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Abstract
For centuries, depictions of skulls symbolised either warnings of lethal threat or moralistic reminders of the transience of life and the vanity of earthly pleasures. However, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, skulls adorned women’s clothing, expensive men’s watches, baby bags and even the belt buckle of a California governor. As words with continuous repetition are reduced to mere sounds, so too are visual symbols – even traditional and emotionally potent ones – rendered meaningless when differently framed by various agencies. Developed here is a social history of how this symbol was largely emptied of its traditional connotations owing to a ‘perfect storm’ of cultural trends, ranging from the skull’s increasing use in popular culture, a doomsday millennial zeitgeist, the death-accepting ethos of Latino immigrants filling a vacuum within a death-denying (and defying) culture, to the growing public expectations of a forthcoming post-mortal world.
Notes
1 Online, there exists the Skull Appreciation Society at http://skullappreciationsociety.com/. Since 2007, one can follow Noah Scalin’s Skull-a-Day blog at http://skulladay.blogspot.com/.
2 Perhaps, nowhere do actual skulls become more interwoven with religious art than within the Sedlec Ossuary in Prague, Czech Republic. The abbey’s cemetery was flowing over with the victims of the Bubonic Plague and the Hussite Wars. During the 1870s, the bone heaps were reassembled into chandeliers, garlands and archway frescoes by František Rint.
3 The origins of the term are traced back to the Latin biblical aphorism: vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. (Ecclesiastes 1:2).
4 Lucas Franchoys the Younger’s ‘Portrait of a Physician’ by (1616–1681), features a stately seated individual, dressed in the black clothing of the day, with a hand atop a skull. Conveyed is not only the message of death’s finality, but also physicians’ inability to prevent it.
5 Ariès refers to the period as a time of ‘remote and imminent death’.
6 An epoch Ariès labels ‘death of other’.
7 It adorned the boyhood Texas home of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. One can only imagine the lessons imparted by this engraving on the man who simultaneously championed the Civil Rights and Older Americans Acts, the Great Society and the Vietnam War.
8 And, if not in image, then in label, such as Salvador Dali’s 1934 ‘Atmospheric Skull Sodomising a Grand Piano’.
9 The skull was autographed by the young woman’s naval lieutenant and 13 of his friends, with the inscription ‘This is a good Jap – a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach’.
10 Even cigarette companies took advantage of the ability of death to sell, marketing such brand names as ‘Global Massacre’, ‘Genocide’, ‘Serial Killer’ and ‘WOMD’.
11 There are interesting parallels between this trend and the misogynist fin de siècle expressions of a century earlier. See, for instance, (Showalter, Citation1990).
12 The images reinforce the logic of existence, as Robert Kastenbaum’s observes: ‘we wake but to sleep; we live but to die; and what is the bed but a grave?’ (2004).
13 In addition to Hirst’s creation, we note Mark Kilner’s ‘Numbskull’, a plastic skull covered with 630 tablets of paracetamol and the 10-foot skull made from kitchen utensils by Indian artist Subodh Gupa, displayed at the 2008 Frieze art fair in London.
14 The day is celebrated by over 70% of the population (Palmer, Citation2012) and, some claim, increasingly hijacked from children by adults. The National Retail Federation estimates that if one adds up the sales of candy, pumpkins, costumes ($300 million for pets alone (Reuters, Citation2011)), greeting cards and decorations, that the holiday generates a $6 billion market.
15 Note the large public rituals given to those suffering ‘non-normal’ losses, such as those associated with 9 November 2001, the Columbine and Sandy Hook shootings and the large-scale disasters following natural and industrial calamities.
16 Unsurprisingly, this cultural tradition has similarly become commodified with caterings to the wealthy. At http://www.luckymojo.com/skull.html, one finds an Aztec skull necklace made in Mexico ca. 1200–1400 and offered for sale on the web in 1997 by the Arte Primitivo/Howard S. Rose Gallery of New York City. It is composed of 14 carved shell beads in the form of human skulls, double perforated on each side for suspension. Each bead is about 1 3/8" long and restrung with period spacers. The asking price was $5500.00. It presently resides in a private collection.
17 At least through the mid-nineteenth century in the Yucatán and elsewhere, skulls were removed from ossuaries to be viewed on the Day of the Dead (Carmichael & Sayer, Citation1991).
18 During the late Middle Ages, for instance, massive loss of life accelerated the decline of traditional feudal institutions. Artists and writers symbolised this disintegration with realistic images of death and decomposition in a style known as the ars moriendi. As their institutions gave way, the cultural ethos went out of focus.
19 That year a botanical Noah’s Ark, the global seed bank, was inaugurated in Svalbard, Norway.
20 The blurring boundary between life and death was epitomised at the Budapest University of Arts. There, found in 2003, were the remains of a man who had hung himself a year earlier in a garden building that had been closed for reconstruction. Apparently, both builders and students had mistaken it for modern sculpture.
21 It read, in part.
Wonder why Zombies, Zombie Apocalypse and Zombie Preparedness continue to live or walk dead on a CDC website? As it turns out what first began as a tongue-in-cheek campaign to engage new audiences with preparedness messages has proven to be a very effective platform. We continue to reach and engage a wide variety of audiences on all hazards preparedness via Zombie Preparedness; and as our own director, Dr. Ali Khan, notes, ‘If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack’ (CDC, Citation2012).
22 The earliest use of the term goes back at least to the early nineteenth century.