about death. It's understandable: death is sad and scary, and few of us look forward to it coming for us or anybody we love. But believe it or not, reminders of death have not infrequently been baked in as a cultural practice -- in a couple of cases I'm going to discuss, literally baked!

There's a grim reason for this, which is that death was far more of a looming threat for historical people than it is for us. Obviously it's true now, as it was then, that everybody eventually dies; the difference is that the average person today can expect to enjoy decades of life first. But life expectancies in the past were much lower -- which is not the same thing as saying that most adults died by the age of thirty! The reason average life expectancy was so much lower is that the odds of surviving your first few years were horrifyingly low. Childhood diseases like the measles tended to kill almost half of all children born before they reached the age of ten.

Which means that nearly every family in existence, rich as well as poor, suffered the repeated grief of seeing life cut short before it really had a chance to start. Then, for those who made it to adulthood, men often had a meaningful chance of dying in war, and women faced the recurrent risk of dying in childbirth. On top of all that, there's the experience of death: people were more likely to die at home, rather than off in some hospital, and ordinary people had the task of caring for them in their final hours and preparing their bodies for funerary rites afterwards. They saw and touched and smelled the effects of death, in a way that most of us today do not.

One of the ways to cope with this is to look death squarely in the eye, rather than flinching away. The Latin phrase memento mori, an exhortation to remember that you must inevitably die, has come to signify all kinds of cultural traditions intended to remind people of the end. Our modern Halloween skeletons and ghosts used to have that function, even if few of us think of them that way anymore; let's take a look at some other approaches.

A few memento mori traditions are things you do rather than objects in your life. Buddhism, for example, has traditions of "foulness meditation," in which a person is encouraged to contemplate topics like disease and decay -- sometimes in cemeteries or the presence of corpses. After all, Buddhism tells us the nature of the world is impermanence, and what illustrates that more vividly than death? Islamic scriptures likewise exhort believers to think about death, and some Sufis make a habit of visiting graveyards for that purpose. I'm also reminded of a fictional practice, which I think might be based on something in the real world, though I can't place it: in Geraldine Harris' Seven Citadels quartet of novels, the Queen of Seld holds banquets in what will eventually be her tomb.

Speaking of banqueting, the Romans had a rich tradition of memento mori (as you might expect, given that we got the phrase from their language). In the early imperial period, it was fashionable to dine in rooms frescoed with images of skeletons and drink from cups decorated with skulls. The message, though, was far from Buddhism's reminder not to become attached to impermanent things: instead it was, as the poet Horace wrote in that same era, carpe diem. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die. These macabre decorations were meant to heighten the transient pleasures of life.

Other classical thinkers took it in a more Buddhist-style direction, though. Stoic philosophy is full of injunctions to curb the pleasures of life because you and all the people around you are mortal, and there are accounts which claim a Roman general celebrating a triumph was accompanied by someone reminding him that eventually he would die. We find the same sentiment echoed in the Icelandic Hávamál, with its "Cattle die, / kinsmen die, / all men are mortal" -- though that one goes on to praise the immortality of a good reputation.

Christian tradition leaned heavily into this for centuries, because of the theological emphasis on the dangers of sin and of dying unshriven. To have any hope of heaven, a Christian was supposed to live with one eye on the ever-present possibility of death, rather than assuming it must be far off and you'd see it coming, with time to prepare. Memento mori took every shape from tomb decorations (don't forget that many wealthy people were buried inside churches) to clocks (time is inexorably ticking away) to paintings (the genre known as vanitas emphasizes the vanity, i.e. worthlessness, of impermanent things) to jewelry. The devastation of the Black Death undoubtedly bolstered this tradition, as seen in the Danse Macabre artistic motif, where the Grim Reaper summons away people from all walks of life, kings and bishops alongside peasants.

I promised you baked goods, though, didn't I? Malta celebrates the Month of the Dead in November and commemorates the season with ghadam tal-mejtin, "dead men's bones," a type of cookie filled with sweet, spiced almond dough. And in Sweden, there was a nineteenth-century tradition of funerary confectionery, wrapped in paper printed with memento mori images -- though the candies were often meant to be saved instead of eaten, and some manufacturers bulked them out with substances like chalk to cut costs. You could break a tooth trying to bite into one.

We might even count death omens as a type of memento mori. Most of the ones I know about are European, and take forms ranging from spectral voices in the night to black dogs to a double of the person who's about to die -- with a certain amount of ambiguity around whether encountering such a thing causes you to die (perhaps with some way to avert it), or whether it's merely a signal that death is at hand. To these we might add plague omens, which I know of from both Slavic lands and Japan: people or creatures who appear to warn a town that an epidemic is about to sweep through. The Japanese ones usually promise that anyone who hangs up an image of the creature will be protected from disease, which is certainly helpful of them! (And yes, there was a resurgence in that tradition when the Covid-19 pandemic began.)

These days we are more likely to enjoy death imagery as an aesthetic rather than a philosophical practice. Our life expectancy is vastly higher -- in part because we're far more likely to survive childhood -- and thanks to modern medicine, even an ultimately fatal injury or illness stands a higher chance of giving us time to prepare for the end. But notwithstanding the fever dreams of some technophiles, we have yet to defeat death; immortality remains out of reach. Until that changes, mortality will remain an inescapable fact for every human born.



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/JVBlEI)