The Secret Language of Symbols: A Bone to Pick

Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash

The Chapel of Bones

The Sedlec Ossuary, near Prague, is a small chapel decorated with the bones of thousands of people whose graves were cleared over the centuries.

In 1870, a woodcarver called František Rint arranged the bones into chandeliers, garlands and even a coat of arms. Macabre, certainly, but not intended simply to horrify. The chapel is a memento mori. The phrase is Latin for “remember that you must die”—or, more simply, “remember death”. It is a reminder of our mortality and of the need to live consciously while we still can.

I visited the ossuary some years ago and found it deeply moving. I left feeling sobered, reflective and rather more in touch with my own mortality than when I went in.

It is also, in its way, an alchemical image: death, dissolution and the remains rearranged into a new form. Although I’m not sure I’d want to end up as part of a chandelier. Given a choice, I’d opt for something a little more dignified.

An Early Dream

Perhaps my interest in bones began much earlier. The earliest dream I can remember was about life, death and what remains. I was about eight years old when I had it, although the dream itself seemed to belong to another time.

I was in a very hot country—possibly ancient Greece. The setting was an old ruin. It was rather like a hospital ward, except that instead of beds there were slabs of stone. There were separate rooms, but the walls had worn down so much that it was easy to see from one into another.

In the dream, I was not a child but a young woman lying on a stone slab. Around me were other slabs, some with people lying on them.

Attendants moved quietly among us, offering sips of water from stone drinking vessels.

Somehow, I knew that I was dying. I also knew what would happen next. Once I was dead, my body would be carried into the room next door and laid on another stone slab.

What struck me is that I was not frightened. The movement from life to death seemed orderly and inevitable—almost ordinary. It did not feel like the end of everything, but more like the next stage of a process.

Beneath it all was an awareness of the bones. Beneath the flesh, beneath the shroud and beneath whatever identity I had carried in life, something more enduring would remain.

Bones in Alchemy

In alchemy, bones are closely associated with death and with the stripping away of everything that is no longer needed.

They belong particularly to mortificatio and nigredo: the dark stages of the work, when an old form has broken down and cannot simply be patched up and carried on as before. Alchemy is not terribly sentimental about this. Sometimes something has to die before anything genuinely new can emerge.

Bones can represent our deepest structure—the framework beneath appearances, roles, ambitions and the various disguises the ego likes to wear. When life strips us back to the bone, we may discover what is actually holding us up.

They may also represent the part of us that survives loss, illness, humiliation, disappointment or change. The ego may feel thoroughly dismantled, but something essential remains.

Bones also belong to the imagery of calcination (or in alchemy - calcinatio). Burned down to white ash, bones become associated with fire, purification and reduction to the bare essentials. There is not much room for padding at this stage of the alchemical process.

Psychologically, bones may represent what is left when an old identity has died away. They remind us of mortality, certainly, but also of endurance. Something has been lost, but something else has survived.

When Bones Appear in Dreams

In dreams, the condition of the bones matters. Broken bones may suggest that a supporting structure has failed. Buried bones may point to something hidden, forgotten or inherited. White or polished bones may suggest purification, while bones being reassembled may carry the promise of restoration, resurrection or the rebuilding of the self.

So bones are not simply symbols of death. They may also ask: what remains when everything superficial has fallen away—and what might be built from it?