Several times a day you’ll see a strange parade of characters in black with skeleton masks. What is going on? It’s the Dance Macabre.
In the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, skeletons escort living humans to their graves in a lively waltz. Kings, knights, and commoners alike join in, conveying that regardless of status, wealth, or accomplishments in life, death comes for everyone. At a time when outbreaks of the Black Death and seemingly endless battles between France and England in the Hundred Years’ War left thousands of people dead, macabre images like the Dance of Death were a way to confront the ever-present prospect of mortality.
Though the Dance of Death isn’t, strictly speaking, associated with Halloween, the macabre imagery resonates with the holiday’s connections between life and death. Skeletons, skulls, and corpses reminiscent of those grim medieval dancers often show up in haunted houses, as yard decorations, and as costumes. Sometimes grisly, sometimes cartoonish, today’s dancing skeletons are far removed from their predecessors in the Danse Macabre. But, as sanitized and commercialized as Halloween can be, it’s still a holiday that brings a greater awareness of death and forces us to confront our own mortality, even if the frights all vanish when November 1st rolls around.
