The Master of Ceremonies, Hasta Los Huesos and Vado Mori - "My name then is ded."

These two films and short exchange of words sum up the figures carved into the weathered face of the world by wandering astral bodies. Totems and artifact unwinding in the Waste Land like a dream of perpetual motion manifested in a broken music box. Beethoven Piano Sonata 14. The ferocity of the moon. A theme played forever becomes the sustained scream of a dying God in the end. 

Master of Ceremonies. Death the Entertainer, Vaudevillian, Juggler, Guitar Player, Comedian, Pedant and Tinker. The flesh burns, the skeleton tried to run away, the angel emerges like a moth flying over water. 

Hasta Los Huesos. A diorama of Jose Guadalupe Posada. William Blake's Sick Rose and Invisible Worm. The man slides out of the womb and lusts to return to it with every woman, his bone hungry for the hole, finding no sanctuary until he slides into the tomb, the last bone hole. 

Vado Mori. I go to die. Text and Image. Death levels all. Hamlet Act 4, Scene 3:

HAMLET 

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end. 

KING CLAUDIUS 

Alas, alas! 

HAMLET 

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. 

KING CLAUDIUS 

What dost you mean by this? 

HAMLET 

Nothing but to show you how a king may go aprogress through the guts of a beggar.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (fragment) also by Chris Sullivan

From the excellent site, The Pre-Gebelin Tarot History: the Moral Allegory of Tarot:

"Although the relationship among the three manuscripts of the Desert of Religion cannot be traced precisely, the question is made all the more intriguing by their common witness to several other text-and-image combinations. Two other imagetexts travel with the Desert of Religion in all three extant copies, linking the manuscripts still more closely together. All three include an illustrated English version of what are known as Vado Mori verses, extant also often in Latin. Although these verses are commonly found in several languages, illustrations accompany them in no other manuscript apart from these three. 

The text is spoken by a king, a bishop, and a knight, as they relate their individual encounters with Death: 

KNIGHT:
I wende to dede knight stithe in stoure:
thurghe fyght in felde I wane the flour.
Na fightes me taght the dede to quell.
I weend to dede soth I ghow tell. 

KING:
I weende to dede a kynge iwisse.
What helpis honor or werldis blysse?
Dede is to mane the kynde wai:
I wende to be clade in clay. 

BISHOP:
I wende to dede clerk ful of skill,
that couth wt worde men more and dill.
Sone has me made the dede ane ende
beese ware wt me to dede I wende. 

The point of these verses—that Death levels all traces of worldy station—is made implicitly by the human speakers, but in the Stowe version, the figure of Death himself speaks further lines that make the point explicit: 

DEATH:
Be ghe wele now warr wt me:
My name then is ded.
May ther none fro me fle
That any lyfe gun led.
Kynge Kaser then no knyght,
Ne clerke that can on boke rede,
Beest ne foghel ne other wyght,
Bot I sal make tham dedde. 

The Stowe manuscript, then, offers a more fully elaborated variant of the Vado Mori texts and images than Additional and Cotton, but the substance of all three versions is recognizably the same. They offer a double memento mori that capitalizes on the rememorative function of visual art so commonly cited by medieval theorists of the image."

Ellis Nadler: Cards of U'ut

Cards of U'ut by Ellis Nadler

The Cards of U'ut are 37 beautiful and subtle woodcut Tarot interpretations of by Ellis Nadler. You can see all of the cards here: http://www.ellisnadler.com/cards-of-wu/ However, there is also an online booklet where you can read short gnomic poems he has written to accompany each image: http://www.ellisnadler.com/buy-cards-of-uut/ In the video Nadler talks about his desire to found a new religion mixed him giving reading to people on the street. He also demonstrates his technique in making the woodcuts. 

Each of the woodcut images seem simultaneously familiar and strange. It is easy to imagine them as a lost or esoteric version of the Marseilles deck from the 15th century. But then there is a disconcerting modernity to them, a graphic frankness mixed with a transgressive sense of humor. 

His price is less than $200 for a set of 37 oversized cards in an "aluminum box, with a 48 page booklet and a numbered certificate signed by the artist."

Cards of U'ut by Ellis Nadler

In the fullness of time
The leg will recover
To kick out heretics
And regain control

U'ut's iron jack-boot
Will crush the free-thinkers
And exile dissenters
Into a black hole

To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die

Death on the Barricades, Alfred Rethel

Death can surprise us in so many ways:

Quid quisque vitet, nunquam homini satis
Cautum est in horas.

[No man knows what dangers he should avoid from one hour to another.] 

Leaving aside fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have thought that a Duke of Brittany was to be crushed to death in a crowd, as one was during the state entry into Lyons of Pope Clement, who came from my part of the world! Have you not seen one of our kings killed at sport? And was not one of his ancestors killed by a bump from a pig? Aeschylus was warned against a falling house; he was always on the alert, but in vain: he was killed by the shell of a tortoise which slipped from the talons of an eagle in flight. Another choked to death on a pip from a grape; an Emperor died from a scratch when combing his hair; Aemilius Lepidus, from knocking his foot on his own doorstep; Aufidius from bumping into a door of his Council chamber. Those who died between a woman’s thighs include Cornelius Gallus, a praetor; Tigillinus, a captain of the Roman Guard; Ludovico, the son of Guy di Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua; and – providing even worse examples – Speucippus the Platonic philosopher, and one of our Popes. [...] 

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.  

At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects. Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls or a pin pricks however slightly, let us at once chew over this thought: ‘Supposing that was death itself?’ With that, let us brace ourselves and make an effort. In the midst of joy and feasting let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition. Let us never be carried away by pleasure so strongly that we fail to recall occasionally how many are the ways in which that joy of ours is subject to death or how many are the fashions in which death threatens to snatch it away.  

That is what the Egyptians did: in the midst of all their banquets and good cheer they would bring in a mummified corpse to serve as a warning to the guests:

Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum.
Grata superveniet, quæ non sperabitur hora.

[Believe that each day was the last to shine on you. If it comes, any unexpected hour will be welcome indeed.] 

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint. Life has no evil for him who has thoroughly understood that loss of life is not an evil.

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays.

Death as a Friend, Alfred Rethel

In an old tower just below the belfry, in the place where they ring the bells: there is Death again in his pilgrim's dress, tolling for one who is just dead, the Sacristan of that Church; this Death is draped tenderly down to the feet; there is no maddening horror about him, awe only; he is not grinning as in the other picture, but gazes downward, thoughtfully, almost sadly, thinking of the old man's life that has been. And he, with his hands laid together and his eyes closed, is leaning back in his chair: many a time these latter years has he leant back so; then needs must that he rise stiffly and wearily to go about his duties; but now he need never rise again; his lips, parted a little now, need never again be drawn together close, at sight of weary injustice and wrong; he will soon understand why all these things were. The dragons on the spire eaves lean forward open-mouthed, disappointed because he has got quit of all that now; near the head of him against the wall is a figure of Christ on the Cross, a Bible is open by the side of him; near the stairs is a horn hanging, a huntsman's horn, and through the window, on the sill of which a bird is singing, you can see the fair sunset-country stretching away for leagues and leagues (for we are high up here, just under the spire). 

They say he was a hunter in the old time, this man; that he heard the north wind sing about his ears, as he dashed over the open spaces; that the young beech-leaves in the early summer quivered at the blasts of his horn; that many a time he rode into that village you can see down there, wherein he was born, where his father and his father's father lived, weary with riding; that some one used to look out for him when he rode in, in the evenings. But that too is all gone by—only in memories perhaps—yet he had other hopes then perhaps than this, a mere old sacristan dying lonely in the old belfry.
What matter? for the setting sun is bright over all that country, and the bird sings still in the window sill—not afraid of death.

William Morris, "'Death the Avenger' and 'Death the Friend'," 

Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (August 1856) via Laudator Temporis Acti

Death the Avenger, Alfred Rethel

In 1844 Rethel visited Rome, executing, along with other subjects, an altar-piece for one of the churches of his native land. In 1846, he returned to Aachen, and commenced his Charlemagne frescoes. But mental derangement, attributed, it is believed, to an accident that he suffered in childhood, began to manifest itself. While he hovered between madness and sanity, Rethel produced some of the most striking, individual, and impressive of his works. Strange legends are told of the effect produced by some of his weird subjects. He painted Nemesis pursuing a murderer across a flat stretch of landscape. A slaughtered body lies on the ground, while in front is the assassin speeding away into the darkness, and above an angel of vengeance. The picture, so the story goes, was won in a lottery at Frankfurt by a personage of high rank, who had been guilty of an undiscovered crime, and the contemplation of his prize drove him mad. 

Another design which Rethel executed was "Death the Avenger," a skeleton appearing at a masked ball, scraping daintily, like a violinist, upon two human bones. The drawing haunted the memory of his artist friends and disturbed their dreams; and, in expiation, he produced his pathetic design of "Death the Friend." Rethel also executed a powerful series of drawings "The Dance of Death" suggested by the Belgian insurrections of 1848. It is by such designs as these, executed in a technique founded upon that of Albrecht Dürer, and animated by an imagination akin to that of the elder master, that Rethel is most widely known.

Wikipedia: Alfred Rethel 

Nemesis, Alfred Rethel