Memento mori

• 1. Introduction

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  Memento mori is the idea behind the sentence that meets visitors at the entrance to the Capela dos Ossos in Évora. It reads: "We bones, lying here bare, await yours." The chapel's walls are covered, wholly or in part, with human remains, mostly bones. The Latin phrase can be translated literally as "you must remember to die". As an artistic symbol, it reminds viewers that death is certain and that life is brief. Its most common image is a skull, often accompanied by bones. A coffin, an hourglass or wilting flowers can carry the same message. This documentary asks where the habit of remembering death began and why religions encouraged it. It asks what shapes the reminder took in stone, paint, jewelry, poetry and song. And it asks whether the idea belongs to Europe alone.

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• 2. Ancient Reminders

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  Democritus, the philosopher, trained himself by retreating into solitude and spending time among tombs. Plato's Phaedo recounts the death of Socrates. It argues that the proper practice of philosophy is "about nothing else but dying and being dead".

  The Stoics turned the habit into a formal discipline, and Seneca's letters are crowded with calls to meditate on death. Epictetus told his students to remind themselves, whenever they kissed a child, a brother or a friend, that the person was mortal. The reminder would curb their pleasure, as do "those who stand behind men in their triumphs and remind them that they are mortal". In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius invited the reader, which meant himself, to "consider how ephemeral and mean all mortal things are".

  Some accounts of the Roman triumph describe a companion or public slave standing behind or near the victorious general during the procession. From time to time, this figure reminded the general of his mortality or urged him to "look behind". English readers may know a version of the warning from Fahrenheit 451, which renders it as "Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal". Scripture offers its own version of the same warning.

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• 3. Faith and Judgment

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  One Old Testament passage tells humanity, "you are dust, and to dust you shall return". In Psalm 90, Moses prays that God would teach his people "to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom". In Ecclesiastes, the Preacher says it is better to visit the house of mourning than the house of feasting. The living, he says, will lay the end of all mankind to heart. Isaiah 40:7 compares human life to grass that withers.

  The expression memento mori itself developed as Christianity grew, with its emphasis on Heaven, Hell, Hades and the salvation of the soul. Death moved to the front of the believer's mind. That gave the reminder a moralizing purpose, quite opposed to the classical theme of nunc est bibendum, "now is the time to drink". For a Christian, the prospect of death exposed the emptiness of earthly pleasures, luxuries and achievements. It invited thoughts of the afterlife instead.

  A verse often linked to the idea is the Vulgate's Latin rendering of Ecclesiasticus: In omnibus operibus tuis memorare novissima tua, et in aeternum non peccabis. In English it runs, "in all thy works be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin." On Ash Wednesday, ashes are placed on worshipers' heads. The words that accompany them are "Remember, Man, that you are dust and unto dust, you shall return."

  Memento mori also became part of ascetic discipline, used to perfect character through detachment and other virtues. The Hermits of St. Paul of France, dated 1620-1633 and also called the Brothers of Death, used memento mori as their salutation. It is sometimes claimed that the Trappists do the same, but that is not true.

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• 4. Stone and Bone

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  In the fifteenth century, wealthy families took up a fashion for the transi, also called the cadaver tomb. It depicts the decayed corpse of the person buried there. Surviving examples still deliver a stark lesson on the vanity of earthly riches.

  Rome's Capuchin Crypt belongs to the same family of bone chapels as the one at Évora.

  The danse macabre shows the Grim Reaper dancing, carrying off rich and poor alike. This image and similar depictions of Death decorated many European churches.

  Puritan gravestones in the colonial United States frequently showed winged skulls, skeletons or angels snuffing out candles. These are among the numerous themes tied to skull imagery. Not every reminder needed a tomb or a church, because some people carried their own.

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• 5. Objects and Portraits

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  Public clocks carried mottos such as ultima forsan, "perhaps the last" hour, and vulnerant omnes, ultima necat, "they all wound, and the last kills". Other clocks bore the motto tempus fugit, "time flies". Old striking clocks often sported automata that appeared to mark the hour. Some celebrated automaton clocks from Augsburg, Germany, had Death himself striking the hour.

  Mary, Queen of Scots, owned a large watch carved in the form of a silver skull. It was embellished with lines of Horace: "Pale death knocks with the same tempo upon the huts of the poor and the towers of Kings."

  In the late 16th and through the 17th century, memento mori jewelry was popular. Mourning rings, pendants, lockets and brooches carried tiny skulls, bones and coffins. Messages and the names of the departed were picked out in precious metals and enamel.

  During the same period, the genre known as vanitas emerged, named for the Latin word for "emptiness" or "vanity". It was especially popular in Holland before spreading to other European nations. Vanitas paintings gathered symbolic objects such as human skulls, guttering candles, wilting flowers, soap bubbles, butterflies and hourglasses. Together they conveyed the impermanence of human endeavours and the decay that time makes inevitable.

  Thomas Smith, a 17th-century Puritan, fought in many naval battles and also painted. His community looked down on art, believing it drew the faithful away from God and so toward the devil. Portraits were the exception, since they counted as historical records. In Smith's self-portrait, his pursuits appear beside a typical Puritan memento mori, a skull, suggesting his awareness of imminent death. The poem beneath the skull shows him accepting death and turning away from the world of the living. It closes by looking ahead: "To Crowne me (after Grace) with Glory."

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• 6. Words and Songs

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  Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying are well-known English prose meditations on death. The skull of Yorick in Shakespeare's Hamlet is also a memento mori. These works belonged to a Jacobean cult of melancholia that marked the end of the Elizabethan era. By the late eighteenth century, literary elegies were a common genre. Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Edward Young's Night Thoughts are typical members.

  European devotional literature of the Renaissance included the Ars Moriendi. There, memento mori carried moral value by reminding individuals of their mortality.

  From the 1340s onward, the bubonic plague returned in recurring pandemics, and death was ever present. People facing it tried to toughen themselves by anticipating the inevitable in chants. These ranged from the simple Geisslerlieder of the Flagellant movement to more refined cloistral or courtly songs. The lyrics often described life as a necessary, God-given vale of tears, with death as a ransom. They urged listeners to lead sinless lives so they would stand a chance at Judgment Day. One typical example is the virelai Ad Mortem Festinamus, preserved in the Llibre Vermell de Montserrat from 1399.

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• 7. Other Traditions

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  The Buddhist practice maraṇasati is a meditation on death. Its name is a Pāli compound of maraṇa, "death", and sati, "awareness". Maraṇa is an Indo-European cognate of the Latin mori, which makes the term very close to memento mori. It first appears in early Buddhist texts, the suttapiṭaka of the Pāli Canon, with parallels in the āgamas of the "Northern" Schools.

  The samurai treatise Hagakure shows how far Zen contemplation of death shaped Japanese culture. It declares: "The Way of the Samurai is, morning after morning, the practice of death". The same outlook colored hanami and momijigari, the annual appreciation of cherry blossom and fall colors. People reasoned that things are most splendid just before they fall, and aimed to live and die the same way.

  Lojong is a Tibetan Buddhist mind training practice, and its classic form begins with "The Four Thoughts that Turn the Mind". The second contemplation concerns impermanence and death. It reasons that all compounded things are impermanent and that the human body is compounded, so death of the body is certain. The time of death is uncertain and beyond our control. In the 19th century, the Tibetan master Dudjom Lingpa wrote a practice text for serious meditators on this theme. He declares: "What a joke to prepare to live forever!" The contemporary master Yangthang Rinpoche treats it in a short text, 'Summary of the View, Meditation, and Conduct'. The Tibetan Canon also holds copious material on preparing for death and for the bardo, the intermediate period between death and rebirth. Among it is the famous "Tibetan Book of the Dead", in Tibetan Bardo Thodol, the "Natural Liberation through Hearing in the Bardo".

  In Islam, Tadhkirat al-Mawt, the "remembrance of death", has been a major topic of spirituality since the time of Muhammad in Medina. It rests on the Qur'an, which repeatedly urges believers to heed the fate of earlier generations. The hadith record advice for believers to "remember often death, the destroyer of pleasures." Some Sufis have been called ahl al-qubur, the "people of the graves", because they visit graveyards to ponder mortality and the vanity of life. Al-Ghazali devoted the last book of his The Revival of the Religious Sciences to the topic.

  Attributed poetically to the god Odin, the Hávamál, "Sayings of the High One", is a 13th-century Norse compilation. Two of its sections, the Gestaþáttr and the Loddfáfnismál, offer many proverbs expressing the memento mori outlook. The most famous is Gestaþáttr number 77.

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• 8. Festivals and Modern Voices

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  Much memento mori art is tied to the Mexican festival Day of the Dead, with its skull-shaped candies and bread loaves adorned with bread "bones". José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican engraver, expressed the theme famously by depicting people from various walks of life as skeletons. The Calavera is a Mexican verse composition. It honours a person who is still alive, but is written as if they were dead. Calaveras have a comedic tone, and friends often offer them to one another during Day of the Dead.

  Roman Krznaric argues that memento mori is an important topic to bring back into our thoughts and belief system. He says philosophers have come up with lots of what he calls "death tasters", which are thought experiments for seizing the day. Such exercises re-orient us toward death in our present awareness and toward living with spontaneity.

  Jean-Paul Sartre expressed that life is given to us early, shortened at the end, and taken away at every step along the way. For him, that meant the end is only the beginning every day. Albert Camus stated it in one line: "Come to terms with death, thereafter anything is possible."

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