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MEMENTO MORI
Remember, Man, that Thou Art Dust

Memento Mori are reminders that all men die. The word comes from the Latin, meaning “reminder of death.”

During the Middle Ages, human mortality was a frequent topic of preaching, and the laity became fascinated with the physical properties of death almost to the point of overshadowing the Christian message of the Resurrection. This morbid fascination became enormously popular and resulted in works of art including paintings, statues, plays, dances, and other daily reminders of death.

One of the greatest plays of this time period, Everyman, showed death as a powerful allegory, reminding the audience that at the time of death all things forsake Everyman except his good deeds. The theme of the Danse Macabre, the Dance of Death, fired the medieval imagination through woodcuts, poetry, murals and wall paintings. The artist Hans Holbein illustrated it with his famous paintings of dancing skeletons. Unlike Guadalupe Posado’s happy skeletons of our own century, these medieval portraits were of desiccated corpses, reminding the viewer of the shortness of life and the vanity of all earthly things. Even the great St. Francis of Assisi drank from a human skull, a grisly reminder of his own mortality. 

The Artes Moriendi was a book popular in the fifteenth century with dramatic text and dreadful engravings published as a treatise on the technique of dying well. Each page was illustrated with an engraving so that even the illiterate could understand it. The book tells of the anguish of a dying man, tormented by demons and surrounded by the pacing dogs of hell. If, at the last moment, he despairs, his soul goes to the enemy. The dying man is exposed to five temptations and five times God sends his angel to assist and console him. The artist has conveyed the struggle by which a soul is born to eternal life and the last pages of the book bring the sense of deliverance and relief. The book contains a prayer of St. Bernard: “O Virgin, protect him. A single soul is more precious than the whole universe. May the Christian learn while there is still time to die well and to save his soul.”

By the sixteenth and up to the nineteenth century, skulls were engraved on household articles including dinnerware and furniture, and both men and women wore jewelry displaying symbols of death which were called “vanities” to remind them that all earthly things are vanity. Girolanmo Savonarola, an Italian reformer, recommended that everyone carry a small death’s head made of bone and look at it often.

In today’s materialistic world, some memento mori are returning to popularity as sacramentals. These can remind us that the pain of death is combined with our joy at the hope of life everlasting. Our loved ones do not die; they live again in God! It is through the crucifixion that we see the bountiful promise of the resurrection. Because He lives, we too shall live.