by Sarah Jost
The past four years have seen a significant increase in the use of both macabre and religious imagery and symbolism across popular music, art, and fashion mediums.
Necromanticism, like the Romanticism of the 18th century, explores the themes of death and mortal existence through the use of passionate emotion and horror. Similarly, just as Romanticism was spurred by rational, aristocratic societal norms of the Enlightenment, Necromanticism seems to be a reaction to the current prevalence of superficiality and materialism. In a world where popular entertainment consists of people enacting scripted drama disguised as reality, it is not surprising that questions of authenticity and meaning prevail.
While the Romantics found their answers in individualism, escapism, the Necromantics find solace the inevitability and equalising nature of death. The evocation of skulls, body parts, and funerals serve as memento mori, reminders that ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Genesis 3:19). No matter how differently we live, our fates remain the same.
Yet what becomes of us after death remains a mystery, and is explored by the Necromantics through the lens of a shared religious and occult lore. While secularism and New Atheism have been consistently embraced, a new wave of religious themes have entered popular culture. Both ‘God’ and other powers are turned to for answers. The quest for a tangible truth on earth has led to the embracing of death, but the mystique of the beyond holds an allure that can only be sated through commune with higher powers.
Music
Emblemtic of both Necromanticism and the New Devotion, English band Florence + the Machine’s music, while ethereally beautiful, is full of graphic references human body parts (lungs, hearts, eyeballs) and death (bodies, ghosts, funerals, coffins). Both Christian and supernatural references abound.
From the ghostly imagery of ‘no colors in our skin/we were light and paper thin’ to the religious symbolism of ‘when it’s time to pray/we’ll be dressed up all in grey/with metal on our tongues’ to the deathly ‘when we come back we’ll be dressed in black/and you’ll scream my name aloud/and we won’t eat and we won’t sleep/we’ll drag bodies from the ground’, Spectrum‘s lyrics verge on terrifying, yet the refrain continuously repeats ‘we will never be afraid again.’ Once death is embraced, there is nothing to fear.
From My Boy Builds Coffins: ‘my boy builds coffins he makes them all day/but it’s not just for work and it isn’t for play/he’s made one for himself/one for me too/one of these days he’ll make one for you.’
With both their debut album ‘Lungs’ and its follow-up ‘Ceremonials’, Florence + the Machine confront the mysteries of life and death, alternately invoking God and the supernatural. The inevitability of death is consistent and prominent.
Fellow Brits Mumford & Sons follow suit, though mostly through the lens of traditional religious beliefs, discussing the soul rather than ghosts. A large proportion of their songs deal with the fear of death and its inevitability, references the comforts and trials of religion both in life and death.
In Awake My Soul, Mumford & Sons sing ‘in these bodies we will live/in these bodies we will die/and where you invest your love/you invest your life/awake my soul/for you were made to meet your maker.’
Fashion/Craftsmanship
Few things could provide a more tangible reminder of death than the physical presence of remains. What began as an attempted connection with nature via feathers a few years has developed into a new trend of jewelry made from animals bones. A connection to nature alone, outside of a greater context, no longer provides enough meaning. Bones, however, provide tangible and grounding perspective.
Animal vertebrae jewelry from the Bones and Feathers Collective
Muskrat jaw necklace from LadyBeastVintage
Visual Art
Unlike the introspective musings on death through music and fashion/craftsmanship, the visual arts have shifted towards a celebratory acceptance of death. Where musicians sing about the grim, tactile aspects of death such as bones and the earth, and fashion has taken things such as skulls and bones not as symbols but as actual artifacts of death, the visual arts have appropriated the Mexican tradition of sugar skulls and the colorful depiction of such symbols. As Damien Hirst said of this conceptualisation of facing death as it served as inspiration for his infamous 2007 work For the Love of God, ‘You don’t like it, so you disguise it or you decorate it to make it look like something bearable – to such an extent that it becomes something else.’
Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007
Nowhere has this been more embraced than through body art. A constant yet jubilant reminder of death, the popularity of such tattoos has spiked dramatically over the past year.
Romanticism produced cultural staples like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. With the latest generation of artists ushering in a new spectrum similarly themed works, human mortality has once again taken center stage. Just imagine what works we might be enjoying next Halloween.
