Mary, Queen of Scots, checked the time on a silver skull
Mary, Queen of Scots, carried a watch carved as a silver skull and engraved with Horace's lines about death knocking equally at huts and royal towers. It was a fashionable object in a long tradition called memento mori, Latin for remember that you must die, that runs from Stoic philosophers to Mexican sugar skulls.
Grammatically the phrase is a warning: memento is a future imperative, remember, and mori means to die, so a literal rendering is you must remember to die. The ancient roots are philosophical. Democritus is said to have trained himself by seeking solitude among tombs, and Plato's account of Socrates' death presents philosophy as practice for dying. The Stoics made it a discipline: Seneca's letters return to death again and again, Epictetus told students to recall a loved one's mortality even while kissing them, and Marcus Aurelius reminded himself how fleeting all mortal things are.
Christianity gave the idea a moral edge. Where classical poets urged drinking while there was time, Christian writers used mortality to expose earthly pleasures as empty and direct the mind to judgement and the soul. Hebrew scripture had already supplied the texts, from dust returning to dust in Genesis to the psalm asking God to teach people to number their days, and the Ash Wednesday rite still repeats the dust formula over worshippers.
Europe filled with reminders. Fifteenth-century grandees commissioned cadaver tombs showing their own decaying bodies. Chapels lined with bones, such as the Capuchin Crypt in Rome and the Capela dos Ossos in Evora, greet visitors with the message that their bones will join these. Public clocks bore mottoes like tempus fugit, and Augsburg automaton clocks had Death striking the hour. Dutch vanitas painters assembled skulls, guttering candles, soap bubbles and hourglasses, and the danse macabre showed death leading rich and poor away together.
The motif travelled widely. Puritan gravestones in colonial America carved winged skulls, and the painter Thomas Smith placed a skull beside a farewell poem in his self-portrait. Hamlet contemplates Yorick's skull. A short-lived French order, the Hermits of St. Paul, used memento mori as its greeting, although the popular claim that Trappists do so is false. Mexico's Day of the Dead adds bread bones and skull-shaped sweets.
Source: Memento mori
