Symbolism and the Visual Representation of Death

I spoke with my tutor on the symbolism related to death and she phrased this very well, saying, “The symbolism and symbolic representation of death is a vast, complex and very interesting topic. It is also a good start to consider the representation of something very visceral but also inherently visual abstract” (Xenou, 2022).

This idea of using a visual abstract to denote something of great meaning and emotional pull is very interesting. Why is death considered using abstract means? If I search for information on the symbolism of death, I find many examples from different cultures. For example, symbols which use creatures from the darkness of the night. Humans are programmed to fear the dark being a place where we not safe. The link between the darkness of the grave or of the crypt and of dark caves of our ancestors seems clear. Creatures such as the bat are linked with death, sacrifice, disease but also come from an era before written histories were used in some cultures (Alaica, 2020) So in part the bat is a creature that inhabits the night time, its wings have a skeletal look to them and the skeltal form is often associated with death and in part, depending on the species, it might feed on blood. Another example of a creature related to death is the carrion crow or raven. In European cultures these are associated with death, war, disease, and plague. In Sweden ravens are believed in folklore to be the ghosts of murder victims (Król and Hernik, 2020) In the UK ravens are famously kept at the Tower of London which was a prison and place of execution. In a book review by Helen Macdonald of the book, The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London by Christopher Skaife, ravens are described as, “birds of gothic darkness and gore, the birds that followed Viking raiders in quest of fresh corpses and that feasted on executed bodies hung from roadside gibbets.”(Macdonald, 2018) Macdonald describes how today the ravens at the Tower are fed rats, day old chicks and will sometimes gang up on pigeons, attack them and eat them alive. This seems to emphasise the connection with flesh and these birds have an obvious connection to death and of corruption of the flesh. As well as the direct physical connection with death, there is a crossover between these birds and mythology. The crow is said to be a creature which is able to cross over to the world of the dead and can act as a guide, be a messenger of the gods or a harbinger of death. (Wigington, 2020)

I read an interesting paper by Semra Somersan on the symbolism of death.

“Cultures endure, traditions are passed on from generation to generation, values persist or they change, but individuals have a finite biological existence and must die. Every culture must somehow come to terms with this irrevocable condition of human existence. The biological universal must be brought into the realm of cultural form and human reason so that it can be made meaningful, comprehensible, and endurable. This shared biological destiny necessitates that death not remain an isolated, fragmented event experienced by individuals alone, but become an integral part of sociocultural reality and its conceptualizations”. (Somersan, 1981)

The biological destiny or inevitability which Somersan speaks of brings about another set of human beliefs many parts of society might give credence to; namely that of an afterlife. In religion, death might be thought of as being “the wrath of a god” or for “god’s purposes”. The sense that death isn’t the end but is a journey into another dimension.

The examples I have found can broadly be divided into physical symbols which might be related to the fear of the dark such as the bat or of creatures which eat the dead, mythological examples such as creatures able to cross to the land of the dead and symbols related directly to our own mortality such as our bones. The wing of a bat or a human skull or skeleton might be portrayed by the skull and crossbones mottos of pirates or of the skulls and bones carved into gravestones, but such mottos remind humans of our mortality. (Curtis, 2015) Medical scans look very much to me of the skulls depicted in books and carved onto gravestones. I wonder if my own use of medical scans is another piece of death symbolism even though science allows us to see our bones and tissues while we are still living?

I wonder why humans deal with the abstract instead of confronting death directly which is an inevitable part of all of our lives. Has this apparent denial of death always been present or is this a feature of modern society? Is this a form of coping mechanism to try and find ways to deal with our end? If so, does this imply that for most individuals and most cultures, that death is something special to be kept at arm’s length and out of sight? I wonder if in modern times, allowing the elderly to die in care homes and not keeping the dead in our own homes or making use of hospices are examples of a denial of death? I wonder if the experiences and attitudes towards death of those who have come face to face with death such as police, soldiers, aid workers, medical professionals, mortuary workers, undertakers or even workers in slaughter houses is very different from many in society. I also wonder if my own experiences of losing a daughter pushes me away from the norm and give me a different perspective.

The questions I have posed about death, denial and symbols are pertinent for my project because I feel I am exploring an area which is uncomfortable and unpleasant for many in society. Not just death, but the death of a child. Finding a way to represent death which might use aspects of the symbolism of death. Would many prefer to look the other way? Does it matter if we look the other way as death will find us all? At the outset of my research, I had a vague idea that I wanted to try and give the medical scan a sense of humanity but is my project using these scans a form of death symbolism? Also, if human bones are linked to death, then does giving these bones a face seem macabre or ghoulish? It feels complex to find a way to resolve this in my head but expressed simply, I want to say to my audience that here is the medical scan and this is the real person this scan shows. Allied to this am influenced by something my tutor said, that I can create this work but ultimately, my daughter will still be dead, ashes scattered in the breeze.

I have mentioned the dark, mythology and the spiritual and touched on the medical side when thinking of the human skeleton. I have to consider how these “feel” to me. Fear of the dark is about the unknown, it is an innate human fear but as an adult is it considered childlike? Am I afraid of the dark? No. Actually I enjoy the dark, the feeling of using your all of your senses when walking home along a dark path. How noise works in the quiet and the way I hear animals on the wind, my own footsteps or my breath and things which maybe aren’t there and are imagined. Or the way shapes appear and resolve themselves as I get closer or vanish as the landscape changes. At school I tried some caving. Going underground into narrow crawl spaces, climbing up underground waterfalls or just being in the dark with a little torch, that if switched off fills your senses with panic, the pressure of your fears and the thought of the almost unimaginable weight of the column of rock above you. Unsure if you in a cavernous void or in a small hole with no context or sense of scale, only extreme darkness . I can easily imagine why such caverns might have been used by earlier cultures as spaces to communicate with their gods even if, for me, i am very non religious and have little patience for those who knock on my door to try and convert me. These beliefs are interesting that so many cling to these but I have often wondered if this is in part due to a fear of death. I don’t believe in rebirth or an afterlife. I recognise the sad and brutal side of this is that my daughter is gone and I will never see her again.

The Tattoo

One thing I want to mention here is the tattoo. It appears that many symbols we associate with death have become part of the tattooing culture. Indeed, I have a tattoo on my back which shows a dead fish. This came about as I had an operation on my back and my daughter used the stitches and the scar as the framework of a fish skeleton. She drew this in with a makeup pencil. After she died I had a tattoo made which was, for me, a memorial which I carry with me. The tattoo has a permanence but only within the timescales of human existence. When I die, the tattoo will die with me and will disappear. Thinking on this, the tattoo seems as good a way to visually represent loss and death as any other.

Another interesting thing about the tattoo is that it speaks in part of the tattoo process rather than simply the tattoo being an artefact in its own right. Senior Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College, London, Paul Sweetman comments, “The invasive and painful nature of the modificatory process thus suggests that neither tattoos nor piercings can be consumed as ‘pure signs’.”  (Sweetman, 1999, p. 64) It would therefore appear to be well suited to the depiction and commemoration of important life events because the tattoo has a process and a permanence with seem to point to the  importance of the tattoo as an act of commemoration. Sweetman goes onto suggest another reason that tattooing is perhaps a strategy to achor the self in terms of time. Manfredi expands on this idea, “body-marks can be understood as strategy to anchor the self  or to stabilize how the person perceives themself: the identity is not a fixed entity but something incessantly in motion and influenced by meetings, conversations, and discoveries we made or, more generally, by our experiences. Every day, we are a little different from who we were yesterday (Manfredi, 2022, p. 9)

Going back to Sweetman for a second, he tells us the tattoo is related to the memory of an event but also, the memory of the event of having the tattoo made.  (Sweetman, 1999, p. 69) This reminds me that the photograph while originally from a fixed place and time is subject to the tricks and faults of human memory. I have written on memory in a seperate blog post.

I find this subject of the symbolism of death very interesting and wonder if there something here I could use for my dissertation.

References

Alaica, A. K. (2020) ‘Inverted Worlds, Nocturnal States and Flying Mammals: Bats and Their Symbolic Meaning in Moche Iconography’, Arts, 9(4), p. 107. doi: 10.3390/arts9040107.

Curtis, F. (2015) 14 Symbols of Death From Our Collection, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Available at: https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/blog/collections/symbols-of-death/ (Accessed: 21 March 2022).

Król, K. and Hernik, J. (2020) ‘Crows and ravens as indicators of socioeconomic and cultural changes in urban areas’, Sustainability (Switzerland), 12(24), pp. 1–21. doi: 10.3390/su122410231.

Macdonald, H. (2018) The Ravens at the Tower of London Are More Than Symbols, The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/ravens-tower-of-london/568312/ (Accessed: 30 March 2022).

Manfredi, F. (2022) ‘In between Birth and Death, Past and Future, the Self and the Others: An Anthropological Insight on Commemorative and Celebrative Tattoos in Central Italy’, Religions, 13(1). doi: 10.3390/rel13010046.

Somersan, S. (1981) ‘Death Symbolism, a Cross-Cultural Study’, Ohio State University.

Svendsen, M. (2019) TYPES AND MEANINGS OF SKULL TATTOOS, Chronic Ink. Available at: https://www.chronicinktattoo.com/blog/skull-tattoos/ (Accessed: 1 April 2022).

Sweetman, P. (1999) ‘Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self? Body Modification, Fashion and Identity’, Body & society, 5(2–3), pp. 51–76.

Wigington, P. (2020) Crow and Raven Folklore, Magic and Mythology, Learn Religions. Available at: https://www.learnreligions.com/the-magic-of-crows-and-ravens-2562511 (Accessed: 30 March 2022).