DEATH
As we have seen it is a very ancient belief that it is of great importance to take care of the dead the best possible way. The believes and superstitions surrounding this state that every human must go trough are many and varying. And that people soon started to believe that someone guards over this process, and that which happens afterwards in the after-life, is perhaps not that strange, whether it may be a god or an angel or just a personification.
Main Page
Death in Ancient Egypt
Death in Ancient Rome
The Christians and Death
Modern concepts of Death
Death in Ancient Egypt
The Kingdom of the Dead in Egypt had its own king, Osiris. He had begun his career as any other god, fell in love with his sister in their mother’s womb, arose his brother Seth’s wrath and was slain and dismembered. But his sister/wife, that is Isis, was a good woman and collected the remains of her husband and he was brought back to life. Their son Horus avenged the murder. But after this it was seen fit that he would become king of the Underworld. There he would rule over everyone who entered – and that was really everyone since everyone eventually will die.
As we have seen death was a serious thing for the Egyptians, in the Afterlife everything would continue so it was important to bring everything along, and to have a Book of the Dead in the luggage. There was written how to enter, what formulas to say and so on. One of the big events was to enter the court of Osiris and there be judged after how you had lived one’s life. Everything was measured and had to be in perfect balance, otherwise the soul was devoured by a monster.
If you did survive this meeting with this god you were free to enter this new world, and live on just as before – with some obvious exceptions, you never died again and you could work in your best clothes, not to mention that you could have little figurines that did the work for you as they came to life here.
The Greeks had Hades, the lord of the place with the same name. The Romans had Pluto. Pluto was also the god of plenty, but when the Greek culture became the great vogue among the Roman culture elite – which happened already in republican times – the Roman gods became identified with Greek counterparts. In this case that meant that Pluto and Hades became one and the same.
This means that many of the legends connected with Hades now became apart of the ideas surrounding Pluto. This includes how he got his with, Prosperina - the Latin form of Persephone – who was abducted from her mother Demeter, which is the cause for the winter and the summer. When Prosperina is with her mother it is summer, and when with her husband in the Underworld, it is the cold and dreary winter since her mother is grieving for her and do not have time to tend to the growing things in nature.
The realm of Pluto was Hades, the same place as in the Greek mythology. There was Charon who ferried the dead over the river Styx in his boat – and the reason a dead person should be buried with a coin so that he could pay for the trip and didn’t have to spend the rest of eternity in some kind of limbo. There was Cherberus, the multi-headed dog. And there were all those famous persons who had to pay for wrongs they had done in their lives, mostly things that had angered the gods. Hades was not a fun place to visit, and it wasn’t supposed to be either.
The Christians and Death
The Christian mythology has in itself no god of Death. As it is a monotheistic religion it would have been very strange indeed had they had one. This means that God also has control over this aspect of the human beings. The interesting aspect for Christians is not who will supervise them in life after death but where one will go, to heaven or to hell. Hell is watched over by the Devil, but he, of course, is no god in any sense of the word.
But the interest in death, and perhaps one should say Death, did not go away this easily. It returned in full force during the Middle Ages, and more exactly in the 14th century. Why this happened at that particular moment can of course be debated. For example, in Northern Europe it was hardly before this time that the population in every aspect was Christian. Of course they had belonged to the church for centuries, but older belief-systems still lingered on and perhaps there they could find answers to their questions about what happened when someone died and where the soul went, and how, et cetera.
The 14th century was also the time of the great plague, or actually plagues as it hit the population in Europe (and the rest of the world) several times. It was now the pictures came that shows Death dancing, showing that to Death everyone was equal, everyone will die. And Death now shows himself as we still see him today, a grinning skeleton.
Modern concepts of Death
Today people tend not to believe that a grim reaper will appear at their door when it is time to depart from this life. The hooded man with the scythe is still present, but it is not the same. Death is much more in the hands of doctors and scientists, there is really no place for something that has to do with superstition and lore. That is not to say that not anyone believe in anything – but even as a good Christian (or whatever religion you participate in) death is today much more of something biological and decease can be explained without mixing any belief-system into it.
This said it has to be said also that just because Death as a person is not present in today’s believes, it does not automatically mean that Death as a person has been erased from the human conscious. It is actually quite the opposite. Anyone familiar with the iconography of Heavy Metal know there is an abundance of symbols linked with Death, from the hooded skeleton with his scythe himself, to hour-glasses, skulls and so on. The fact it also often include pentagrams and other symbols associated with devil-worship and things like that is quite another story that I will not go in to.
But you do not have to be an ardent fan of music that will make you deaf before the age of 30 to run into Death in today’s culture. One example is the TV-series ‘Dead like me’ that gives quite a down-to-earth view on what happens when you have passed a way. It deals with a group of (dead) people that works as modern reapers, that is they collect the souls of the living before they die. And another good example is the character Death in Terry Pratchett’s very popular Discworld-series. Here Death is the skeleton with cowl and scythe, he talks with BIG LETTERS, loves cats and have a great interest in the human life – which he does not always get the hang of, even though he tries very ardently. He even at one time adopts a daughter!
Main Page
