Kissing the Skull: Intimacy Across the Void on Mosher Mag

Touch is a human necessity. We reach for warmth, breath, presence. When someone dies, the body, once porous and living, becomes separate, even foreign. Yet in some corners of human culture, and psyche, people lean in. They kiss the skull. This isn’t necrophilia. It’s something hollowed out, a ghost touching another ghost. There’s a want in the wise: a place where emotion becomes physical. In over 89% of cultures, mourners touch their dead, washing, kissing, embracing, even risking contagion. That impulse exists from primates to humans: to confront the corpse not as repulsive object, but as former other, as love lost, as boundary broken. Touch becomes a ritual of reckoning. A truth-sayer. Entering a charnel house or ossuary isn’t just macabre aesthetics. It’s confrontation with our own absence. In places like Sedlec or the Catacombs of Paris, bones stacked in geometric wonder, visitors breathe in centuries of silence, and sometimes feel compelled to brush a fingertip across a skull, as if to say: I remember you. Photographer and author Paul Koudounaris, in his book Memento Mori, explores how spiritual rituals across Bolivia and Indonesia treat skulls not as abominations, but as kin. In Bolivia’s Fiesta de las Ñatitas, people carry decorated skulls of ancestors, feed them, commune with them, sometimes kissing them with reverence.

Paul chronicled folklore of “sex ghosts”, the stories where grief, eroticism, and skeletal remains intertwine. Not direct necrophilia, but the spiritual yearning for what death stole: touch, breath, belonging.

Some erotic art, like skulls kissed in Spanish cathedrals, or vanitas portraits with lovers and bones, reflect the allure of corpses, not for their rot, but for their final vulnerability. Death becomes ultimate intimacy.

In Aguni, Okinawa, the ritual of senkotsu, bone washing, forces physical intimacy with the dead under water. When hands gently caress ancient bones to cleanse them, they do not recoil. They reforge a bond, murmuring love over silent bones. Anthropologists call it “affective intimacy with the dead”.

Our Western culture ghettoises the dead into sealed graves, away from touch, sight, discourse. Koudounaris calls this boundary a “Siegfried Line” of death, more a wall than a threshold. Other cultures keep the dead near, even on altars, even at the table, even as beloved members of communities.

The philosopher Gary Laderman argues that touch, even on corpses, is sacred, humanising, necessary to witness death fully, not to fetishise it.

Funeral professionals describe "devotional contact," A tender permission to grieve aloud through physical contact, even when the body is lifeless.

This is a ritual of claims: I loved, I know you’re gone, I still reach.

Even the things the dead leave behind become part of their skin. Their ring. Their cardigan. Their comb. All become sensory stand-ins. Grief survivours wrap themselves in these to simulate closeness. Not comfort, but presence. Touching a skull evokes the same ghost-response. A phantom warmth. Memory lit up by contact. The same way a kiss on their sweater still makes you cry. Bone becomes relic. Object becomes body.

Love turns to haunting, and haunting turns to ritual.

Sedlec. Hallstatt. San Bernardino alle Ossa. Europe’s bone churches.

Rows and towers of skulls, arranged in sacred geometry. Art of the dead. Death turned cathedral.

To walk among them is to walk into a temple where the worship is mortality, and the faithful reach out, brushing their fingers on what used to be life.

Not to defile. But to commune.

This is the secret power of ossuaries: you aren’t horrified. You’re mesmerised. You’re pulled closer. These were people. And now they’re silence you can touch.

In early Buddhism, monks meditated in charnel grounds. Watching bodies rot. Watching flesh fall from bone. Smelling it. Breathing it in.

Not to disgust, but to awaken.

Everything dies. Every pleasure decays. Every body breaks.

So why cling to it? Why fear it?

The monks didn’t kiss the skull. But they saw it clearly. And that changed them.

That discipline shares ancestry with the erotic horror of touching death, beyond fantasy, toward enlightenment, or dissolution.

Not everyone will understand this. That’s fine. But for those of us who’ve stood at the edge of grief and reached for something, anything, it’s not so strange.

Let’s not lie to ourselves. This isn’t all poetry.

Modern medical advisers warn: touching corpses risks infection, but more dangerously, mental unraveling.

The corpse is pathogen, grief, phantom touch all at once.

People who can’t stop visiting graves. Who collect teeth. Who stroke the skulls of strangers in bone museums. The danger is not eroticism, but obsession. The lure of what’s gone, refusing to leave it gone.

And yet, it’s human. When love has nowhere to go, it clings to what remains.

This is where the horror gets complicated.

A fetish objectifies. A mourning ritual sanctifies.

We do not love the skull. We love who it used to be.

The lips that once spoke. The eyes that once sparkled. The skin that once flushed. The skull is the echo of all that. We kiss the echo, not the emptiness.

Grief can look like madness. But it isn’t. It’s just love, worn down by time.

We are all future relics. Someday, your skull might sit in a drawer, or under dirt, or on an altar. Someone might kiss it. Not in lust. Not in fear. But in reverence. In memory. In mourning.

The skull becomes sacred not because it is dead, but because it was once so alive.

And because someone, somewhere, still remembers the warmth.

Even when all that’s left is bone.

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com