Skull (symbolism)

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St. Jerome, by Lucas van Leyden
St. Jerome, by Lucas van Leyden

Skull symbolism is the attachment of symbolic meaning to the human skull. The most common symbolic use of the skull is as a representation of death and mortality, but such a reading varies with changing cultural contexts.

Humans can often recognize the buried fragments of an only partially revealed cranium even when other bones may look like shards of stone. The human brain has a specific region for recognizing faces [1], and is so attuned to finding them that it can see faces in a few dots and lines or punctuation marks; the human brain cannot separate the image of the human skull from the familiar human face. Because of this, both the death of, and the now past life of the skull are symbolized.

Moreover, a human skull with its large eye sockets displays a degree of neoteny, which humans often find visually appealing—yet a skull is also obviously dead. As such, human skulls often have a greater visual appeal than the other bones of the human skeleton, and can fascinate even as they repel. Our present society predominantly associates skulls with death and evil. However, to some ancient societies it is believed to have had the opposite association, where objects like crystal skulls represent "life": the honoring of humanity in the flesh and the embodiment of consciousness.

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[edit] Examples

The skull that is often engraved or carved on the head of early New England tombstones might be merely a symbol of mortality, but the skull is also often backed by an angelic pair of wings [2], lofting mortality beyond its own death.

"All is Vanity" by C. Allan Gilbert, 1873-1929
"All is Vanity" by C. Allan Gilbert, 1873-1929

One of the best-known examples of skull symbolism occurs in Shakespeare's Hamlet, where the title character recognizes the skull of an old friend: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest. . ." Hamlet is inspired to utter a bitter soliloquy of despair and rough ironic humor.

Compare Hamlet's words "Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft" to Talmudic sources: "…Rabi Ishmael [the High Priest]… put [the decapitated head of a martyr] in his lap… and cried: oh sacred mouth!…who buried you in ashes…!". The skull was an emblem of melancholy for Shakespeare's contemporaries.[3]

The emblem of the skull cannot be assumed to be a mere symbol of Death. The skull is placed significantly on the writing desk of Saint Jerome in Albrecht Dürer's woodcut. Not truly a Memento mori, the skull's huge empty eye-sockets contrast with Jerome's downcast eyes in one of the best evocations of the interior vision of contemplation, perhaps focused on Eternity, ever realized in Western art[citation needed].

Sugar skull given for the Day of the Dead. They're also made with chocolate and amaranto
Sugar skull given for the Day of the Dead. They're also made with chocolate and amaranto

Skulls and skeletons are the main symbol of the Mexican holiday, Day of the Dead.

Venetian painters of the 16th century elaborated moral allegories for their patrons, and memento mori was a common theme. The theme carried by an inscription on a rustic tomb, "Et in Arcadia ego"—"I too [am] in Arcadia," if it is Death that is speaking—is made famous by two paintings by Nicholas Poussin, but the motto made its pictorial debut in Guercino's version, 1618-22 (in the Galleria Barberini, Rome): in it, two awestruck young shepherds come upon an inscribed plinth, in which the inscription ET IN ARCADIA EGO gains force from the prominent presence of a wormy skull in the foreground.

Next to the Magdalene's dressing-mirror, in a convention of Baroque painting[citation needed], the Skull has quite different connotations and reminds the viewer that the Magdalene has become a symbol for repentance. In C. Allan Gilbert's much-reproduced lithograph of a lovely Gibson Girl seated at her fashionable toilette, an observer can witness its transformation into an alternate image. A ghostly echo of the worldly Magdalene's repentance motif lurks behind this turn-of-the 20th century icon.

The skull becomes an icon itself when its painted representation becomes a substitute for the real thing. Simon Schama chronicled the ambivalence of the Dutch to their own worldly success during the Dutch Golden Age of the first half of the 17th century in The Embarrassment of Riches. The possibly frivolous and merely decorative nature of the still life genre was avoided by Pieter Claesz in his "Vanitas" (illustration, below right): Skull, opened case-watch, overturned emptied wineglasses, snuffed candle, book: "Lo, the wine of life runs out, the spirit is snuffed, oh Man, for all your learning, time yet runs on: Vanity!" The visual cues of the hurry and violence of life are contrasted with eternity in this somber, still and utterly silent painting.

Vanitas, by Pieter Claesz, 1630 (Mauritzhuis, The Hague)
Vanitas, by Pieter Claesz, 1630 (Mauritzhuis, The Hague)

When the skull is represented in Nazi SS insignia, the death's-head (Totenkopf) deals with the fear of death, but when tattooed on the forearm its apotropaic power helps an outlaw biker cheat death.[4] The skull and crossbones signify "Poison" when they appear on a glass bottle containing a white powder, or any container in general. But it is not the same emblem when it flies high above the poop deck as the Jolly Roger: there the pirate death's-head epitomizes the pirates' ruthlessness and despair: their usage of death imagery might be paralleled with their occupation challenging the natural order of things.[5] "Pirates also affirmed their unity symbolically," Marcus Rediker asserts, remarking the skeleton or skull symbol with bleeding heart and hourglass on the black pirate ensign, and asserting "it triad of interlocking symbols— death, violence, limited time—simultaneously pointed to to meaningful parts of the seaman's experience, and eloquently bespoke the pirates' own consciousness of themselves as preyed upon in turn. Pirates seized the symbol of mortality from ship captains who used the skull 'as a marginal sign in their logs to indicate the record of a death'"[6]

The skull of Adam at the foot of the Cross: detail from a Crucifixion by Fra Angelico, 1435
The skull of Adam at the foot of the Cross: detail from a Crucifixion by Fra Angelico, 1435

When a skull was worn as a trophy on the belt of the Lombard king Alboin, it was a constant grim triumph over his old enemy, and he drank from it. In the same way a skull is a warning when it decorates the palisade of a city, or deteriorates on a pike at a Traitor's Gate. The Skull Tower, with the embedded skulls of Serbian rebels, was built in 1809 on the highway near Niš, Serbia, as a stark political warning from the Ottoman government. In this case the skulls are the statement: that the current owner had the power to kill the former. "Drinking out of a skull the blood of slain (sacrificial) enemies is mentioned by Ammianus and Livy,[7] and Solinus describes the Irish custom of bathing the face in the blood of the slain and drinking it."[8] The rafters of a traditional Jivaro medicine house in Peru [9], or in New Guinea. The temple of Kali is veneered with skulls, but the goddess Kali offers life through the welter of blood. The late medieval and Early Renaissance Northern and Italian painters place the skull where it lies at the foot of the Cross at Golgotha (Hebrew: the place of the skull). But for them it has become quite specifically the skull of Adam.

The Serpent crawling through the eyes of a skull is a familiar image that survives in contemporary Goth subculture. The serpent is a chthonic god of knowledge and of immortality, because he sloughs off his skin. The serpent guards the Tree in the Greek Garden of the Hesperides and, later, a Tree in the Garden of Eden. The serpent in the skull is always making its way through the socket that was the eye: knowledge persists beyond death, the emblem says, and the serpent has the secret.

Symbolism of chance (Fortuna's wheel) divine justice (right angle and plumb-bob) and mortality in a Pompeiian mosaic
Symbolism of chance (Fortuna's wheel) divine justice (right angle and plumb-bob) and mortality in a Pompeiian mosaic

The skull speaks. It says "Et in Arcadia ego" or simply "Vanitas." In a first-century mosaic tabletop from a Pompeiian triclinium (now in Naples), the skull is crowned with a carpenter's square and plumb-bob, which dangles before its empty eyesockets (Death as the great leveller), while below is an image of the ephemeral and changeable nature of life: a butterfly atop a wheel—a table for a philosopher's symposium.

"Calavera de la Catrina" by José Guadalupe Posada (1851-1913)
"Calavera de la Catrina" by José Guadalupe Posada (1851-1913)

Similarly, a skull might be seen crowned by a chaplet of dried roses, a "Carpe diem", though rarely as bedecked as Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada's Catrina. In Mesoamerican architecture, stacks of skulls (real or sculpted) represented the result of human sacrifices. The skull speaks in the catacombs of the Capuchin brothers beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome[10], where disassembled bones and teeth and skulls of the departed Capuchins have been rearranged to form a rich Baroque architecture of the human condition, in a series of anterooms and subterranean chapels with the inscription, set in bones:

Noi eravamo quello che voi siete, e quello che noi siamo voi sarete.
"We were what you are; and what we are, you will be."

An old Yoruba folktale [11] tells of a man who encountered a skull mounted on a post by the wayside. To his astonishment, the skull spoke. The man asked the skull why it was mounted there. The skull said that it was mounted there for talking. The man then went to the king, and told the king of the marvel he had found, a talking skull. The king and the man returned to the place where the skull was mounted; the skull remained silent. The king then commanded that the man be beheaded, and ordered that his head be mounted in place of the skull.

[edit] Popular culture

  • Lee Falk's popular superhero The Phantom uses the mark of the skull as his trademark. He is noted for wearing a Skull Ring, which leaves a permanent skull-mark on whomever he hits with his fist. The Phantom often use the mark of the skull to psychologically outwit his enemies.
  • In the popular video games Halo 2 and Halo 3, there are hidden skulls, which modify aspects of the game, such as the "Grunt Birthday Party" skull, where if you give a grunt a head-shot, confetti will pop out and children will cheer. Others, such as the Thunderstorm skull, increase the difficulty of the enemies by raising them up one level. For example: Minor Elites become Major Elites.
  • The symbolic image of the skull permeates the Indiana Jones movies to such an extent that skulls become décor—and even comic relief when Marion encounters multiple cobwebby skulls and skeletons during the escape from the subterranean Well of the Souls at Tanis (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981). Every appearance of a skull in the Jones series emphasizes the 1930s' cultural view: a gulf between the rational, modern, progressive, scientific, and vigorously physical daylight world embodied by the intrepid American archaeologist, with the sinister, dangerous, mythical, exotic, dead lore of Antiquity or the Orient in torchlit interiors of caves and temples, as well as exemplifying the fate of those who have gone before but failed.
  • The giant gorilla King Kong had his home on "Skull Island," presumably a place of dangerous power. Perhaps a similar power flows to the superhero He-Man from Castle Grayskull, a castle shaped like a huge gray skull. It has been suggested that the relationship of He-Man and the sorceress of Grayskull mirrors Carl Jung's ideas about the animus and the anima: the sorceress, an all-knowing woman, is the source of the hero's power, and she dwells within the head. Still, the skullface of Grayskull is also the face of Skeletor, He-Man's enemy.
  • The evil mystique of a skull is playfully subverted in the LucasArts adventure game The Curse of Monkey Island, in which the face of Skull Island (revealed after a long pan) is actually that of a duck. The game also introduces Murray, the mighty talking skull, who cackles and threatens demonically but, lacking arms, is actually completely helpless.
  • The Marvel Comics anti-hero, The Punisher, wears a costume with a large human skull emblazoned on the front.
  • The helmets of the Stormtroopers, and Darth Vader in particular, in Star Wars were said to be "Death's Head" masks during character development. Darth Vader's mouth piece resembles teeth, his visors the eye sockets, as well as the angular cheeks resembling cheek bones, all features of a skull. Stormtrooper helmets have "eyes" and "teeth" that remind people of skulls.
  • The popular monster truck Grave Digger has a large skull mountain as the backdrop for its graveyard mural paint scheme. Skulls are also used on many t-shirts, posters, and other promotional materials for the truck, as they correlate with the truck's somewhat macabre image.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ (University of Wales, Bangor) "New function identified for an area of the brain"
  2. ^ Tony Taylor, "The Mystery of Graveyard Art & Symbols"
  3. ^ See Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia.
  4. ^ Margo DeMello, Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community, (Duke University Press) 2000, ch. "Creation of Meaning" explores the semiotics of modern tattooing.
  5. ^ "In Virginia in 1720 one of the six pirates facing the gallows "called for a Bottle of Wine, and taking a Glass of it, he drank Damnation to the Governour and Confusion to the Colony", which the Rest pledg'd". (Marcus Rediker, "Under the Banner of King Death": The Social World of Anglo-American Pirates, 1716 to 1726" The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 38.2 (April 1981:203-227) p. 219.
  6. ^ Rediker 1981:221, and 223, quoting S. Charles Hill, "Episodes of piracy in Eastern waters", Indian Antiquary 49 (1920:37).
  7. ^ MacCulloch is referring to Livy xxxiii.24, of events of 216 BCE: "Postumius died there fighting with all his might not to be captured alive. The Gauls stripped him of all his spoils and the Boii took his severed head in a procession to the holiest of their temples.There it was cleaned and the bare skull was adorned with gold, as is their custom. It was used thereafter as a sacred vessel on special occasions and as a ritual drinking-cup by their priests and temple officials."
  8. ^ J.A. MacCulloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts 1911:239f.
  9. ^ F.W. Up De Graff. Head hunters of the Amazon: Seven Years of Exploration and Adventure, New York: Garden City 1925 p. 273-283
  10. ^ The Crypt: Church of the Immaculate. Official site of the Capuchins
  11. ^ William R. Bascom: Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa (Indiana) ISBN 0-253-20638-3

[edit] General

  1. Ariès, Philippe, L'Homme devant la mort: (Seuil, 1985), 2 vol. ISBN 2-02-008944-0, ISBN 2-02-008945-9
  2. Veyne, Paul (1987). A History of Private Life : 1. From Pagan Rome to Byzantium ( p. 208 illustrates the skull mosaic from Pompeii)

[edit] External links