St Margaret’s Church, Uxbridge: tomb of Dame Leonora Bennet: detail
The Morrigans Harvest , Samhain festival todays Halloween or Native american day of the dead Labradorite Skull ring with Rainbow moonstone and raven with Hidden pentacle and copper moon by leespicedragon on Flickr.
ca. 1679, [gold and enameled mourning ring]
Jewellery, chiefly rings and lockets, is sometimes worn in memory of a deceased person during set periods of mourning. The practice of bequeathing a ring for remembrance was known from the Middle Ages, and by the seventeenth century it had become customary to engrave rings with the name and the dates of the deceased, with the decorative design on a ground of black enamel. People would leave instructions in their wills for specific sums of money to be used by the executors to buy rings, and the recipients would be named. As a consequence of the Great Plague in London in the 1660s, mourning rings had to be made in enormous quantities.
The designs were generally based on the title page of Bills of Mortality published by the Company of Parish Clerks of London, or on funeral tickets. These are usually enclosed in an arched frame, the borders of which commonly show a skeleton with an hour-glass, a symbol of the brevity of life, a pick and shovel, used to dig the grave, and a winding sheet, in which the body was wrapped. Above, a skull and cross-bones appear with the legend ‘MEMENTO MORI’ (‘In remembrance of death’).
On the inside of this ring is the engraved inscription ‘In mem.I.W.Arch.Roch.obt 11 June 79’ (‘In memory of I.W. Archdeacon of Rochester, died on 11 June 1679’). John Lee Warner was Archdeacon of Rochester from 1660 to 1679.
“Ivory Rosary with Gilded-Silver Chain (detail)
Carved in Germany, about 1500-1525
This Rosary’s Latin inscriptions read “Think on Death” and “This is what you will be.” The worlds of the living and the dead are intimately connected in the context of private devotion: prayer in life directly affected the soul’s fate after death, and many personal prayers were intended to aid souls in purgatory.”
Ritual Human Skull On 18th century Rococo Pedestal, Containing Brass Lined Interior engraved with Pentagram and the Black Goat or Baphomet. England/France 1871.
This is the eerie ‘Bone House’, or ‘Beinhaus’ - home to an estimated 1,200 skulls. Many have been painted with symbolic floral crowns and the name of the deceased before being placed in the spooky building in Hallstatt, Austria. The Bone House came into being in the 12th century because the lakeside village’s cemetery was too small to hold all the dead from the surrounding area. Cremation was forbidden at the time, so bodies would be buried for 10-15 years, and then the skulls exhumed. They would then be left out in the sun and moonlight until they were bleached ivory white and then stacked in rows in the charnel. The last skull to go into the Beinhaus was interred in 1995. It belonged to a woman who died in 1983 and her dying wish was to have her skull placed in the vault.
Tomb of professor of anatomy Dr. Francesc Farreras i Framis (1888), in Montjuic Cemetery, Spain.
This enamelled gold mourning ring commemorates the death of Samuel Nicholets of Hertfordshire who died on 7th July 1661, as is recorded in the inscription inside the ring. The ring is hollow, and a lock of hair curls around within it, visible through the openwork of the enamelled decoration of skulls and coats of arms