PotPourri Of Global Interest: Human skull symbolism

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 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 findvisually 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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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

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" toTalmudic 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 symbol 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]}.

In Elizabethan England, The Death's-Head Skull, usually a depiction without the lower jawbone, was embelmatic of bawds, rakes, Sexual Adventurers and prostitutes; The term Deaths-Head was actually parlance for these rakes, and most of them wore half-skull rings to advertise their station, either professionally or otherwise. The original Rings were wide silver objects, with a half-skull decoration not much wider than the rest of the band; This allowed it to be rotated around the finger to hide the skull in polite company, and to reposition it in the presence of likely conquests.

Sugar skull given for the Day of the Dead. They're also made with chocolateand 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 moriwas 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 theDutch 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.