Dance of Death (Danse Macabre)

The dance of death, or danse macabre, seems to have first appeared as a practice in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. It was expressed as a dance in allegorical form in which a group of the dead led a group of the living in a dance procession down to their graves to show the living that all are equal in death and that no one will escape death. It did not matter how high a station in life a person achieved, how much wealth was accumulated, or how much respect was gained. All would eventually come to the same status as a decaying corpse or a skeletal figure. This was the great lesson taught to the living by the danse macabre.

Ironically the procession of the living persons in the dance was arranged according to their societal status in life. In various art forms the pope, kings, bishops, noblemen, and, last of all, the peasants and the poor, were in the line of procession from beginning to end. A part of the lesson of the equality of death was the metaphoric living people all arranged in their various statuses in life going down into the grave where all of them without exception became the rotting corpses and skeletons found in the graves. Implicit also was the fact that God would judge each of them equally, with his justice based on their faith and good works in life.

The practice of the dancing seems to combine several historical traditions related to death that developed over hundreds of years. These include dancing on the occasion of death in churches and cemeteries; the use of a skeleton to represent death with a later, more formalized picture of death represented as a skeletal figure dressed in a long black cloak and hood and carrying a long scythe (the “Grim Reaper”); and the expression of death in many and varied art forms (in which it would be expressed as the dance of death in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance). The art forms included music, paintings, woodcuts, staged drama, poetry, and other forms of literature. The appearance of the dance of death is still seen in 21st-century music, art, and literature.

The practice of dancing as a funeral ritual is reported to have even preceded the Christian era of history. People danced at interment and cremation rites before the birth of Jesus. It was often frenzied and fast paced with the dancers often stripping off their clothing and dancing nude among and on top of the graves and tombs. This was unlike the dance of death in the Christian era, which was much slower, more formalized, ritualistic, and organized. In the earlier times, the dancing was seen as a celebration of the lives of those who were still alive to enjoy the many pleasures and fruits of the material life, whereas those who dwelled where they danced had lost all of this by their death and passing on to whatever afterlife or spiritual dimension that existed among the various societies of those times.

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