![]() ![]() In this painting he is holding the wheel of life in his mouth and claws, symbolizing the inevitability of death. He carries a piece of rope with him, which comes in handy when he gets busy retrieving the soul from a corpse. This embodiment of death is typically portrayed as having dark red or blue skin and travels by water buffalo, which curiously links to the Western images of the Grim Reaper, who is known to travel by horse. In East Asia, Yama is depicted as the lord of death. ![]() “The Wheel of Life,” used as a meditation tool by Buddhist Yama ![]() “Sleep and his Half-brother Death” by John Waterhouse, 1874 Charon then carried the dead across the river Styx, from the world of the living to the world of the dead. In this way, Thanatos is also a ‘psychopomp’, an entity that helps guide the dead into the afterlife. In the event of mortal death, Thanatos would come and cut off a lock of the deceased’s hair before taking them to the Underworld and leaving them with another one of his brothers, Charon the ferryman. He was mainly associated with a peaceful, gentle death, in contrast to his other siblings, for example, the bloodthirsty sisters Keres. The Greek called into existence Thanatos, son of the Night (Nyx) and twin brother of Sleep (Hypnos). This Dance of Death personified death as skeletons that rose from their graves and literally joined each other and the living in a macabre dance, hereby reminding us that no matter our status in life, death is the ultimate equalizer it eventually comes for us all. Inspired by the horrors of the Black Plague in the late-medieval era that killed nearly a third of the world’s population, an artistic genre called Danse Macabre emerged. “Danse Macabre” woodcut by Hans Holbein, 1648 The giddy skeletons of the Danse Macabre He travels by horse, which can be traced back to the Book of Revelation in the bible where Death is named as one of the four horsemen who, according to Christian apocalyptic beliefs, come to announce the Last Judgment. The scythe he carries, big enough to chop off someone’s head with a single sway, symbolically implies he is the harvester of souls. Does an inanimate being automatically represent, or become Death itself?”ĭepicted as a ghostly pale man – later on developing into the image of a skeleton – and holding a scythe, the Grim Reaper is probably the most popular personification of death. “Why do we tend to make Death look like us? Skeletons belong to the living just as much as to the dead. To put a face and voice to this counterforce of life, we have created numerous images to give death an identity throughout history. But what death exactly is or looks like, we do not know. Our fear of death is ultimately at the core of all our other fears. We tell each other scary stories about these horrifying beings to channel our own shadow side. These are just a few of the mythical creatures man has created to project his fears onto. The Boogeyman, Dracula, mutated monsters, zombies, and man-eating werewolves. ![]()
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