Macabre

Macabre (pronounced muh-kah-bruh, muh-kahb or muh-kah-ber)

(1) Gruesome and horrifying; ghastly; horrible; grim.

(2) Of, pertaining to, dealing with, or representing death, especially its grimmer or uglier aspect.

(3) Of or suggestive of the allegorical dance of death, the danse macabre.

1400–1450: As Macabrees daunce, a Middle English borrowing from the Middle French danse (de) Macabré (dance of death), of uncertain origin, thought perhaps identified with the Medieval Latin chorēa Machabaeōrum a representation of the deaths of Judas Maccabaeus and his brothers, but there’s no documentary evidence.  An interesting technical point is the French pronunciation with a mute “e” is a misreading of the Middle French forms.  The abstracted sense of "characterized by gruesomeness" was used first in French in 1842, spreading to English by 1889 and dictionaries date a racial sense from 1921.  The sense "comedy that deals in themes and subjects usually regarded as serious or taboo" was first recorded in 1961, in the figurative sense of "morbid".  The origin, although contested, is most associated with the French left and new wave of the late 1950s (pièce noire, comédie noire) which may have and the source of the terms “black comedy” & “dark comedy” in English.  A revisionist theory suggests derivation from the Spanish macabro, from the Arabic مَقَابِر‎ (maqābir) (cemeteries), plural of مَقْبَرَة‎ (maqbara) or مَقْبُرَة‎ (maqbura).  Borrowing from the Arabic in plural form is not unusual (eg magazine, derived from the plural مخازن (maxāzin) of the Arabic singular noun مخزن (maxzan) (storehouse; depot; shop) so the theory is etymologically possible but, like the preferred French source, evidence is wholly lacking.  Related meanings include spooky, ghastly, ghoulish, grisly, morbid, gruesome, weird, frightening, grim, lurid, cadaverous, deathly, dreadful, frightful, ghostly, hideous, horrible, offensive & scary; Macabre is an adjective, macabrely the adverb.  The alternative spelling is macaber but few approve.  Macabre is an adjective.

Dance of Death

Danse Macabre of Basel, memento mori painting, unknown artist, circa 1450, Basel Historical Museum.

The Danse Macabre (Dance of Death) was an artistic genre of allegory dating from the late middle ages; exploring the universality of death, it made clear that however exulted or lowly one’s station in life, the Dance Macabre unites all.  It was a popular artistic motif in European folklore and the most elaborated of medieval macabre art.  During the fourteenth century, Europe was beset by deathly horrors, recurring famines, the Hundred Years’ War and, looming over all, the Black Death.  All these were culturally assimilated throughout Europe, the omnipresent chance of either a sudden or a long and painful death spurring not only a religious desire for penance but also a sometimes hysterical desire for amusement while such things remained possible; a last dance as cold comfort.  The Danse Macabre satisfied these desires, the dance-with-death allegory originally a didactic dialogue poem to remind people of the inevitability of death and to advise them strongly to be prepared at all times for death.

During the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the theme was a source of the vivid and stark paintings on the walls of churches and the cloisters of cemeteries and ossuaries.  Art of the Danse Macabre was typically a depiction of the personification of death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave; often included were popes, emperors, kings, children and labourers. They were produced as mementos mori (a phrase from the Latin which translates literally as "remember that you will die"), artistic or symbolic reminders of the inevitability of death and intended to remind the living of the fragility of life and how one should try to live a more fulfilling and purposeful life, making the most of one's brief few years.  The tradition, although it became increasingly detached from its religious associations, never died and has enjoyed periodic resurgences over the last six-hundred years, notably after horrific events such as pandemics or the First World War.  COVID-19 seemed not to stimulate similar art; popular culture’s preferred platforms have shifted.

Sense of the macabre: Terry Richardson's (b 1965) suicide-themed shoot with Lindsay Lohan, 2012.