O Death, Part 3: Dark Mother, Always Gliding Near

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

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Speaker 3: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with Part three in our series on personifications of death. When we think of death not as an abstract concept or process, but as a person, so I thought we should start off by recapping the things we've talked about in the past two episodes. We've already covered a good bit of ground wide ranging, so in Part one we mainly talked about common types of death and categories of death characters. So one distinction we talked about was the between the moment of death character who appears to the still living person in their last moments and then either signals that death is coming or somehow causes the death directly. This would be your classic grim reaper figure. And then the distinction between that and the figure known as the psychopomp, which comes from the Greek for soul conductor. This is the figure who shepherd's the souls of the dead into the afterlife. After that, we talked about four predominant categories of death figures that were proposed about fifty years ago in an influential book called The Psychology of Death by Castenbaum and Aisenberg, And these archetypes were the macabre, the comforter, the deceiver, and the automaton, and we explained in detail in those episodes what those mean. We also talked about some psychology research on these categories, like what contextual factors about a death might cause us to envision deaths as one of these characters as a seductive trickster versus a soothing helper and so forth. And then in part two, we started off by talking about the cultural evolution of death demon characters and aspects of these characters, including everything from the tools they carry to the clothes they wear and how those things could both reflect and inform how we feel about death itself. So an interesting example was does it change how you feel about death if the character of death is a harvester with a scythe versus a spinner with a pair of shears versus a fissure with a net. And this discussion was based on some Jungian ideas that rob you were reading in a book by an author named Edgar Hertzog. And then finally after that, we talked about some overlapping themes and overlapping jurisdiction even in certain worldviews between death personifications and personifications of fate, like you might see with the moirai in Greek mythology or with the norns of Norse mythology. And so we're back today to talk about more.

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Speaker 2: You mentioned how it changes the vibe of the death figure depending on what tools they have with them. You could really conduct an exercise by which any given person out there, whatever your your trade is your trade or or your you know, signifying hobby, whatever it happens to be, what is what is one? What are one of the tools of your trade or passion? Now imagine death holding that like it ends up pushing it in some direction, Like I don't know what it would mean if if death had a podcasting microphone. Yeah, yeah, it I mean it it implies something if death has a typewriter, or it maybe implies that death is telling a story and I guess you are the story and it's about to end. So it basically writes itself.

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Speaker 3: Wait, isn't there a short story about that where there's like somebody who has a magic typewriter and everything they type comes true.

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Speaker 2: There's what the word processor of the Gods, the old Stephen King short story that I think was made into a Tales from the Dark Side episode. Yeah so yeah, and it may have been explored in other places as well. All Right, So at this point in the series, we're gonna be getting a little more into the area of discussion that actually inspired me to pitch this series to begin with, and that's gender in the anthropomorphic personification of death, especially as far as female personifications are concerned. The specific inspiration for me occurred towards the end of last year. I underwent a routine surgical procedure that required anesthesia, and as I came out of anesthesia, I experienced a vivid dream of a female death entity. The death entity was shadowy, her face hidden, you know, as if there was a veil or hood, you know, whatever the case may be, and there was, you know, as I reflect on it, and you know, with the important caveat that reflection changes the memory or impression as I reflect on it, though, it does seem like there was a complex aura here that had, you know, elements of nurture during comfort, also eroticism as well. And at the same time, the experience was just rather overpowering as well, Like I came out of anesthesia feeling like shaken by this vision that I had just had vision slash dream, And I've thought about it pretty much every day since. Oh, so to be clear, just to go and get out of the way. I absolutely know this entity was the product of my own mind and fed by any number of experiences and cultural motifs. I mean, for instance, I was attended to by a nurse, my wife was there when I came to, My mother had died very recently, and I'd also consumed media just in the weeks prior that featured a female death incarnation. And as previously noted, death personifications are just simply everywhere. You can't avoid them. Even if they're not overt, they are at least implied.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, And as we discussed in the previous episodes, while male personfations of death tend to be more common among us subjects, I mean, there is always a mix of gender representation of death. They're like, yeah, you get you get male and female death figures throughout cultures.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. I guess one thing that impressed me though, or made me think a lot about it, was, you know, I had never been asked hey, draw death, what does death look like? I've been exposed to all these different ideas, but I never had I never had to choose. No one ever said pick one, and that's the one you have to reflect on. So so yeah, we'll come back to that here in a bit. But you know, it goes without saying that dreams alone are fertile soil from which things like this can rise. Of course, Hypnos, the Greek personification of sleep, is the twin of Thanatos, the personification of death. So these these things are closely linked throughout human myth making. We also know that anesthetic induce dreaming during surgery can produce vivid dreams, and in some cases of reading some papers about this can be transformative something we could potentially come back to in the future. Though I would say that I wouldn't necessarily classify what I experience or saw as truly profound. But it did make a strong impression, and you know, to some extent, I would say, maybe soothed some pre existing anxiety and in reflection, helped with some later anxiety as well. But it made me wonder, It's like, well, why this vision, where does this? Where does this come from? In the psyche in culture. You know all these things that I'm feeding off of because at the heart of everything, like my mind is said by the same basic symbols and motifs as count countless others in the world around me and throughout history, My core values and reflections on life are not that different from anyone else's. So you know, what did it and what does it mean to glimpse, in Whitman's words, the dark Mother always gliding near. Now we've already discussed some of the answers to these questions in the broad psychological clim classifications that we've already discussed, But in this episode we're going to be exploring it from a few additional angles, and then we will get into some specific examples of gender death entities and discuss where they come from and what they seem to me. So I'm going to continue to draw from Edgar Herzog's Psyche and Death as well as from The Gender of Death, A Cultural History in Art and Literature by Karl S. Gutka, a professor of German art in his and culture rather at Harvard. His focus is on the quote Western self in these matters, so on the whole he's generally dealing with European motifs. So if you're listening to this podcast in its original form, then you speak English or understand English, and probably have some experience with other languages as well, be it very little like myself, or perhaps you know, maybe English isn't even your first language, you just understand it well and there's another language that is closer to you.

00:09:01
Speaker 3: But you love to hear that. By the way, people who listen to us as for English as a second language, learning that really does feel very special. So we love to get those emails.

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Speaker 2: Yes, and definitely as you listen to what we're about to talk about. If you have specific examples from either your native language, your first language, or language you know really well or even just know better than I do, certainly write in We would love to hear from you on your examples. But most of you are probably already aware that grammatical gender systems exist and they vary. So, for instance, thinking back to my own now long ago German classes, I had to of course suddenly remember whether a computer is masculine, feminine or newter Do I say dere computer, d computer or dos computer? As an English speaking student, though this of course meant trying to catalog all of this in my head and thinking of things like computers and fruits conforming to is gender stereotypes, like imagining what kind of hat the computer is wearing or something stupid like that.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this is a common experience, Like coming from a language without grammatical gender, we end up, I think, applying more associations of biological or social gender roles on to grammatical gender than native speakers of those languages usually would, though I think it's not necessarily the case that none of those associations would ever exist, but they're probably more pronounced to you if you are coming from a language without grammatical gender, because you're not used to just how automatic it is to classify words without actually thinking about other connotations.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. So we'll get into whatever degree this seems to matter, especially when it comes to death personifications. But we'll go ahead and point out that death as a concept is gendered in different ways depending on the language. So in modern English, again, we have no grammatical gender. Likewise, in Turkish, Finnish, and Japanese, death as a concept has no grammatical gender. In the Romance languages and Slavic languages, the concept of death is feminine, and in Germanic, Semitic, and ancient Greek languages it's masculine. So we'll get into to what extent this matters, while also acknowledging that language itself is not the only factor at work here. So, for instance, it's not like all computer characters or artificial intelligence characters in German science fiction are male because computer is masculine. In fact, a lot of them seem to be female. So yeah, language is not the only factor influencing any of these personifications. But here is an interesting translation issue that I was reading about. So in the last episode I mentioned the character Death from Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. He's a major character and a handful of books, and a minor character and a bunch more. And these books are of course quite popular and have been translated into various languages. And I've seen numerous accounts online of international pratchet fans attesting to the fact that, due seemingly to the gender of Death in their own language, the male character of Death in some of the novels was translated as a female character.

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Speaker 3: Oh okay, so am I understanding this right? It's like, before there was any information given by the author about the intended social or biological gender of this character, all you had to go on was the word, and so the word just kind of defaulted to a female character.

00:12:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, or that was my main understanding, But then I don't know. The more I read about it seems like maybe I just don't know much about about major translations of works, Like there's a fair amount of art to it as well as just figuring out which word to switch in. So it seems like maybe some of the translators made this initial judgment call based on grammar, but then also embellished it a little bit more in the tech. But at first I thought, Okay, this must only concern the books where death is a minor character as opposed to a major one, But apparently it's the case with nineteen eighty seven's mort which is a major death book in the series. According to fan forums, it seems like it was an issue with this book and the overall. The gender issue in the Discworld books is sometimes addressed by the translators, and in fact there's a running gag apparently in French translations of the Discworld books where they have a footnote that's like, yes, Death is a male character and so forth. So I found that interesting.

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Speaker 3: That does call to mind some of the psychology research we were talking about in the first episode of this series, where remember across the four archetypes, the macabre, the comforter, the deceiver, and the automaton, all four of them were male biased, and so visions of death among these US participants were male biased overall, but the breakdown, the gender breakdown in representations was very different by category. So like you had the macabre and the automaton as overwhelmingly male biased representations, whereas you had more of a mix with the comforter and the deceiver. And I think that's interesting. I mean one way it's just interesting is that clearly like the two least likable of the of the or I don't know, the deceiver, I guess is also supposed to be bad but has a fun side. Yeah, And so like the the only two that have anything good about them are the ones that are more likely to have a more mixed gender representation.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, that's interesting.

00:14:41
Speaker 3: So maybe people just don't like dudes, or you don't want Death to be a man.

00:14:48
Speaker 2: Now that that is an additional interesting question that I don't know if I've seen anyone pull anybody on, like, which do you want death to be?

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Speaker 3: Like if you had your your pick?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I guess a lot of that it's going to come down to how you're already, Like, if you're already inclined to think of death as a seducer or as a nurturer than than you know, then that's going to influence an individual's choices in that matter.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, depending on like sexual preferences or preferences about parents and that kind of thing.

00:15:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, So coming back to this linguistic question, this grammatical question, what does what does Gutka have to say about it? Well? In gender of Death, this is actually his starting point. He brings up how at one point he was looking at a finish work by nineteenth century symbologist Hugo Simberg titled Death Listens and Joe. Interestingly enough, you you pasted this very work earlier on in our shared notes.

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Speaker 3: Yes, I dug up an image of this painting because I saw it. So I haven't read this book by Guti that you have, but I was looking at the first chapter from it because I found a pdf of that online. So I was looking at that in the reference to this painting, so I pulled it up, and I thought it was very interesting because, yeah, so death here is represented as a woman draped in black, but she's I don't know, something about the posture of this painting is very different and very interesting. I think we're used to seeing images where somebody's maybe on their deathbed, and then we see death hovering over them. In this the person who appears to be on their deathbed. Correct me if I'm interpreting this wrong. Is it way in the background, they're off in the background, and then in the foreground we have a younger person playing a violin, and Death seemingly too, seeming to be in communion with the younger person playing the violin, kind of just sitting there listening to the music. It's like the death is not even concerned with the dying person.

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Speaker 2: Without being super familiar with this work or you know, traditions it might be playing upon, it is a fascinating one. Like it almost feels like Death should be saying something to the effect of, hmm, well, this is awkward, Like maybe he's here to get the violinist and not the sick person. He's like actually, yeah, I'm here for you, not them, or it's something you know, or that's one of the interesting things about death personifications. It gives you an opportunity to think about death and all these death does feel kind of awkward here. Death is waiting as opposed to being a real active participant in the scenario, like leaping at you with a scythe or something.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, but so is Gutka asking the question is there anything about the particular cultural context in which this painting was produced or something about the intentions of the artist that caused them to depict death as a woman skeleton rather than as a man.

00:17:50
Speaker 2: Right right? And he writes that the prevailing explanation that he was met with regarding such portrayals was well, it's tied to grammatical gender, that it is grammatical determinism. But he's very firm on this that this doesn't really First of all, it doesn't make sense in particular cases such as this one, because Death Listens is a work by a Finnish artist, and again, the Finnish language has no grammatical gender, so there's no like gender determinist specific argument to be made here. And more importantly, he argues that in general, this argument breaks down as a primary explanation when you look at the different and many exceptions in pretty much any Western culture, which again that's the area he's looking at. Here to this supposed rule, they're just too many exceptions and too many varied exceptions.

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Speaker 3: You mean that there are many cases where there's a language where death, the word death has one grammatical gender, but you see lots of representations of death as the opposite gender in terms of embodied gender.

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Speaker 2: Exactly. Yes, So the evidence just doesn't really back it up. So Guka argues that in addition to classical mythological traditions, we just have this impactful interaction of images over the course of our cultural history. So ideas influence the exact form the death personification takes, and then these symbols are then received by human minds anew reinterpreted, you know, oftentimes across centuries, generating not only new ideas about the personification of death, but also new ideas and interpretations of death itself quote, creating new tensions and relationships between the grim reaper figures and their victims. It kind of comes back to, jokingly, we were talking about it. If you give what happens when you give the image of the grim reaper a podcast microphone. Yeah, it ends up, even on a lark, it ends up changing the idea that's being presented to you and could potentially change the idea in your head about that thing.

00:19:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a two way exchange. It might make you the tool or the contextual item that death has made you think about death differently, but probably also makes you think about the thing differently.

00:20:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:20:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, So in broad strokes, you know some of the ways that this plays out. He mentions how in Christian traditions, you know, we have death and sin associated with you know, the fall of even with Adam and Eve. And depending on who gets the most blame in that situation, and it's never the snake, it's always Adam or Eve that can influence how death ends up being gendered in one way or another. So if it's Eve, then we may have a tendency to feminize death. But then also when Adam is given more of the blame, we we have this like medieval motif of death as a male knight or a king or a laborer the reaper for example, after the fall, whereas with Eve we might have some of these more seductive or destructive feminine figures of death.

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Speaker 3: Interesting, I've never thought about it that way. You know, I've never done on like a deep historical dive on this, but I've just assumed that the by far the majority trend is to blame me if. I mean, there's kind of a sexist bias in this that says, like the woman she was deceived, it was not the man who was deceived.

00:21:13
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, and again we're talking about many different factors coming into play here and all this, and different trends that get picked up at different points in history, different literary and visual motifs. But the thing is like, once you say, for one reason or another, you end up depicting death as feminine, and then you have this feminine image more of the masculine image that may then be eroticized later on, and then that can change the import of the symbol. And so this sort of basic cycle can take place over the course of centuries, fueled by human creative impulses and the general reception and reproduction of images and ideas.

00:21:51
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, interesting, this chain reaction. So if death has a gender and if it becomes eroticized, that kind of determines who death becomes erotic two.

00:22:01
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So it's just one of the ways that these images really almost seem to become alive in a fashion, you know. Now, Guka stresses that these various images may or may not actually reveal anything about the nature of death, but they still quote open our eyes for aspects of the world of interpretation, that is, for humans, individuals and groups orienting themselves in their world by making such images and thereby ultimately defining themselves. Now, I'm not sure if this contradicts anything we've previously discussed, you know, I don't think it does, really, But Guka states that some cultures Spanish, French, Polish quote almost regularly unquote personified death as a woman, though in all manner of directions and lining up with you know, all of the four broad classifications that we discussed. She may be old or young, she may be horrifying or comforting, she might be a trickster or an automaton. And then we see in English and German a tennis towards the masculine death. But he stresses that in both of these culture sets we just see significant exceptions, and he ponders whether exceptions is even the right word, like rather it's more of a twofold image and a point of contemplation of not only death but also of life.

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Speaker 3: So even within like English and German speaking cultures, it's not necessarily that masculine death is the rule and feminine death is the exception. It's just more there is a somewhat of a bias towards masculine depictions.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he says that. Yeah, it would be incorrect perhaps to think of it as saying like, okay, well death is mostly male in this culture, and then some people think it's female. Like. It seems a lot more complicated than that, And much of it comes down to the power of images. Again, humans are just image makers, and our image shapes our world and helps us define ourselves. And one image is never enough. We have to have multiple images, especially when we're and this is something that you know, both of the main authors I was looking at really drive home is that death is such a huge concept that we can't really fit in our head all at once. And what we can do, though, is lean on these different symbols that enable us to contemplate it in different ways and on different levels.

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Speaker 3: One thing this is all raising for me is just the question of how, you know, in certain contexts, you could have a canonical representation of death that would essentially govern how you are supposed to think about death, and thus, you know, and if that governing image had a gender, then you would conform to that image. But a lot of times you're not going to have a canonical representation of death, so you can just actually think of it quite easily in multiple different ways with different characteristics, and it's not really hard to switch between them.

00:24:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean this is kind of a dumb example, but like in Farside cartoons, I feel like death is generally a masculine leaning grim reaper figure. But then in Marvel comics, death is feminine, and we don't feel like these two ideas are in conflict with each other and we need to go to war for which one is correct.

00:25:15
Speaker 3: Right, It's totally easy to recognize both, and I think that's probably because we live in a cultural context where there's not any canonical source that people recognize as having much authority that says death is one way or another.

00:25:27
Speaker 2: Right, And you know, we're generally dealing also again with an abstraction that is not so hard canonized within a religion, Like, it's not arguing. It's not like if when we're to suddenly start asking people about the gender of like the Christian God, that would.

00:25:42
Speaker 3: Be a more strong opinions.

00:25:44
Speaker 2: They have strong opinions about that, but you're not going to see that with the idea of personified death unless you get very particular to a given religion and say, Okay, what gender do you think the death angel is and so forth, and then yeah, they have that. There's a case to be made there.

00:26:02
Speaker 3: But I think because of that freedom and looseness, like because there's nothing that's forcing people to have a strong opinion about it one way or an. I mean, for the most part, there might be some self cultures in which there is, but mostly there's not. In American culture. I think that makes it especially interesting to study because you can instead see the gendering of death is a kind of free expression of tendencies and something that's not just constrained by somebody telling you how it is.

00:26:30
Speaker 2: That's right, and that's one of the things that Goodcud drives home is that, yeah, you have these different images that emerge via a number of different influences across time that speak to each other and they're varied. They say different things, things that maybe need to be said at a certain point in time or within a given culture. And you know, these are going to mirror the shifting cultural, theological and psychological anxieties of different eras, and one will go away, then it will be rediscovered later, you know, I mean, it's just need and culture. So in his book, he spends a fair amount of time, for instance, charting the change in the predominant gender of death as he identifies it in Europe out of the Middle Ages, with a mostly masculine death a reaper and a night giving way to a mixed diabolical death associated with the devil, then a masculine youth death during the age of Romanticism that is like a gentle friend will come back to that idea, and then more of a seductive, eroticized feminine death of decadence and modernity. So definitely a book worth picking up, and you know, very readable and absorbing if you really want to dive into that.

00:27:44
Speaker 3: I wonder if the idea of death as a as a male youth in the Romantic period in Europe is at all coming from the Greek influence, is because you know, thanatose is often represented as like a winged male youth.

00:27:58
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, definitely, yeah, that is something that he discusses. But one thing that this made me think about, and actually I was thinking about this a little bit in one of our previous episodes, is we're talking about the four basic death figure tropes and about how they serve different purposes and they cast death in a different light. I imagine most of you out there familiar with the idea of the stages of grief, the Koobler Ross model of you know, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. If nothing else, you've probably there's a great Simpsons moment where Homer goes through all of the stages in a manner of seconds. I think it's season two episode, and it's great fun and and and so forth. But that little moment on the Simpsons also implies something that I think a lot of us kind of take for granted and assume is maybe the case, and that is that the stages of grief are a sequential process that you begin with denial, then you cycle through anger, then you do a little bargaining, then you get depressed, but then you accept everything and it's over and you can move on. But as many of you know from personal experience or therapeutic guidance, you don't necessarily experience all of these stages, and you don't necessarily experience them in this order, and you don't necessarily experience each one of them only once it can. It's more like a roller coaster that maybe never stops. So in grieving the passing of a loved one or struggling with your own mortality, you might feel anger one day, and then the next day you feel acceptance on some level, but then you're angry the day after that, and it's you know, that's that's normal, that there's nothing there's nothing. You know again, you don't have to go through these stages in order. We can feel a lot of different ways about death, and therefore it makes sense that we might need more than one death personification to sort of understand everything, even if this understanding is again taking place kind of in the background of consciousness and not as a, you know, a focal point of our contemplation.

00:30:01
Speaker 3: That's a good point. I think this should have been somewhat obvious, but I don't know if we ever said this explicitly. I don't think any of the research on on like the prevalence of the you know, the cast Enbaum and Aisenberg for archetypes of death was suggesting that individual people consistently think of the same image. I think it was more like asking people at a particular time to test the relative abundance of different types of death imagery. So you can get some general ideas of how people often think about death by asking them, but you wouldn't necessarily expect the same person to give you the same answer a year later.

00:30:38
Speaker 2: Right, right, And we also mentioned how it may shift if they're thinking about their own death versus the death of another, so exactly. Yeah, So there's there's no consistency there, so yeah. Via various gender stereotypes and gender roles in a given culture, differently gender deaths may serve different purposes. The masco and death might work or with views of a hunter or a judge, or with an automaton or the macabre, while the feminine might work better with the idea of a lover or bride, the gentle comforter, or the gay receiver. And none of this is firmly set. Gutka also stresses that we might personify different types of death based on scale. So again, he's looking at Western traditions like medieval art and so forth. But you might have individual deaths leaning more male in the personification of a grim reaper figure, while there would be a tendency for it to be more often feminine if you're dealing with mass deaths such as deaths from the plague.

00:31:43
Speaker 3: Interesting, that's almost the exact opposite of what I would expect.

00:31:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean it stirred something in my mind and I was like, oh, a mass death and modern understanding, that's kind of like a mega death, right, you know, the idea of like if you have a million deaths which hers during say a nuclear war, that would be you would be talking about how many mega deaths resulted. Mega death, of course, is also the name of a popular metal band. It's been around for a long time, and they have a mascot. I didn't know this mascot's name. I've seen him before in imagery named vic Rattlehead, and he is exclusively a male, skeletal reaper figure. This is kind of a terrible example because I mean you can also throw in well, okay, thrash metal is a very masculine world, and you know this is maybe pointless and senseless and there's no real meaning to draw from any of it, but I can't help but bring it up.

00:32:40
Speaker 3: I think, actually this is incredibly culturally apt to mention because we really so far haven't discussed the irony inherent in a lot of personifications of death, Like a huge number of visual representations of death and personifications are suppose used to be a little funny, often wikidly funny, or there's something I don't know if I don't know if you say it's supposed to be mainly funny, but there's something other than just serious meaning implied by it. It's a way of playing Like it's imagery that people are using because it feels dangerous in a way that's fun, and they're doing it with a smart with a smirk. So like, what is what's going on with death personification there? When you know the embodiment in a in a character allows you to play with that character and have fun with it.

00:33:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean we mentioned Farside earlier. You know, the usages like that for the Grim Reaper are fairly common, you know, pops up in all sorts of cartoons and children's media, and yeah, and in this specific example, Vic Rattlehead is seemingly an ironic character. I'm not sure how great the comedy necessarily is, but you know, like one of the images I pulled out, like I think in general generally, there's this motif that he is blinded and deathened and also can't speak, so he can see no evil here, no evil speak, no evil, and he's also a skeleton. Maybe it's kind of a muff metaphor going on here, but yeah, it does seem to be played for sort of edgy whimsey.

00:34:19
Speaker 3: I guess, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. So I said in a previous episode that you can sort the different death archetypes depending on where they come from emotionally, and the example I gave was that you're probably more likely to think of the gentle comforter type figure as a coping mechanism. If you're embodying death personifying death that way, it helps you soothe your fears about death, whereas thinking of death as the macabre figure is probably more a raw expression of the fears rather than a way of soothing or coping with them. But this is causing me to rethink that I think maybe a lot of macabre representations of death are coping mechanisms because they allow you to play with the image and have fun with it, which is a way of whistling through the graveyard.

00:35:10
Speaker 2: It is.

00:35:11
Speaker 3: It does actually help you cope. It says, I'm not afraid because I'm making a joke out of this.

00:35:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And it is interesting how many depictions of the Grim Reaper, especially when I've seen him in various films. The depictions can kind of have a leg in both in both buckets, you know, you can have a depiction that is a little bit goofy but also a little bit scary. Cinematic depictions of death from Pratchett's novels I think line up with this. I'd say the same about the musical Scrooge. I'd say the same about the work of Terry Gilliam as well. Which which show which one does see show.

00:35:53
Speaker 3: Up in it is the Time Bandits.

00:35:56
Speaker 2: He might death might show up in that, but also Baron Munchausen. Yeah, yeah, death shows up in that. And while and part of that is like the puppetry, I guess of the thing, like puppetry can also be at once frightening and also humorous. Yeah, symbology is complex. Now getting into another area with a lot of ins and outs. Here, some very large concepts are tied up in death personifications that to take on the gendered form of a mother or a lover, with the mother personification generally taking on an air of gentle comforter with with some caveats, while the lover may be either gentle or or it might be the gay deceiver. So Gutka, going back to his work, he has a lot to say about the romantic period, in which death is frequently cast as a dear friend. We alluded to the earlier. A couple of examples from this period. One of is from John Keats o to a Nightingale. Famous example, he writes, I have been half in love with easeful Death, called him soft names, and many amused rhyme to take into the air my quiet breath. Yeah. Another example was found in Shelley's poem Queen Mab which begins, and I'm going to try and express the exclamation points here begin to tears. How wonderful is death? Death and his brother's sleep, one pale as yonder waning moon, with lips of lurid blue, the other rosy as the morn. When throned on ocean's wave. It blushes over the world yet both so passing wonderful. Okay, calm down, Percy. You know that's what Percy's all about. You do get the sense, not just there, that he was really excited about death. Yeah, and again you know, the closest between sleep and death. This again goes way back between rest and eternal rest, both in their own way or return to the well of unbeing which came before us. As Edgar Herzog explores in the book Psyche and Death, this is, you know, all, one of the main openings that occurs when we give the concept of death a human form, because you know, more powerful than tool, weapon or clothing metaphors. The human form allows the figure of death to replicate important, actual human beings in our own lifespan. So it gives us a relational context.

00:38:39
Speaker 3: As they say, that is interesting, and that also connects to remember when we talked about the four archetypes, the finding from the psychologists that people felt different levels of emotional closeness to the characters. So like the macabre figure, the monster and the comforter were both actually thought of as close to the dying person, but in good and bad ways or bad and good ways respectively. Yeah, whereas you had the automaton figure, the one that is un you know, sort of expressionless and unfeeling, and that's the one that's thought of as emotionally distant. So I wonder if maybe that one is less informed by relationship to people you have known in your life. Maybe that that is an expression in some ways of not knowing how to fill in the personal details of the the embodied death you imagine. But yeah, yeah, I definitely think about like, do you identify death with an enemy you have had, or someone you're afraid of who means you harm, or with someone you have loved.

00:39:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, it comes back to again the realization that death is too big of a concept for humans to really understand, and we we didn't evolve to understand it. We did evolve to be social animals with theory of mind to understand people in our community, to under to have a a theory of mind, a simulated model of the mindset of someone we love, someone we fear, but someone And therefore, if we take this sort of mold that pre exists, like a social mold of an individual human being, and we pour death into it, then we have some way to interact with it and make sense of it, ultimately an incomplete way, but one a way that may best fit our individual needs at a given time. Like I don't know how to think about death, but I know how to think about a friend, I know how to think about a lover, or I know how to think about a loving parent or an enemy. And if I pour death into that mold, well then now I have something to work with at least I can. You know, It's like I can at least work out some of these feelings via this context. Yeah, and so so. In the book Hertzog you know gets into this. He points out that of relationships you can have, some of the most potent are going to be mother, father, and bride or bridegroom. And naturally this sort of thing applies to various forms of anthropomorphic personification and the generation of various gods and even monotheistic gods, but he pays more attention here to the mother and bride or bridegroom examples. He does point out that like Odin could be considered kind of a death father, but he links the death mother not only to like womb to tomb dualities, but also to Mother Earth, to the devouring ground, and he argues that in this the death Mother can be quite frightening and also numinous and mysterious and strange, but also ultimately affirming, robbing death of some of its more senseless attributes. Again the gentle comforter. So that's an interesting thing to think about too, Like the gentle comforter can also I guess, be terrifying or mysterious as well. Like it's it doesn't have to be completely purely this one thing.

00:41:53
Speaker 3: Well, and that actually is there in the original research. You remember there was that passage in Casten Belm where he's talking about the He includes i think actually the words of one of their survey respondents originally who was describing this comforter figure and says that you know, yeah, they are there to soothe you. They're there to be kind and to help you. But also there's a mysteriousness and a firmness. There's something about them that isn't going to be persuaded. You know, it's unyielding, and it's working at purposes that are sort of beyond your understanding, and yet it is kind, it is there to help. Very interesting duality in fact, probably the way a lot of especially very young children relate to their parents. When you're very young, when you don't understand the reasons why you're being told you can't do something that seems very important to you. You might understand that your parents love you and want to help you, but they have purposes beyond your comprehension and they cannot be plied or persuaded.

00:42:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And I think that's definitely one of the many things that factors into this particular idea, in this particular symbol of death, you know, in addition, like the mother who puts us to sleep or in this case death, but with comfort security at the beginning of life and at its end, the need of a caretaker on both ends of things, Andrew return to the source, be it to the mother or to the earth, or just to unbeing in general. Hertzog argues that death as bride or bridegroom is closely linked to the idea of like the death mother, the death bride is also an ancient motif, and he makes an argument that Ishtar and the epic of Gilgamesh is ultimately an example of this. The death bride embodies the passion mystery and even longing wound up in death as well as seduction, there is a union between such a death figure and the dying. Death in the Maiden is a popular Renaissance treatment that he mentions, focusing on the death bridegroom luring away a mortal woman to her death, but not you know, not killing her, but luring her away. It is a matter of seduction. We've already touched on gay decy of for motifs involving death is an alluring but secretly monstrous female figure. But the other side of that is also again the notion that it's this thing that will claim us in a loving or erotic matter, you know, envisioning death as the ultimate intimate union between entities, between death and the dying, and this leads to leads to or feeds into eroticisms of the figure of death and euroticisms of death in general, you know, perhaps playing into you know, if we're to discuss Freud's death drive argument, you know, like it lines up pretty well with all of that. So again they're just there are many compelling examples, and they reveal different things. And again I think that's largely the point. Death is too big for us to understand. We're not hardwired to understand it. We're hardwired to understand individuals or create an understanding of individuals in our minds. And by imagining death as a person, it gives us social animals something that we can work with, something we can do well.

00:45:14
Speaker 3: So we were remaining in today's episode to end up talking about a very interesting feminine death personification, especially in Latin American culture, is known as Santa Marte. But I think we're out of time for today, so we don't have time to do this. We're going to have to move this to part four, aren't.

00:45:32
Speaker 2: We, Yeah, I think so. But this will be great because we'll get to discuss this particular example of a feminine death figure and we can either come back to maybe I'll come back to one of the ones I mentioned more in passing in this episode and give it a little more treatment, or pick out something entirely new. So in either event, we'll have much more to talk about in the next episode of our Death series. Here in the meantime, just a reminder to every one out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a little short form episode on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

00:46:15
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

00:46:37
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Had had the pocop