Everyone loves Halloween, and especially the creatures it has become associated with over the years of its celebration. Plenty of examples of these pop up in pop culture everywhere around the world, such as zombies, bats, witches, vampires, werewolves – the list goes on and on. We decorate them in movies, our houses, costumes, even mediocre social media posts! But what if we told you that the best creature, one universally recognized as being 100% real by believers and cynics alike, is contained within our own bodies? Obviously the skeleton, but hold on, – how did they even become so widely known? Continue reading, dear spooky enthusiasts, and be enlightened.
Around the world, before writing and language became mainstream enough that we could document things as “well recorded”, art was shown of an undead entity known as the “Revenant”, an old French word meaning “Returning”, or “Come back”. While this will not have much effect on the rest of the spread, this does provide some insight into the fact that dead people coming back and the soul remaining after death have been in human culture for as long as we have understood what death even was. Carvings, art and writings make allusions to the ability for a corpse to come back to life in 5 continents, only 3 of which share a border. The oldest known references to this date back all the way to the Bronze Age, where decomposed bones of those the Romans were afraid of, would sometimes be buried or covered to prevent them from rising up. This may have had an effect on art pieces hundreds of years later, a little bit after the Dark Ages.
The first well recorded instance of skeletons we know of today, after the Romans and Nordic revenants, was the artistic allegory in religion and art known as the Danse Macabre, or, in English, the Dance of Death, in 1493 (Though it may have been inspired by the Book of Ezekiel, the Third Prophet, where he described a “field of bones”. This is more of a tangent though, so feel free to do your own research!) It was more poetic and slightly sad than fun, about the certainty and universality of death, especially to the black plague. It made a great impact on the culture of the medieval times, and included some higher class dressing up as corpses in certain gatherings. (Sound familiar?) Even though many other cultures, including the Mexican, Japanese, and Pagan traditions and stories, have had the undead and skeletons in art and tradition, this genre led to the eventual spread to gothic fiction, the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the skeleton being globally recognized as a symbol of Halloween.
Those kicked off the personifications of skeletons as the undead in earlier centuries, but how did they get to where they were today? Well, in the 19th to the early 20th century, many writers, horror figures, and satiric artists (such as José Guadalupe Posada, creator of La Calavera Catrina, originally made to make fun of Upper-Class Women, later becoming a huge part of
