Daily Globe

The Dance of Death.

This name is given to a certain class of allegorical representations, illustrative of the universal power of death, and dating from the fourteenth century. When the introduction of Christianity first banished the ancient Germanic conception of a future state, a new description of Death mythology arose, partly out of Biblical sources, partly out of the popular character itself, wherein the last enemy was presented under simple and majestic images, such as that of a husbandman watering the ground with blood, plowing it with swords, rooting out weeds, plucking up flowers, or felling trees, sowing it with corpses; or, of a monarch assembling his armies, making war, taking prisoners, inviting his subjects to a festival, or citing them to judgment. But, with a gradual change of national manners, came a change in the mode of treating the subject, and it was associated with every-day images, such as the confessional, chess-playing, and, above all, with the adjuncts of a festival, viz., music and dancing. This tendency to familiarize the theme increased during the confusion and turmoil of the fourteenth century, when the national mind alternated between fits of devotion and license, or blent both elements in satire and humor. Such a mood as this naturally occupied itself in personifying Death, and adopted by preference the most startling and grotesque images it could find--that of a musician playing to dancing men, or a dancer leading them on; and as the dance and the drama were intimately connected, and employed on religious occasions this particular idea soon assumed a dramatic form. This drama was most simply constructed, consisting of short dialogues between Death and "four-and-twenty" or more followers, and was undoubtedly acted in or near churches by religious orders in Germany during the fourteenth century and at a rather late period in France.