When Azrael was placed in charge of him and saw him, he called the angels to look at him, and when he, at God’s command, spread his wings over him and opened all his eyes, the angels fainted away and remained unconscious for a thousand years. “When Death was created by God, he, on account of his terrible power, had to be put in 70,000 chains of a thousand years’ journey’s length each, and behind millions of barriers. Far from having the power to cease life at will, Azrael is described as carrying out God’s instructions by being the master of Death – an immense and terrible beast which God created. Azrael is considered to be an angel of great and noble power, chosen by God to command many lesser-ranking angels tasked with pulling souls out of bodies and transporting them through the the journey of the afterlife. Some are merely performing a necessary task.Īccording to texts of the Abrahamic religions, one of the the angels of death is Azrael. Looking beyond the traditional grim reaper figure, not all entities associated with death are quite as ominous. The skeletal grim reaper was the great equaliser of medieval society. People from all classes would dance together with skeletal figures off to the afterlife in paintings, woodcuts and plays.Ĭontemporary poetry, including this verse which was directed at the Holy Roman Emperor, reinforced the reality that all will be reaped by death in time. The Danse Macabre artistic movement was born in the centuries which followed. At the time of the Great Plague, Death reigned as king.Īll peoples across Europe acknowledged and even drew inspiration from the overlordship of death. Swathed in black, the grim reaper lurked in the shadows, waiting to reap his next, unsuspecting, victim. Īt a time of great misery, it was perhaps inevitable that death was personified in art and literature as a figure of terror. 1 “Where Does the Concept of a “Grim Reaper” Come From?” Amy McKenna. Whilst estimates of the death toll range wildly, some historians have suggested that as many as sixty percent of Europe’s total population fell to the sickness. The inexorable plague swept across the land, leaving piles of bodies in its wake. This ominous symbol of death can be traced back to fourteenth century Eurasia, and one of the darkest periods in human history – the Black Death. An Engraving of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death, published in 1756. A skeletal creature, the traditional grim reaper is death, able to cut down human life with his scythe as easily as he would harvest wheat. The most common imagery associated with the grim reaper is that of a figure dressed in a long, black cloak holding a scythe. ![]() In some cases, there are even people who claim to have encountered the grim reaper themselves. Yet, this entity is more than just a psychological coping mechanism: it is a being which has permeated folklore and beliefs across time and space. The grim reaper, or the Angel of Death as he is sometimes called, provides us with a tangible creature to embody the confounding concept of death. For centuries, mankind has searched for a means to make sense of the end of life. Contemplation of our own mortality often simultaneously incomprehensible and terrifying. The loss of a loved one an indescribable agony. Death is incredibly difficult for many of us to cope with.
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