What Memento Mori Actually Means (And Why It Ended Up In Jewelry)
Memento mori is Latin. It means: remember you must die.
That sounds like the worst possible thing to put on a ring. It is actually one of the oldest and kindest ideas in the whole history of jewelry, and we want to explain why, because we get asked about it at every single market.
Memento mori is not pessimism. Pessimism says nothing matters. Memento mori says the exact opposite. It says everything matters, precisely because it will end. It means that you have to experience and not wait for the right time because time is fleeting. We are going to die. And before that it would be amazing if we did amazing stuff.
That is the whole thing. That is the entire philosophy compressed into one skull.
There is a strange comfort in remembering that you are going to die.
We know how that reads. Stay with us.
A memento mori is not built to unsettle you. It is built to soothe you. It cuts straight through the noise of a bad week and says: this is temporary. The deadline is temporary. The panic is temporary. The person who was rude to you in the supermarket is temporary. So are you, and so are we, and that is not a threat. It is perspective.
People have been using this trick for about six hundred years. It works. Its there for a reason.
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Made to Order
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Made to Order
Memento mori was genuinely fashionable in jewelry from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century.
Memento mori was genuinely fashionable in jewelry from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Not niche. Not subculture. Mainstream, wearable, everywhere.
And now it is coming back.
We have already lived through the cathedral revival, the medieval revival and the gothic revival. What we are watching right now is a memento mori revival, and it is not hard to work out why. We live in loud, expensive, exhausting times. Stress levels are high. The future feels unreliable.
So people reach for the oldest reminder there is. This is temporary. This is fleeting. Also, please remember to live.
If you want to see where a lot of our own designs come from, look at Gilles Légaré.
If you want to see where a lot of our own designs come from, look at Gilles Légaré.
Légaré (1610 to 1685) was a goldsmith to Louis XIV, working out of Paris. In 1663 he published Livre des ouvrages d'orfèvrerie, a book of engraved jewelry designs cut by the printmaker Louis Cossin (Victoria and Albert Museum, n.d.). It was a pattern book, meant for other goldsmiths. He drew each design from the front and the back, so whoever picked it up could actually see how the stones were held (Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
Look at plate five and you will find rings crawling with skulls, knotwork and bone. A working goldsmith, at the height of the French court, casually publishing skull rings as an ordinary thing to make.
Légaré's work was a huge inspiration for our creations. When you see a skull tucked into the shoulder of one of our rings, that lineage is where it comes from. We did not invent it. We are just still doing it.
The most meaningful jewelry is not about vanity. It is about memory.
Which brings us to the thing we actually believe.
The most meaningful jewelry is not about vanity. It is about memory.
A skull ring is not a gothic accessory. It is a reminder that your time is finite, and that the finiteness is exactly what makes your choices worth anything at all. If you had forever, nothing you picked would cost you anything. You do not have forever. So the things you choose, and the people you choose, and the years you spend, all have weight.
A memento mori ring does not tell you that you are nothing. It tells you that you matter. Those are opposite messages and people mix them up constantly.
Goths, honestly, got this from the beginning.
Goths, honestly, got this from the beginning.
It was never about a skull being creepy. Anyone who has spent five minutes in the scene knows that. It is about honouring death openly instead of hiding it in a drawer, because honouring it is what lets you live fully.
The rest of the culture is only now catching up, arriving at the death cafés and the grief podcasts and the funeral planning apps, and finding out that the weird kids in the graveyard had the healthiest relationship with mortality all along.
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Made to Order
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Made to Order
Before the Church Got Hold Of It: Rome and Greece
Here is the part most people skip. Memento mori did not start in a monastery. It started at a party.
A slave in a chariot
When a Roman general won a decisive victory, he was awarded a Triumph. A vast parade through the city, purple robes, his face painted red like Jupiter. For one day, a man was publicly treated as a god.
And standing right behind him in the chariot, holding a golden laurel wreath above his head, was a public slave. That was the whole job. Hold the wreath, and keep talking into the general's ear so he did not start believing the crowd.
The earliest detailed written account of this warning comes from the Christian writer Tertullian, around 197 CE, in his Apologeticus. He records it as: Respice post te! Hominem te memento! Look behind you. Remember you are a man (Tertullian, c. 197/1885).
The most powerful man in Rome, on the best day of his life, paying somebody to remind him he was going to die. That is memento mori before it had a name.
Socrates, calmly, with the hemlock in front of him
Greece supplied the philosophy.
In Plato's Phaedo, written around 360 BCE, Socrates spends his final hours before execution explaining to his devastated students that a philosopher's entire life is a preparation for death. He called philosophy meletē thanatou, the practice of death (Plato, c. 360 BCE/1892).
He was not being bleak. He was arguing that if you train yourself to stop clinging to comfort and status and physical want, then the actual moment of dying holds nothing new for you. You have already rehearsed it.
The Stoics turned it into a daily habit
The Stoics took the idea and made it practical, which is why it still gets quoted on the internet every single day.
Seneca, in his letters to Lucilius, advised finishing each day as though it were the end of a life, settling your accounts and putting nothing off. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor with genuinely unlimited power, wrote reminders to himself in a private notebook that he could be dead by the end of the day and should let that shape every word and decision (Marcus Aurelius, c. 180/1862).
None of this was designed to make people sad. It was designed to make them move.
In Christian Europe, memento mori found its first real foothold, and it is where the exact Latin phrase gets locked into place.
The monastery, and one myth worth killing
Medieval monastic orders built the reminder of death into daily life. Carthusian monks, whose order dates to 1084, meditated holding human skulls.
You will also read everywhere that Trappist monks greeted each other with "memento mori." This is not true, and the Trappists have said so themselves. The order was founded in 1664, well after the medieval period, and its brothers greet one another in silence. The myth appears to come from a different French order, the Hermits of Saint Paul, nicknamed the Brothers of the Dead, who wore skull and crossbones scapulars, kissed a skull before meals, and greeted each other with a line about remembering death. Pope Urban VIII suppressed them in 1633 (Catholic News Agency, 2017).
We are pointing this out because the story gets copied endlessly without anyone checking it, and we would rather give you the boring true version than the good false one.
And then the plague
The concept escaped the monasteries in the fourteenth century, and the Black Death is why. Between 1346 and 1353 the plague killed something close to half of Europe. Death stopped being a philosophical exercise and became a logistical problem in the street outside.
That trauma produced the danse macabre, the dance of death, where skeletons lead away the pope, the emperor, the merchant and the labourer in one procession, because death does not check your rank. The most democratic image in medieval art.
You see the same instinct in ossuaries, whole chapels built from the bones of the dead. And in tomb sculpture, especially the transi tombs, where the deceased is carved twice: once in full finery on top, and once as a decaying corpse underneath.
It was blunt. It was public. It was completely normal.
Later in the seventeenth century, something shifts.
Science is taking over. People start seriously studying the natural world, the living and the dead and everything in between. Cabinets of curiosity fill up. Anatomy theatres open to the public. Botany literally becomes an obsession. You could find an enthusiasm of any of these "hobbies" in any family.
And you can see it in the jewelry. Botanical detail becomes far more prominent. Leaves, vines, flowers, the whole living world creeping into metal.
But memento mori does not leave. It sits right there alongside the botanicals, and the two of them start telling one story together. The living world and the dead world, on the same object. Which is more or less the brief we still work to.
In Christian Europe, memento mori also became an art genre in its own right.
Paintings filled up with a fixed vocabulary of symbols, and once you know it you cannot unsee it:
Skull: you will die. The most direct symbol there is.
Hourglass: time is running and you cannot stop it.
Extinguished candle: a life that has just gone out. Smoke still rising.
Wilting flowers: beauty is real and beauty is brief.
Weeping willow: grief and mourning. Everywhere on Victorian mourning jewelry and gravestones.
Urn: the container of what remains. Classical, restrained, permanent.
Laurel wreath: victory and remembrance. What survives you. The same wreath the slave held over the general's head.
Ouroboros, the snake eating its tail: the cycle with no end point.
Broken column: a life cut off before it finished.
The subject of transience turns up in every art form of the period. Even architecture. Architects deliberately built structures to look older than they were, adding artificial ruin and weathering, so a brand new building would already whisper that it was passing.
And then there is the Dutch chapter, which we are fond of for obvious reasons.
The vanitas tradition flourished in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century and took this whole idea into still life painting. The name comes from the biblical line about vanity, meaning emptiness rather than conceit.
A vanitas painting piles up everything a person could want. Silver, wine, books, maps, instruments, oysters, jewelry. And then it puts a skull in the middle of it. The Rijksmuseum's own description of the genre is refreshingly plain: these still lifes point at the impermanence of life and of material things, and there is usually a human skull doing the pointing (Rijksmuseum, n.d.).
Skulls, bones, hourglasses, guttering candles, all the symbols we just listed, becoming more present rather than less as the century goes on. Painted here, in this country, four hundred years ago.
We make our version in silver, roughly an hour and a half south of the museum that holds the paintings.
Memento mori.
Remember.
Two words, and they have survived a plague that took half a continent, the Reformation, revolutions, two world wars and the internet without changing meaning once. A Roman slave said a longer version of it in a chariot. A monk said it holding a skull. A goldsmith carved it into a ring in 1663. We stamp it inside a locket in 2026.
Same instruction. Different metal.
It is the art of death. It is also, and much more so, the art of remembering.
So this is what we are actually doing when we make a coffin locket with a skull inside it, or a moth with a stone hanging from it, or a ring with bone worked into the shoulders.
It is the art of death. It is also, and much more so, the art of remembering.
Remembering someone you lost. Remembering a year you survived. Remembering that the thing you are worrying about tonight will not be there in ten years, and neither will you, and that both of those facts are permission to go and live.
Everything we make is sterling silver, or 14K and 18K gold, cut and carved and set by the two of us in our own atelier in Kaatsheuvel. Our gold goes to the independent Dutch assay office, the Waarborg, to be tested and hallmarked before it ever comes back to us, because in the Netherlands a goldsmith does not get to mark their own gold (Rijksoverheid, 2019). We rather like that. Somebody outside this building checks our work first.
If you want to look, the memento mori creations live in the Curiosity Cabinet collection. The cathedral and tracery side of things sits in Regina. If there is a person you want to carry and nothing on the site is quite right, that is what the Custom Realm exists for.
We will also be at Duystere Markt in Roeselare on 26 and 27 September, where the theme is memento mori, which felt like the universe being unusually direct with us. Come and say hello. 🖤
And since the whole point of the thing is that it should change what you do: what is one choice you could make differently today, knowing it is finite?
So a few questions about Memento Mori shortly answered
What does memento mori mean?
It is Latin for "remember you must die." It is a reminder to live well with the time you have, not a wish for death.
Where did memento mori come from?
The idea traces back to ancient Rome and Greece. Roman generals in a Triumph had a slave behind them reminding them they were only human, and Greek philosophers treated awareness of death as a daily discipline. The exact Latin phrase was formalised later, in medieval Christian Europe.
Did Roman generals really have a slave whispering to them?
The earliest detailed account comes from Tertullian around 197 CE, who records the words as "Look behind you, remember you are a man." Historians treat it as a real practice, though the exact wording used at any given Triumph is not recorded.
Did monks greet each other with memento mori?
Mostly no. The claim is usually made about Trappist monks, who greet in silence and have publicly said the story is untrue. It seems to come from a smaller French order, the Hermits of Saint Paul, suppressed in 1633.
What is memento mori jewelry?
Jewelry carrying symbols of mortality: skulls, hourglasses, coffins, bones, wilting flowers. Worn since at least the medieval period as a daily reminder that life is finite.
What is the difference between memento mori and mourning jewelry?
Memento mori is about your own mortality in general. Mourning jewelry is about one specific person who died, and often contains their hair or their name and dates. The two overlap heavily in the Georgian and Victorian eras.
Why do people wear skull rings?
Most often as a reminder that time is limited and choices matter. The skull has meant "remember you will die" in European jewelry for roughly five centuries, long before it meant anything about rebellion.
What is the danse macabre?
A medieval image of skeletons leading people of every rank away together, from popes to labourers, showing that death makes no distinction between them. It spread widely after the Black Death.
What is a vanitas painting?
A Dutch still life genre from the seventeenth century that arranges beautiful, expensive objects around a skull to show that none of it lasts.
What does a weeping willow mean on jewelry?
Grief and mourning. It is one of the most common motifs on Victorian mourning jewelry and on gravestones from the same period.
Is memento mori jewelry morbid?
Not to the people who wear it. Most describe it as grounding or comforting, because it puts small daily anxieties into proportion.
Sources (APA)
Catholic News Agency. (2017, October 30). Memento mori: How religious orders remember death. Crux. https://cruxnow.com/global-church/2017/10/memento-mori-religious-orders-remember-death
Gemological Institute of America. (n.d.). Victorian era mourning jewelry: Antique elegance and history. GIA 4Cs. https://4cs.gia.edu/en-us/blog/antique-victorian-era-mourning-jewelry/
Marcus Aurelius. (1862). Meditations (G. Long, Trans.). The Internet Classics Archive, MIT. (Original work written c. 180 CE) http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html
Metropolitan Museum of Art. (n.d.). Design for pendants, plate 4 from "Livre des Ouvrages d'Orfevrerie". https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/338674
Plato. (1892). Phaedo (B. Jowett, Trans.). The Internet Classics Archive, MIT. (Original work written c. 360 BCE) http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html
Rijksmuseum. (n.d.). Still lifes: The 16th and 17th centuries in the Netherlands. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/node/Still-Lifes-The-16th-and-17th-Centuries-in-the-Netherlands--4c7906d168b34351b285971b9a9bdd20
Rijksoverheid. (2019). Waarborgwet 2019. Wetten.overheid.nl. https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0042317/
Seneca, L. A. (1917). Epistles, Volume 1 (R. M. Gummere, Trans.). Liberty Fund. (Original work written c. 65 CE) https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/seneca-epistles-volume-1
Tertullian. (1885). Apologeticus (S. Thelwall, Trans.). The Tertullian Project. (Original work written c. 197 CE) http://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf03/anf03-05.htm
Victoria and Albert Museum. (n.d.). Livres des ouvrages d'orfevrerie, Gilles Légaré, Paris, 1663. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O647791/livres-des-ouvrages-dorfevrerie-print-gilles-legare/
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