Arcane Glossary: Memento Mori
Memento mori, Latin for "remember you must die", is no simple nod to human fragility. It is an aesthetic, a philosophy, and a commandment: look death in the face, and let it make you virtuous.
Introducing the Arcane Glossary
This is the first in a new series of essays exploring the language of the Gothic- its symbols, aesthetics, and recurring obsessions. Each entry in the Arcane Glossary will trace a single term through its historical roots, cultural mutations, and contemporary afterlives, asking what these haunted words still have to teach us.
We begin, appropriately, with memento mori: a phrase that once adorned tombs and devotional rings, and that now lingers in high fashion, cigarette warnings, and digital aesthetics. What happens when a reminder of death becomes a tool of persuasion? What do we lose when death is treated as a failure to optimize, rather than a universal truth?
To remember that we must die is not an act of morbidity, it is a confrontation with time, value, and the self.
Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, 1628, oil on panel.
The idea behind memento mori predates Christianity. In ancient Rome, a victorious general parading through the city was followed by a servant who would whisper into his ear, memento mori- remember you are mortal. This ritual was intended to cultivate humility and temper glory (Beard, 2007, p. 98). Stoic philosophers such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius took the sentiment further, encouraging contemplation of death as a means of moral and philosophical clarity. In Meditations, Aurelius reminds himself daily, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think” (Aurelius, trans. Hays, 2002, Book 2.11).
Early Christianity absorbed this classical sensibility but infused it with a theology of the afterlife. From the fourth century onward, the memento mori became more than a personal reminder, it became a salvific warning. To live well was to die well. The liturgy reminded the faithful they were dust, and unto dust they would return. Monastic rules demanded daily reflection on mortality. The Rule of Saint Benedict, for example, commands monks to “keep death daily before one’s eyes” (Benedict of Nursia, Rule, ch. 4).
This theology took striking material form in the cadaver tomb, or transi, popular between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. These funerary monuments featured two tiered effigies: the upper showing the deceased in life, the lower as a rotting corpse, often devoured by worms. The most famous examples include the tombs of Archbishop Chichele at Canterbury and René de Chalon in Bar-le-Duc (Binski, 1996, pp. 112–115). These images were not morbid curiosities. They were meditations on salvation.
Ligier Richier, upper section of the Transi de René de Chalon, c. 1545–47
The Ars Moriendi, or “art of dying,” developed after the Black Death as a genre of devotional literature. These texts offered the dying practical spiritual advice, preparing them to meet death in a state of grace. The illustrations often featured devils tempting the soul and angels defending it, visual dramatizations of the soul’s final test (Scribner, 1981, pp. 27–30). For the literate elite, the memento mori became a genre unto itself.
Woodcut illustrations from original 15th Century texts of the Ars Moriendi. The dying Christian is tempted by greed and then triumphs over the temptation, surrounded by angels.
In the Renaissance and early modern period, wearable reminders proliferated. Mourning rings, lockets, and rosaries bore skulls and bones, often inscribed with memento mori. These adornments functioned as both status markers and spiritual instruments. In Protestant England, where visual culture was restrained, memento mori motifs persisted in plain, powerful forms: skulls carved into gravestones, or inscriptions such as “Be ye also ready” and “As I am, so shall you be” (Llewellyn, 2000, p. 49).
At the height of its influence, the memento mori appeared on church walls, in sermons, in poetry, and on tombs. As Ecclesiasticus urges, “Whatsoever thou takest in hand, remember the end, and thou shalt never do amiss” (Ecclesiasticus 7:36, KJV). Post-Reformation iconoclasm did not erase the memento mori. It adapted it. In place of saints and relics, a skeletal realism took hold- death as the ultimate equalizer, the final theological truth (Bartram, 2007, p. 133).
Even amid doctrinal upheaval, the memento mori retained its hold. It shaped how time was measured, how inheritance was prepared, how the soul was examined.
By contrast, in modernity, death is no longer a sacred certainty but a secular failure. The memento mori has shifted accordingly. Today’s reminders appear in unlikely places: cigarette packages, public health ads, anti-drunk driving campaigns. In one infamous Australian AIDS commercial, the Grim Reaper appears not as a medieval allegory, but as a bowling ball that topples children (McKenzie-Murray, 2012). These images invoke authority, but not transcendence. Where the classical memento called for contemplation, the modern one issues a directive: comply, or die.
Some scholars have coined the term neo-memento to describe this shift. As Little and Sayers write, modern reminders are shaped not by “death acceptance” but by “mortality salience”- the psychological pressure that arises when individuals are reminded of their vulnerability (Little and Sayers, 2004, p. 191). The neo-memento does not teach us to die well, but to avoid death at all costs. Do not smoke. Drive sober. Get screened. Stay alive. Sin is replaced by risk. Salvation by prevention.
This shift in tone aligns with broader critiques of modern media. Susan Sontag, in her work on illness and imagery, warned against the aestheticization of suffering (Sontag, 1991). Jean Baudrillard went further, arguing that media no longer reflects reality but simulates it, producing images that feel real but are detached from lived experience (Baudrillard, 1983; 1988). In this environment, death becomes spectacle: emotionally distant, endlessly circulated, curiously hollow.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, death is not a warning, but an arrival. A masked figure crashes a masquerade. There is no prevention, only inevitability. The horror lies in its certainty.
And yet, even now, the memento mori retains its strange force. Skulls, gravestones, warnings, all whisper the same ancient truth. We are not only afraid of dying. We are afraid of being forgotten. That our death will mean nothing. That we might fail to live well in the time we have.
If the classical memento mori asked us to face death squarely, today’s neo-memento asks us to defer it. But what is lost in this shift? When death is framed as failure, we risk turning mourning into self-help. The result is an ethical paradox: we are told to look at death while being promised we can outmaneuver it.
Perhaps the time has come to return to the original command: remember you must die, not in fear, but in reverence.
References
Aurelius, M. (2002). Meditations (trans. G. Hays). New York: Modern Library.
Bartram, C. (2007). ‘Some Tomb for a Remembrance’: Representations of Piety in Post-Reformation Gentry Funeral Monuments. In R. Lutton & E. Salter (Eds.), Pieties in Transition: Religious Practices and Experiences c.1400–1640 (pp. 129–143). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations. New York: Semiotext[e].
Baudrillard, J. (1988). Fatal Strategies. In M. Poster (Ed.), Selected Writings (pp. 185–206). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Beard, M. (2007). The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of Saint Benedict. (Various translations)
Binski, P. (1996). Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Little, M., & Sayers, E.-J. (2004). The Skull Beneath the Skin: Cancer Survival and Awareness of Death. Psycho-Oncology, 13(3), 190–198.
Llewellyn, N. (2000). Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McKenzie-Murray, M. (2012, April 5). The Commercial That Scared Us—and Might Have Saved Us. The Sydney Morning Herald.
Scribner, R. W. (1981). For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sontag, S. (1991). Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
The Bible, Ecclesiasticus 7:36, King James Version.