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mask131 · 29 days

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Greek mythology talk... About the incompatibility of modern sensibilities with Ancient Greek mentality.

Don't worry no rape or sexual talk. We'll do something more joyful... DEATH!

I want to talk about Thanatos, and about how the treatment of this personification in modern media reflects a fundamental fracture between modern mindset (well... modern American mindset let's be honest) and Greek mythology.

There has been a recent streak of interpretations of Thanatos as a fair deity, in all the senses of the term. Beautiful, needed, just, benevolent or neutral. And that Thanatos would be interpreted in such a way is very logical and... yeah kind of needed. We are currently living (or we have lived) a strong cultural shift when it comes to Death - where fiction has done its best efforts to destroy our fear of death, make us accept or embrace it in various way. We have gone through a lot of Death personifications that are all about being respectable or charming or funny or honorable entities: Pratchett's Reaper, Gaiman's Death of the Endless, Guillermo del Toro's Angel of Death, etc, etc... We are living in a culture that works to make Death a neutral principle, a force of nature beyond morality, or a benevolent and pleasant though grim and sad thing. Again, it is something we do need after millenia of us mortals being taught to fear and escape our own mortality, and this same fear or disgust of death causing us to do all sort of horrible things.

That being said... While it makes sense that such a way of thinking would be reverberated onto the Greek Thanatos, it poses a big problem. Thanatos was never meant to be a benevolent, fair or even just entity. That's actually a counter-interpretation of the Ancient character. And that's what I mean by how modern mindset has a hard time grasping the ideologies and philosophies behind the Greek myths.

Ancient Greek society was one of the main reasons behind Europe's fear of death. It is one of the roots of the "death is evil" mindset. And not accepting this is not just denying a reality, but also completely misreading the ancient myths. The Greeks feared death - and as such Thanatos is considered and called a "dreaded" deity, because all the gods associated with mortality were supposed to be terrifying. The same thing goes with Hades: he who must not be named, he who must not be seen. And unlike Thanatos Hades is actually a fair and honorable god - but still he was feared and avoided precisely because he is associated with and rules over death, which itself is a negative principle. Talk about death, you attract death (out of a superstitious mindset) and the Greeks would avoid that at all costs - for their main goal and ideal in life was to live. Remember: eternal life, immortality, was the purest and most perfect form of existence ever (hence why the gods are superiors to mortals). Death was never seen as pleasant or seducing in any way.

More than that: Death was filth. It is something typical of many Ancient societies, but the Greeks had it going VERY strongly. When someone died, it soiled the place and the people. Hence why there was a need for purification. Hence why murderers were more likely to be cursed and banished than rapists for example. Death was filth, a disease, a stain, something foul and vile, which needed to be cleansed. And the mere idea of the dead returning to the world of the living was one of the worst case scenarios ever - which is why Hades' threat in the Persephone myth was taken so seriously. It would not just be an "upset of the balance", it would be the end of humanity because the mere SIGHT of the dead returned would cause the living to go crazy of fright or die of terror or be broken out of shere repulsion. And it would soil the living world forever...

All of that to say: Thanatos, the embodiment of death, was not in Greek mentalities a good guy. There has been a long talk about "Let's un-demonize Hades", I myself participated in this talk, and I couldn't agree more. We cannot ignore that Hades was a feared, dreaded god that was avoided and recognized as a sinister force - but he was not evil, not a bad guy, not a Greek equivalent of the devil. He was just a neutral force of nature, someone performing a dirty but needed task, and someone who we feared because of what he could unleash and thanked for not unleashing this. He was feared and avoided, but the same way a prison warden or an executioner tends to be treated - we don't want to hang out with those people, but when they do their job by the law we thank them for being here. (Well for the executioner, it's debated depending on if you are for or against death penalty but that's another story)

Thanatos on the other hand... Its bad. Thanatos is not fair. Thanatos is not neutral. Thanatos is not just "acting by the law". Thanatos is a deity that is dreaded by all living beings and that terrifies them - and for a good measure! Thanatos is supposed to be all the darkness and horror and ugliness and violence and filfth of death combined into one person. It is Hades that maintains the order and the balance: not Thanatos. In several texts we have Thanatos described as an enemy of humankind, as an entity who delights in ending lives, as a god who enjoys more his job when he gets to kill young people, as an entity who sees his job as a privilege and will never let a mortal escape him without a good fight. Why does Zeus, when he wants to offer a peaceful and glorious end to his son Sarpedon, seds both Hypnos and Thanatos to him, not just Thanatos? Because, the text precises it as such - Hypnos is the one who is "painless". Aka, Thanatos is the pain. Death is a suffering in the Ancient Greek mindset, and this suffering is named Thanatos. Without Hypnos by his side to soothe his evil and veil his brutality, Thanatos only brings horrible diseases and brutal murders and vicious disasters. To die peacefully "in one's sleep"... That's Hypnos, not Thanatos.

And it isn't just Thanatos - he is affiliated with the Keres. And everybody forgets the poor Keres... Thanatos is sometimes described as drinking the blood of funeral sacrifices, making him look like a gruesome vampires. This is because the idea of a death as a bloodthirsty-vampire was typical of Ancient Greece - and can be found back within the Keres. These female spirits were in charge of death on battlefields and during wars - they were the female counterparts of Thanatos, the embodiment of brutal murders and death by weapons and manslaughter. And they were depicted as Erynies-like entities, a mix of vampires, frightening ghosts and corpse-eating birds, with an horrifying appearance, who terrified all those that saw them, and who spent their time ripping away bodies and drinking the blood of the living.

All of that to say, the embodiments of Death in Ancient Greece were deeply unpleasant. It was horror entities, and the "rehabiliation" of Thanatos does not answer the same questions and needs as the rehabiliation of Hades in modern perception of Greek mythology.

I want to insist that I do understand, and I accept and I can agree with a reading of Thanatos as a beautiful, fair, just or benevolent entity. Either as a subversion of Ancient Greek mythology (and it is not because we need to be better taught about the source material that we can't do subversions fit to modern days), either as a simple continuation of our own modern culture. Because we do have an entire aesthetic of the "beautiful Angel of Death" (or the "beautiful Lady Death"), AND we do live in a world where the arts and the philosophies rely on a multi-continental idea that Eros and Thanatos are a couple, a duo, twins. As such, making Thanatos a "dark Eros" is defendable, logical, expected.

But the problem still stays that the idea of Eros and Thanatos as a couple could NOT have existed within Ancient Greece, and this is something that needs to be understood. Eros and Thanatos had nothing to do in Ancient Greece. Aphrodite did not belong to the Underworld. The twins were Hypnos and Thanatos, sons of Nyx the Night. As such, if you want to do something truly faithful to the Ancient Greek mythology, you will need to do Thanatos as a petty, stubborn, evil, wicked, ugly, terrifying, horrifying thing - on various degrees and nuances.

It does not mean one needs to stick to this idea, of course, people can do anything they want in the end cause if we were bound by millenia-old tales when it comes to modern retellings we wouldn't have anything new or creative today... However I do strongly believe that people should be aware and recognize that having a "fair Thanatos" is in itself a subversion and reinvention of the Ancient Greek myths, and is not at all faithful to the Ancient Greek worldview in any way. "Fair Thanatos" can exist, and has existed for a very long time... But to pass it off as the "real" or "original" Thanatos of the Ancient Greeks is a misinformation and a lie. The Ancient Greeks hated and feared death. They thought it was filthy and ugly and disgusting and repulsive. And it might be hard to accept for us today, since we know that death is just a neutral thing and unescapable part of the cycle of life and how the world works... But that was the Greek mindset and the Greek worldview essential to understing Greek mythology - the same way we have to accept that the Greeks believed all waters came from the Ocean which was not an ocean but a gigantic river surrounding the world, or that we have to accept that the Greeks believed Black people were black because they lived in lands devoid of night and thus had their skin burned by the endless sun.

It clashes with our modern knowledge and sensibilities and morals, but if we do not know and inform ourselves about these fact that were basics and fundamentals for Ancient Greek poetry and culture, we will completely misread the Ancient Greek myths.

#greek mythology #greek gods #thanatos #hades #greek myths #ancient greek myths #ancient greece #death #personification of death #keres

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