The God of death

I recall of having said something about the feared ferryman in a previous post, this is no ordinary ferry man, he is mighty, he is deadly, and he instills chill and fear in those who does not know him.

He is the conductor of souls, verily he is death.

He comes in many guises and disguises, we think he is somewhere in the future but he with us every step. The whole universe is his play ground; he is the lord superior and the unopposed in it. He has no foes; of course he has few friends too.

In the west two coins are placed over the eyes of the dead as a payment to the ferry man, strange custom, but nice too. It can’t be a bribe, it’s offered in good faith, as a token of respect.

I know some are distressed whenever they hear this trickster mentioned. I can recall only Lorca as a worshipper of death in the west, he wrote beautifully. He was of the land of the bull fights, and death was a tangible presence in that land.

We don’t have any such in this land. There is the jellikkettu of the Tamils of course; it’s a very crude version of the bull fight. So death only comes to us in its ordinary ways, there is no gallantry attached to it..

But we have many names for him, mysterious and musical names, like Yama, and Mruthyu, we also call him Kaal, the time, for the time is death itself, it wipes everything out sooner or later. The Yama is the personification of death, he comes visiting at the moment of death astride a Mahisham or a mighty buffalo.

Now this Buffalo is quite a fellow in our mythology, it represents the unconscious, the ignorance, and the gross in all its varieties. The mighty godess Kali is ever depicted as standing with a foot on the breast of Mahisha after slaying him.

This Mahisha guy was a cool guy. He was born of a she-buffalo and had become powerful by the practice of magical arts and had taken over the entire world, in the manner the modern human civilization is aiming at. He even wanted to have Kali (Time in female form) as his partner.

Now the unconscious can’t become joined to the conscious. It had to be slain, whenever such manifestations happen Kaali kills him, this happens over and over again.

Well coming back to the term ‘death’ in English,

I searched for synonyms but could not find any; death is a standalone term in English it seems. Well of course you can go back to the Romans ( Viduus) or Greeks ( Hades, Zalmoxis ) or even back to the Sumerians /Acadians’. The Acadian Namtar is not bad, but strangely it has neither poetry nor power in it. This may be a personal view; to the Acadians it might have been the deadliest of terms.

But I like the Egyptian term of Wepwawet for death, he is an “Opener of ways” too, a kind of ferryman. The word feels soft and feathery, nice.

The ancient red Indians too have nice terms for death. The Maya term is the one I like the most. Cizin. The sad fact is that after the Spanish conquest this delightful god merged in Satan. The Incas have Supay as the god of death. The Aztec has the most unpronounceable death god. Xiuhtecuhtli- I have no hopes of pronouncing it in this year.

The Hebrew’s have Adriel as an angel of death. I am not forgetting the sefirah, the dark flame that started the revelatory/creative process, "Nothing" . I like the imagery.

The Irish have Balor it seems. The Norse mythology has Odin as the god of death.

I left the Australian Aboriginal god Eingana to the last because everything about her is funny. She seems to be the supreme god of the aboriginals. May be the whole conception shows crudity.

Anyway here are some of the names of death I found over the net during the search. May be it would be useful to some.

yama
mors
mara
osiris
anubis
namtar
auraka
balor
chamer
cizin
supay
cum hau
ethlinn
wepwawet
loki
odin
hau
aipaloovik
viduus
pikullos
baiame
rudra
xiuhtecuhtli
adriel xipe totec
zwezda polnoca
idun
aumakua
azriel
eingana
zalmoxis
hades
azriel
eingana
zalmoxis
hades
siva