Skull Candle Meaning: Ofrendas, Memento Mori, Folk Magic and Decor

On an ofrenda, the altar families set up for Día de Muertos, candles carry some of the clearest meaning of anything on the table. The Mexico City government's guide to ofrendas says candles provide light, faith and hope. They guide deceased visitors toward home and light their way back after they have visited the living. In some communities, the same guide notes, each candle stands for a particular person who has died.

Candles share the ofrenda with food, flowers, copal incense and other things chosen for the people being remembered, and practices vary from one community and household to the next. A skull-shaped candle on an ofrenda is a household's own choice rather than a required element. The documented meaning belongs to the light, whatever shape the wax happens to take.

If you are setting up an altar of your own, our guide on how to make an ofrenda walks through the elements, and Día de Muertos tells the larger story of the celebration. Skulls appear on ofrendas in other forms too, and sugar skulls has the history of the sweetest of them.

The molded skull candle on a Halloween shelf is a modern novelty or seasonal object, and it has at least one small moment of official fame. In a 2003 candle classification decision by the U.S. Department of Commerce, the retailer Meijer described a molded skull candle as a Halloween novelty candle. The Department then studied whether the skull design could be recognized from several angles, and in the end treated that particular candle as an ordinary molded column rather than a Halloween novelty. Somewhere in the federal record, a skull was filed as a column.

In gothic decor, a skull candle can carry theatrical darkness, mortality, horror or simply a macabre look. Those readings belong to the decorator, the designer or the person who chose it for the room, not to a single tradition. A black skull candle on a bookshelf may be saying nothing more than "I like this," which is a perfectly good thing for a candle to say. Our stories on skeletons and Halloween, gothic skull meaning and skull home decor cover the decorating side of the skull.

Long before molded wax skulls, European artists put real candles and painted skulls side by side. In the memento mori and vanitas traditions, the skull reminds the viewer of mortality, and a burning or snuffed candle suggests how long a life lasts. Our stories on what memento mori means and vanitas paintings follow those traditions in full.

Museums keep the pairing in view. The Museum of Modern Art identifies the candle in Pablo Picasso's *Goat Skull and Bottle*, made in Vallauris, France, in 1951 and cast in bronze in 1954, as a memento mori, a reminder of mortality. The British Museum records a German watch case shaped like a skull, made around 1660 to 1670, and describes the miniature skull as a memento mori symbol with a long history reaching back to the medieval period.

The same museum holds a French ivory memento mori pendant of about 1600, attributed to Christoph Harrich, and a 1612 to 1615 engraving by Simon van de Passe showing a skull with an hourglass and flowers. Together they show a long link between skulls, flames, time and mortality, though they do not give every modern skull candle that meaning. The hourglass has its own story in skull and hourglass meaning.

In some folk-magic practice, practitioners describe a skull candle as a figure candle, a candle shaped to stand for something specific. In their accounts, the skull represents a head, the mind, thoughts, or a particular person whose attention is being addressed. The uses practitioners name include influence, communication, mental healing, ancestral wisdom and reflection on mortality.

Those are the practitioners' own descriptions of their practice, not meanings shared by everyone who lights a skull candle. A skull candle on its own does not belong to any of these practices. For more on how skulls appear on modern altars, and where they do not, our story on skulls in witchcraft goes further.

Santa Muerte devotion is a separate practice with its own devotees and its own ways. Anthropologists Kate Kingsbury and Andrew Chesnut, in "Holy Death in the Time of Coronavirus", describe a devotion with no single governing church or standard ritual. Many devotees keep home altars, sometimes with only a small image or a votive candle, alongside gifts such as water, flowers, food, alcohol and cigarettes.

One public altar in Mexico City has a well-documented beginning. In Tepito, Mexico City, Enriqueta Romero, known as Doña Queta, moved her Santa Muerte altar from her kitchen to the street outside her home in November 2001, after neighbors began leaving flowers and votive candles there, Kingsbury and Chesnut write.

Candle colors carry meanings that vary among devotees. Kingsbury and Chesnut document red candles for love, passion and lust; white for cleansing, blessing, peace and harmony; and black for protection, with associations in some settings with black magic and vengeance. These are votive candles, and a candle shaped like a skull is not automatically a Santa Muerte candle. The image on it, its wording, the altar it sits on and the devotee's own explanation are what place it in the devotion. Our story on Santa Muerte tells more about the devotion and its history.

A black skull candle carries different meanings in different hands. In Santa Muerte devotion, as Kingsbury and Chesnut document it, some devotees tie black votives to protection, and in some settings to black magic and vengeance. Other folk-magic practitioners may assign black to protection, removal or banishing.

In gothic decor, a black skull candle may simply be a color choice that suits the room. So, the meaning belongs to the person who lit it, and if you were given one, asking the giver is the surest way to know what they meant by it.

Whatever a skull candle means to you, it is still an open flame, and the National Fire Protection Association treats it the same as any other candle. A flame can ignite anything combustible nearby, so keep the candle at least 1 foot, or 30 centimeters, from anything that can burn, and set it in a sturdy, heat-resistant holder on an uncluttered surface. Keep it away from curtains, paper, books, bedding, decorations, children, pets, drafts and loose clothing.

Never leave a burning candle unattended, and put it out before you leave the room or go to sleep. The NFPA's detailed guidance adds that you should trim the wick to about 1/4 inch before lighting, follow the maker's burn-time instructions and avoid burning a candle all the way down. Use a snuffer rather than water, because water can make hot wax splatter and glass break. On altars and shrines, keep candles in sturdy, noncombustible holders and under adult supervision. NFPA also suggests flameless candles, which give an ofrenda or a mantel the look without the flame.

A few more short answers for anyone with a skull candle in hand.

If the candle on your table sits on an ofrenda, start with how to make an ofrenda. If it belongs to a still life or a memento mori shelf, what memento mori means is the next stop, and for the skull's wider range of meanings, see what a skull symbolizes. Candles are not the only thing a skull gets paired with, either: skull and butterfly meaning follows another pairing from Greek art to tattoos.

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