We return to our occasional series on Terry Pratchett’s work, but with a difference. The fourth Discworld book, Mort, focuses on a personification of death. We therefore use it as a jumping off point to discuss personifications, and the personification of death in particular through history. We probably end up spending more time on the Iliad and the Aeneid than on Mort.

The Greeks did not have a personification of the moment of death itself - you’ve got Ares, god of slaughter, Persephone, the psychopomp, you’ve got a king of the underworld, but no Death. The Romans came closer to a Terry Pratchett-esque Death personification, appearing in Virgil when Dido kills herself. Juno sends down Iris (the female counterpart of Hermes), who cuts the link between the queen’s body and her spirit. But this is not Iris’s primary duty, she’s a more general psychopomp.

Pratchett’s Death is medieval - in appearance this is the Death that emerges in Europe during the Black Death, and reaches its final form as a skeleton with a cloak and a scythe in nineteenth century England. In most of Europe, actually, Death was a woman, and in many ways that feels more fitting. One intuitively feels that a woman has a much better understanding of death than a man - and on the Discworld, witches embrace death and treat it pragmatically, while wizards fear death and are always trying to escape it. But Pratchett is playing off English folklore, and Death’s masculinity allows him to explore more masculine traits like duty.

Terry Prachett’s philosophy is that death is an event we need to be comfortable with - scary, inevitable, but it should be accepted. We should be at peace with the fact that we’re going to die. His personification of Death reflects this - yes, intimidating, powerful, dreadful, but also kind to cats, fond of humanity, doting on his granddaughter, sentimental. In fact, Death is one of the most sympathetic characters on the Discworld. This view of death was given more colour later in Pratchett's life when he became a vocal proponent of assisted suicide.

But now we’re all scared of death. In the modern world we do not have a healthy relationship with it. The Athenians had the mysteries of Eleusis, through which they psychologically conquered death and lost their fear of it. We have Christianity, which is supposed to do the same, but we seem to have reclaimed the pre-Eleusinian bleakness regarding death that we see in Homer. If we even think about death at all.

A society’s attitude to death is absolutely fundamental. This is not a test our society is currently passing. In personifying death, we are not personifying the biological process itself but rather what that process means to us, how it affects us, and especially how it affects the friends and family of the person dying. We would probably benefit from returning to a personification of death in the wider culture as a starting point for society's return to health.

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37. On “Natural”

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35. On Museums