Talking about Death - Western Culture I

It is nevertheless possible to view the history of Western attitudes toward death within the framework of this binary opposition.

According to the social historian Philippe Aries, the realms of sex and death were separated in Western culture until the end of the Middle Ages, largely due to the strictures of Christianity. With the loosening of these strictures, and the simultaneous emergence of individual consciousness, the two realms began to be associated.

Centuries later, they combined in a macabre eroticism, of which an abundance of death-related imagery is tangible evidence. The outward treatment of death, in funerals and other rituals, remained unchanged or evolved discreetly, but love and death merged in the realm of the unconscious.

Artists, and society as a whole, began to discover hitherto unrecognized resemblances between the two.