How Do You View Death?

[Fausta]

As this is in the "Gods, Goddesses and Mythology" -section, I'm asking this: How do you view Death - as in the god or goddess thereof? Have you interacted with any of the deities associated with death and if you have, what were your feelings? With or without that kind of interaction, do you view Death as a fearsome figure or not?

One reason for me to ask this is because of a working gone even deeper I imagined and of a god I met there and what happened. Usually, this particular god hasn't seemed to get true cult and there isn't that much UPG to find either - but to me he was clear as crystal about his identity. Now, I'm a not-recon but recon-minded and I'm still wondering. In my own mind I'm dead sure (pardon my pun), but...

This was almost a decade ago, but due to info relating to that particular god and the lack of UPG, I'm still hesitant to say who it was who said "keep being fascinated by death, but as soon I got you handed over by Anpu, I knew my job was to keep you alive" and that he did.

[Materialist]

As this is in the "Gods, Goddesses and Mythology" -section, I'm asking this: How do you view Death - as in the god or goddess thereof? Have you interacted with any of the deities associated with death and if you have, what were your feelings? With or without that kind of interaction, do you view Death as a fearsome figure or not?

Death fearsome? No, based on my experience of having been put under general anesthesia several times (I didn't know I had lost consciousness until I regained it hours later) dying would be like that. The moment of death, anyway; the events leading up to one's dying could be quite horrible in some cases.

Death is the completion of one's life cycle, the returning of one's atoms to their material origins. How could that be scary? They only true form of immortality, in my view.

[Altair]

As this is in the "Gods, Goddesses and Mythology" -section, I'm asking this: How do you view Death - as in the god or goddess thereof?

She's busy. Devoted to her work, and takes it very seriously. She's drop-dead gorgeous yet a bitter beauty, all knotted up inside about how things have panned out for her. Her words are inordinately powerful.

[Frostfire]

As this is in the "Gods, Goddesses and Mythology" -section, I'm asking this: How do you view Death - as in the god or goddess thereof? Have you interacted with any of the deities associated with death and if you have, what were your feelings? With or without that kind of interaction, do you view Death as a fearsome figure or not?

One reason for me to ask this is because of a working gone even deeper I imagined and of a god I met there and what happened. Usually, this particular god hasn't seemed to get true cult and there isn't that much UPG to find either - but to me he was clear as crystal about his identity. Now, I'm a not-recon but recon-minded and I'm still wondering. In my own mind I'm dead sure (pardon my pun), but...

This was almost a decade ago, but due to info relating to that particular god and the lack of UPG, I'm still hesitant to say who it was who said "keep being fascinated by death, but as soon I got you handed over by Anpu, I knew my job was to keep you alive" and that he did.

 
She is gorgeous and conflicted, she is a woman of strong passions and subtle strength. I've always seen her with owl talons and leonine eyes.

Her counterpart is slower to act and gentler in nature if she is winter he is summer.. they are both death, just different aspects or faces to it.  She comes with owls as her escort, he holds court with crows.

[Fausta]

She

 
Jumping from this post just to stop and think how Death has always projected as more male than female to me.

[Laveth]

Jumping from this post just to stop and think how Death has always projected as more male than female to me.

 
Me too. When I was approached a decade or so ago (it doesn't happen anymore, that path has run its course), it was a masculine figure.

I wouldn't say fearsome, but I would say... not something you would dare think of lightly. Gentle, calm, but incredibly focused and sees straight into the truth of matters.

[Altair]

Me too. When I was approached a decade or so ago (it doesn't happen anymore, that path has run its course), it was a masculine figure.

I wouldn't say fearsome, but I would say... not something you would dare think of lightly. Gentle, calm, but incredibly focused and sees straight into the truth of matters.

For me, this describes Death's father, the god of the unknown.

[Materialist]

Jumping from this post just to stop and think how Death has always projected as more male than female to me.

 
It could go either way for me. Death of the Endless from the Sandman graphic novel series has stuck with me, but when I wrote an (unpublished) poem-fable, a male figure was used, because that is what the story needed.

[Laveth]

For me, this describes Death's father, the god of the unknown.

 
Hrm, that brings another potential dimension to the situation. I'll have to ponder that for awhile.

[IceAngie]

Jumping from this post just to stop and think how Death has always projected as more male than female to me.

 
I don't see Death as neither male nor as female. I speak of Death as if It was female because in Spanish, it's a female noun ("la Muerte"), but It's energies are not perceived as having any gender by me. It just is.

[Fausta]

Me too. When I was approached a decade or so ago (it doesn't happen anymore, that path has run its course), it was a masculine figure.

I wouldn't say fearsome, but I would say... not something you would dare think of lightly. Gentle, calm, but incredibly focused and sees straight into the truth of matters.

 
Noddingnodding to both.

To the latter I'd add a feeling of a kind of infinite sadness: it's not a job that makes one, even a god, light-hearted.

[Fausta]

For me, this describes Death's father, the god of the unknown.

 
Can you expand on this? Sounds like something needing pondering here.

[Laveth]

Can you expand on this? Sounds like something needing pondering here.

 
Yessss, exxxpaaandddd. :p  (Ok yeah, I had a weird moment)

[Valentine]

Noddingnodding to both.

To the latter I'd add a feeling of a kind of infinite sadness: it's not a job that makes one, even a god, light-hearted.

 
You meet a lot of people on their very worst day, and the job never, ever, ever stops.

Back when I worked with the Lord of Hades, I explained this a lot to people who thought He was so terribly grim and stern and forbidding: He didn't ask for the job, He was assigned it after losing a dice-roll.  And while the other Gods party on Olympos, take lovers, ride the waves, whatever, He never, ever gets a break.  Just administration of an enormous realm that will eventually be bigger than everyone else's, management of a staff that includes some very nasty creatures, and a literally endless line of people all begging, "It wasn't my time, I have a family, I have a magnum opus, my children will starve, please just one more day," and He has to say to every single one, "If I made an exception for you, I'd have to make an exception for everybody."  Forever.  In the entire mythological corpus, I think He leaves His realm twice.
There are kind and loving faces of Death, but I think the only perky one is Neil Gaiman's.

[Altair]

Can you expand on this? Sounds like something needing pondering here.

It's peculiar to my mythos, though this god clearly has counterparts in other mythologies. The god of the unknown (or, more poetically, the Lord of Things Unseen) is called Night in most of my myths, though that's not his actual name. He wears black robes that blend into his black surroundings, and his face is eternally hidden in shadow. He's a thinker, hungry for knowledge, to which he has nearly total access--no shadows are hidden from him. He can be a trickster, and he knows how to manipulate a situation to get exactly what he wants. You don't trifle with him and come out on top, and if you think you have, it serves some purpose of his to have you think so. In his native dark, his words, his least spoken whims, carry absolute power. He's not evil or cruel, but neither does he follow anything that you or I would recognize as a moral code. His voice--a smooth baritone, like velvet--is his signature.

So when Laveth posted the description above, I immediately thought of Night.

Night seemed especially apt because he presides over the shadowlands, a realm a sidestep away from our familiar world and interwoven with it. It is the realm of the "other", of thought, of things normally beyond our reach, hidden in the dark. And it is the realm of the dead.

Night has twin daughters, one of whom is Death. Her thankless and endless task is to bring souls to her father's domain permanently.