Who is Death?

Death is represented as a silent cloaked figure wielding a long staff tipped with a scythe, commonly known as the Grim Reaper. Why? I think the answer lies not so much beneath the cloak, but with the scythe at the tip of the staff. Who else in legend bears a scythe? There are two figures who readily come to mind - Father Time, who rings out the old year on December 31, and the once mighty Saturn, who is denoted by a scythe in astrology. Saturn is the Roman name for the Greek god Chronos. Chronos literally means "time," which provides the other link needed to confirm the connection. The Zoroastrian Zurvan was renamed "Aion" (Eon) when Mithras moved to Greek-speaking lands. He was readily acknowledged as Chronos or Saturn. Inscriptions show him as a lion-headed winged deity wrapped in the coils of a great serpent, the gnostic laldobaoth.

The Saturnalia were once held beginning December 25, which is why Santa Claus comes bearing presents on that day. We no longer remember that he and Father Time were one and the same, were Saturn. Dickens dubbed Saturn "the Ghost of Christmas Past." The five days between Christmas and the New Year were once considered intercalary days - leap days - and were part of no month. They were reserved for feasting. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Tomorrow, Time comes for ail of us.

The planet named for Saturn takes the longest of all naked-eye planets to complete its solar orbit and return to the same position relative to the fixed stars. For this reason it was associated with time. Legend tells how Saturn used a scythe to castrate his father Uranus, who was thereafter relegated to the harmless position of sky god. Saturn was eventually castrated himself, and as such he is the hermit of the Tarot. But Saturn, Chronos, comes to harvest each one of us, to devour his young as it says in the legends. That is why Death and Time wield scythes. Such ran image could only develop in an agricultural society, which is an aid we can use in dating the origins of the Saturn myth. He replaces Uranus, becomes preeminent at the dawn of agriculture.

In ufology we now see the same processes at work that were once reserved for comparative religious studies. The mysterious Men In Black have been compared to the Grim Reaper, Death personified, to the Black Man of the witches' sabbat, and to Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep. Does this make the MIB Saturnians? No, but it may make them saturnine.

I see another connection. Jack the Ripper carried his own blade, a concealed butcher's knife, with which he claimed several English victims. Like Saturn castrating his father Uranus, Jack used his left hand. The old English for "reaper" is "ripere," from whence we also get "ripper." Jack the Reaper? In English slang a ripper is a jolly good time. Could this refer to the Saturnalia, the last supper before we step into eternity?

Today, no more frightening death could be imagined than to die at the hands of a serial killer. We have mythologized such madmen to the point of godhood. Go into any bookstore; the true crime section has grown beyond belief. There are cheap paperbacks on anybody accused of the one crime we can trace to Time and Death - mass murder. He is the subject of many horror movies, appropriately dubbed "slasher" movies. Not with a gun but with a knife, the Reaper comes for us all. That thought frightens us. We cannot stop him, cannot predict his arrival. He is a seeming madman. And he is our god.