The Personification of Death Trivia Quiz

Answer: Ereshkigal

In Sumerian cosmology, the netherworld is the place the dead go when their lives are over, where they eat bread and drink water; (it is also the place where the sun and moon go when they are not overhead). The dead are judged by the gods, and their afterlife fates decreed according to the gods' desires. Utu, the sun, and Nanna, the moon both decree the fate of the dead when they are in the netherworld; in addition, the seven Annunaki (sometimes called the Annuna; both terms refer to the offspring of An but the Annuna may more properly be a set of "fifty great gods" not necessarily confined to the netherworld) are the seven "judges" of the dead.

The netherworld is sometimes called by the name "Kur," which either refers to a great dragon whose body became the netherworld after it was slain by Enki, or to the living land itself, or to some variant or combination of these two.

The chief personification of death in the Sumerian cosmology was Ereshkigal, who became the Queen of Death against her will.

The older sister of Innanna, Ereshkigal was carried off by (or given to) Kur soon after the world came into being. There the dominion over the dead was thrust upon her; ultimately she definitely grew into the role. When Innanna goes to the underworld to witness the funeral rites of Gugalanna, the Bull of Heaven, Ereshkigal orders that Innanna be permitted entry to each of the seven gates of her dwelling; at each, Innanna loses an article of clothing, so that Innanna is naked by the time the sisters are face to face. Ereshkigal herself wears no clothing, and is demonic in appearance. The Annunaki pass judgment upon her, and Ereshkigal renders Innanna a corpse by directing a killing gaze upon her. (Innanna is later revived and freed when Dumuzi/Tammuz is set in her place.) This cycle is surely cognate with the Greek myth of Persephone, although the Greeks combined the elements of Ereshkigal's and Innanna's experiences into one girl's experience; this was probably appropriate since Innanna and Ereshkigal appear to be aspects of (or at the very least foils for) one another. (Innanna and the Annunaki are described above; Uttu is the goddess of weaving, textiles and clothing.)

Answer: Anubis

Jackal-headed Anubis (Anpu, Inpew, Yinepu) was not just the Egyptian psychopomp (the guide of dead souls); he was also the god of embalming (the process of making mummies), the protector of the necropolis (the "city of the dead" or the place where dead bodies kept), and the judge of the dead. Known as "Foremost of the Westerners" -- the land of the afterlife was known as the "Western Lands" -- among other evocative titles ("Lord of the Hallowed Land" (the necropolis), "He Who Counts the Hearts", etc.), Anubis is usually described as the son of Osiris by Nephthys (Nephthys having taken the form of Isis, Osiris' sister-wife, in order to seduce him), but sometimes as the son of the evil god Set.

In any event, after Set killed Osiris, Anubis helped Isis locate Osiris' body parts, and preserved them so well that they could be brought back to life.

This action is thought of as the invention of the mummification process which became so integral to Egyptian religious belief. A particularly evocative image of Anubis has the god holding scales; in one balance there is a feather, and in the other a human heart, the heart of a newly-dead soul.

When the heart belonged to a worthy person, it does not outweigh the feather, and Anubis preserves that soul from destruction, but when the heart was unworthy, Anubis permits the soul to be destroyed irrevocably. (Ammut was the "Eater of Hearts" or the "Devourer", a chimera of crocodile, leopard and hippopotamus, the punisher of the unworthy dead; Hathor was a goddess of life, fertility, motherhood and beauty, appearing sometimes as a woman with a cow's horns and sometimes as a cow; hawk-headed Horus was a sky-god and god of vengeance.)

Answer: Osiris

Probably the best-known episode of Egyptian theogony relates the slaying of Osiris at the hands of his brother Seth. Seth dismembered Osiris' corpse and spread the pieces thereof far and wide. Osiris' sisters Isis and Nephthys, together with his son and nephew Anubis, found all of the parts except for his penis, which had been eaten by a fish; Isis was forced to fashion a new one. Anubis put the body together, and Isis blew life back into it.

As the first being to experience death, Osiris became the king of the dead -- but not before Isis impregnated herself on his nice new prosthetic penis, conceiving Horus who eventually would avenge his father. Osiris, as a god of rebirth, is portrayed as a green-skinned man, as are many gods of vegetation and rebirth. (Seth, portrayed as an indeterminately theriomorphic god, was thought of as an embodiment of evil, having ripped himself through his mother's womb rather than await birth, but was not the god of death; Min shared Osiris' ithyphallic nature, but was a sky-god and fertility god; cat-headed Bast was a solar goddess of life and healing.)

Answer: Emma-O

Emma-O judges the dead. Murderers, for example, are plunged into boiling metal after Emma-O (or Emma-hoo) judges them. He lives in the Yellow Springs, in a subterranean castle of gold and jewels. He is depicted with a judge's cap and holding a mace. (Amaterasu is the sun goddess; Owatatsumi is the trickster god of the ocean; Uzume is a goddess of dance.)

Answer: Yanluo Wang

The Lords of Death rule the Chinese underworld, each presiding over a different court of law. The first, pertaining to Yanluo Wang, judges the life of each dead person to enter the underworld, and sentences the dead soul to one of eight courts of punishment.

After the punishment is carried out, the dead go to the tenth and final court, the Wheel of Reincarnation, where the lord of that court sends them back to earth. The Lords of Death all wear similar robes, and can only be distinguished from one another by the very wisest beings. Yanluo Wang is considered to be the equivalent of the Hindu Lord Yama. (Guan Di is the red-faced, green-robed god of war; Lei Gong is the blue-skinned, bird-feathered god of thunder; Cai Shen is the exquisitely-garbed extremely popular god of wealth.)

Answer: Yama

Lord Yama is almost always depicted as black, usually either as a black-skinned man or as a black-skinned bull; sometimes even as a black-skinned man with a bull's head. In Buddhist iconography, his appearance tends to be more frightful and demonic than in Hindu iconography.

In the Upanishad known as the Kathopanishad (or Katha-Upanishad), Yama Raj is portrayed as a keeper of the ultimate wisdom, the Atman, the highest wisdom to which human beings can attain. A young boy called Naciketas travels to Lord Yama's house in obedience to his father's thoughtless command.

There the boy waits three days to be received by Lord Yama, who, impressed with the boy's patience, grants him three boons. For his third boon, the boy chooses to be taught the conquest of death, and that teaching is arguably the central tenet of Hindu practice. (Lord Agni's special province is fire; Varuna is lord of the ocean; and Indra Raj is known as the king of the demigods.)

Answer: Thanatos

(An alternate answer to this question -- but not one of the answer choices supplied -- could have been Atropos. The three Fates (Moerae) were the maiden Clotho (the "Spinner") who spun the thread of life for each mortal, the matron Lachesis (the "Allotter") who measured the thread of life for each mortal, and the crone Atropos (the "Unbending") who cut the thread of life for each mortal at the end of that mortal's time on earth. So, in a sense, Atropos is responsible for ending each mortal's life, but the actual taking of each life is relegated to Thanatos, who has some discretion in how to carry out his duty.) Thanatos ("Death" in Greek) was the twin brother of Hypnos ("Sleep") and the son of Nyx ("Night").

In taking human lives, he is often said to be accompanied by the keres, the Hounds of Hades or Fates of Death.

The myth of Sisyphus underscores the role Thanatos played in Greek belief. King Sisyphus of Ephyra was renowned as the most cunning man in the ancient world (so much so that the paternity of Odysseus is frequently if implausibly ascribed to him). Sisyphus had the misfortune to witness Zeus' abduction of Aegina, daughter of the river-god Asopus. Sisyphus told Asopus where Zeus had hidden Aegina, enraging Zeus to the point where he sent Thanatos to take Sisyphus' life. Sisyphus cunningly tricked Thanatos and bound him; during the period of his imprisonment, no mortals could die. Zeus sent Ares to free Thanatos, who then took Sisyphus to the underworld, but the sequelae are interesting; Sisyphus instructed his wife to refuse to conduct the proper funerary rights on his behalf, then complained to Hades about his wife's "lapse," requesting permission to return temporarily to the mortal world to rebuke her.

When permission was granted, Sisyphus went AWOL and lived to a ripe old age. In another sequence, Thanatos was sent by the Moerae to take the life of Admetus; however, the god Apollo had received a special dispensation to permit someone to die in Admetus' stead, so Thanatos took Admetus' wife Alcestis instead. Heracles, moved by Alcestis courage in dying vicariously for her husband, went down to the underworld and wrestled Thanatos for her, successfully. (Clotho is the Fate responsible for spinning the thread of life, not for cutting it; Hypnos is the god of sleep, Thanatos' twin brother; Morpheus is the god of dreams, son of Hypnos and therefore nephew of Thanatos.)

Answer: Hermes

Hermes Psychopompos guided the dead to the underworld, and, indeed, when a lucky deceased got to return to the land of the living, it was Hermes who guided that soul back; for example Hermes guided Eurydice up to the mortal world when she received a special dispensation to be reunited with Orpheus for a day.

Hermes is thus the only god to partake of both the Uranian and the Chthonic realms. (Lachesis the Allotter measured out the thread of life for each mortal; Iris (the "Rainbow"), like Hermes, is a sort of messenger of the gods, but her role is to bring messages from the gods to mortals, and occasionally to fetch water from the sacred river Styx; Orpheus was a mortal, usually described as the son of the Muse Calliope, who went living to Hades in an effort to secure the return of his love Eurydice.)

Answer: Charon

The Greeks would bury their dead with a coin under the tongue to pay Charon for the passage across the Styx into the land of the dead. Failure to pay meant eternal loitering, lost on the banks of the infernal river; although for the wicked such an unpleasant fate might have been an improvement over punishment in Tartarus, so Charon's refusal to ferry except for money would seem an exploitable loophole in the system.

In any event, Charon is described as filthy, unshaven, black-cloaked, with fiery eyes. (Eurynomus was a flesh-eating demon of Tartarus; Erebus is the personification of the darkness of the underworld; Cocytus was the name of the River of Wailing, an underworld river and a branch of the Styx.)

Answer: Tisiphone

Each of the three judges of the dead was a king in mortal life, who, because of undying fame for honesty and fairness, earned an exalted and indeed critical place in the Greek afterlife. Rhadamanthys was the son of Zeus and Europa (although some attribute his paternity to Hephaestos) who ruled Crete before Minos did, and married Alcmene, mother of Heracles, after she was widowed; Minos was Rhadamanthys' brother, and was indeed the same Minos whose wife was cursed with lust for a bull, so that she bore the monstrous Minotaur; Aiakos was the son of Zeus by the river nymph Aegina, and during his lifetime was considered so righteous that he settled disputes among the gods, at the gods' request.

The three judges of the dead would determine who was fated for the Elysian fields (which was considered good), and who for Tartarus (which was considered bad). (Tisiphone is one of the Erinyes, the Furies, who judge not the dead but rather the living (although they certainly are involved in the *punishment* of the dead).)

Answer: Mors

Mors is a Latin name for Death, thus for Thanatos rather than for Hades, although the king of the underworld was sometimes given that name by the Romans. (Hades (or Aides) or Aedoneus are Greek names for the king of the underworld, both meaning "the unseen"; Pluto (or Plouton) is a Greek name for the king of the underworld meaning "the wealthy" or "the enricher" which was later adopted by the Romans, along with other names.)

Answer: Ah Puch

The Mayans believed the afterlife was composed of thirteen "heavens" and nine "hells." The lowest of the underworlds was called Mitnal; there went the most wicked after death. The ruler of Mitnal was Ah Puch, god of death, sometimes depicted as an owl-headed man but more frequently as a skeleton or a bloated corpse. (Another Mayan mortuary deity is Ixtab, goddess of suicide, depicted as a woman with a noose around her neck. Suicides were well received in the Mayan afterlife, and went to the highest paradise rather than to any of the infernal realms.) (Ah Kinchil is the Mayan sun god; Ix Chel is the Mayan moon goddess; Kukucan is a Mayan wind god.)

Answer: Mictlantecuhtli

Aztec cosmology was closely related to the Mayan cosmology described immediately above; to the Aztecs, the nine infernal realms were referred to collectively as "Mictlan" although only the lowest of the nine was properly named so. The name "Mictlantecuhtli" thus simply means "Lord of Mictlan" or "Lord of the Land of the Dead", just as the name of his wife, Mictecacihuatl, means "Lady of the Dead". Mictlantecuhtli is usually represented as a fleshy man with a skull head. For the Aztecs, when a person died his or her soul escaped through the mouth and rose into the air where it encountered Tezcatlipoca, who tested it for purity. If it was pure, it entered Tlaloc, the complex of paradises, but if impure, it entered Mictlan where it underwent many tortures and ordeals before being judged once again by Mictlantecuhtli. According to some sources, Mictlantecuhtli also ruled over one or two of the thirteen paradises. (Yya Dzandaya was the Mixtec god of death; Tezcatlipoca was an Aztec god who created the earth the first time it was created, only to destroy it later as a jaguar in a rage; Nanahuatzin was the Aztec god who became the sun after the earth was created the fourth and most recent time.)

Answer: Hel

Hel was the daughter of Loki by the giantess Angurboda; the three products of Loki's union with Angurboda (Hel and her siblings Fenris (the wolf) and Jormungand (the world-serpent)) collectively represented death, pain and cruelty. Hel ruled Nifleheim, the Norse world where the unhappy dead spent their afterlife (i.e., either the evil or those who had failed to die in glorious battle, depending on your source).

She was as demonic in appearance as her brothers, by some (I believe continental) accounts being a black- or blue-skinned corpse-eating ghoul, who rode a three-legged horse in times of plague.

The "definitive" source -- the Prose Edda -- describes her thus: "Hel [Odin] cast into Niflheim, and gave to her power over nine worlds, to apportion all abodes among those that were sent to her: that is, men dead of sickness or of old age.

She has great possessions there; her walls are exceeding high and her gates great. Her hall is called Sleet-Cold; her dish, Hunger; Famine is her knife; Idler, her thrall; Sloven, her maidservant; Pit of Stumbling, her threshold, by which one enters; Disease, her bed; Gleaming Bale, her bed-hangings.

She is half blue-black and half flesh-color (by which she is easily recognized), and very lowering and fierce." (Angurboda was Loki's giantess paramour and mother of Hel; Gunnlod was the giantess from whom Odin was able to obtain the mead of poetry; Elli was the personification of Old Age against whom Thor wrestled unsuccessfully in the saga of Outland-Loki.)

Answer: Morrigan

The Morrigan, the "Phantom Goddess," was the goddess of battle and the chooser of those who would die in battle. She would appear either as a crow or raven, or as the eerie "Washer at the Ford" who would be seen washing the bloody clothes of a then-living hero fated to die in his next battle.

She was a singleton goddess but also part of the great Triple Goddess in her crone aspect; in her own right the Morrigan had three of her own aspects, namely Fea (the "Hateful"), Badb ("Battle Crow") and Nemain ("Venomous"). (Oghma was the god of writing; Goibniu was the god of smiths and brewers; Grian was the goddess of the sun, later demoted to mere "fairie queen" status.)

Answer: Sammael

The passage goes on to describe how Sammael bears a sword with a drop of poison suspended at its tip; indeed, the name Samma-el meand "poison of the Lord." Longfellow's "Christus: A Mystery", has the following dialogue - "Judas: 'In the Rabbinical Book, it saith / The dogs howl, when with icy breath / Great Sammael, the Angel of Death, / Takes through the town his flight!' Rabbi: 'Well, boy! now say, if thou art wise, / When the Angel of Death, who is full of eyes, / Comes where a sick man dying lies, / What doth he to the wight?' Judas: 'He stands beside him, dark and tall, / Holding a sword, from which doth fall / Into his mouth a drop of gall, / And so he turneth white.'" (Dubbiel was the angel charged with protecting Persia, who, like all of the seventy "national" angels save for Michael, patron of Israel, fell with Lucifer; Moroni was the angel who appeared to Joseph Smith and gave him the original-language cersion of the Book of Mormon; Gabriel, the "Strength of the Lord," is the angel who will appear at the day of judgment, and also is the angel who dictated the Qu'ran to Mohammed.)

Answer: Azrael

According to some Muslim sources -- but not the Qu'ran, which does not name the Angel of Death -- Azrael ("Help of the Lord") possesses four thousand wings, seventy thousand feet, and the same number of eyes and tongues as there are people in the world.

When he blinks, a person dies. (Shamiel is, according to some Rabbinic writings, the leader of one of the celestial choirs; Israfel is the angel of judgment in Islamic tradition; Peliel was the patron of the patriarch Jacob.)

Answer: Iblis

In the (Arabian Nights) story "The Angel of Death with the Proud King and the Devout Man," Iblis sets the proud king up for humiliation before taking his soul: "And Iblis came to [the proud king] and, laying his hand upon his nose, blew into his nostrils the breath of hauteur and conceit, so that he magnified and glorified himself and said in his heart, 'Who among men is like unto me?' The Angel then takes the king's soul while the king sits his horse, so that the king's corpse falls into the street. (Sakhr al-Jinni, as his name suggests, is an ifrit or djinn mentioned in one of the tales as a heretic; Khalifah is the eponymous fisherman of Baghdad of one of the tales; Shah Zaman is the brother of King Sharyar, to whom Scheherazade told all of the tales of the Nights.)

Answer: a pale horse

The Greek word usually translated in this context into English as "pale" is "chloras." The four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Conquest, War, Famine and Death) and their steeds are described in Revelations 6:1-8 of the New Testament or Christian bible, as the first four of the famous seven seals: "1 And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see. 2 And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. 3 And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see. 4 And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. 5 And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. 6 And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. 7 And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. 8 And I looked, and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hades followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth."

Answer: Guede

Vodou is a living belief system lacking a central body of "scripture," and as such is hard to pin down in its details (hence the vagueness of the question). The term "Guede" can refer to a group of loa (powerful spirits) associated with death and the dead, of whom Baron Samedi is the leader, or it can refer to a single loa of death, of whom Baron Samedi is an aspect.

When Guede is an individual, he dresses as an undertaker and stands in the crossroads, and knows all that is known by the dead. Baron Samedi is thought of as he who controls the passage between the land of the living and the land of the dead; his preferred attire is black, with a top hat and dark glasses.

Other aspects of the Baron (or closely-associated loa, depending who you talk to) include Baron Cimitiere, Baron la Croix, and Baron Criminel. Maman Brigitte is the Baron's wife, and a protectress of the properly buried dead. (Legba is the loa who guards the passage between the land of (living) mortals and the spirit world of the loas; Mombu is the stuttering loa of storms; Ogoun is the warrior loa.)

Answer: Arrow

In medieval and renaissance illustrations, Death is frequently depicted with a musical instrument, a scythe, a sickle, or a bow and arrows. In particular during and after the plague years, the arrow represented death by plague. One often sees paintings of people dying with arrows wounding them in precisely the locations that plague buboes most commonly appeared.

In this case, Death as a thin but fleshy man with a skull head, wearing a whitish robe, holds a single arrow in his hand. An angel tries to attract the dying man's attention to a crucifix, but he is more interested in the gold being offered by a devil.

Answer: Scythe

As indicated immediately above, in medieval and renaissance illustrations, Death is frequently depicted with a musical instrument, a scythe, a sickle, or a bow and arrows. Here we have a very traditional Death; a naked skeleton riding a starving horse, mowing down the living, indiscriminately, with a scythe.

This painting is probably the masterpiece of what might be thought of as an established subgenre of medieval and renaissance painting and engraving, in which Death is depicted in out-and-out combat with the living; invariably Death is shown to be clearly victorious, or about to emerge victorious. Clearly, this subgenre is a product of the social consequences of repeated plague epidemics. Bruegel's "Triumph" is not just the masterpiece of the subgenre; it is also an example par excellence of Death having won the day -- his skeletal minions are killing everyone; a skeletal demon is tolling a bell for victory; no hope for the living can be extracted from the scene.

Answer: a scene in which Death personified cavorts with living people from all walks of life

La danse macabre, or "dance of death" is yet another theme whose origins can surely be traced to the plague in Europe. The danse macabre painted in 1424 in the Cimetiere des Innocents of Paris is usually considered to be the first example of this theme.

In these paintings, engravings, and occasionally carvings, Death is frequently depicted holding or playing a musical instrument; the dance itself is often identifiable as a farandole. Very frequently these depictions were accompanied by verses representing a dialogue between Death and its victim(s). First Death speaks, usually threateningly, sometimes ironically.

The living interlocutor(s) nearly always demonstrate(s) despair and guilt. A standard element of these depictions is that people from all walks of life are brought into the dance, often with pains to include representatives from every stage of some particular hierarchy, such as clerics from priests through bishops to the pope, or lay persons from peasants through merchants to kings.

Answer: Death personified in erotic or sensual juxtaposition with a healthy, youthful woman

These paintings tend to play up the juxtaposition between the dreadful "suitor" and the vitality and loveliness of the woman; Death is almost invariably a particularly horrible rotting corpse or skeleton, and the woman or girl is always attractive, frequently nude or in an advanced state of deshabille. Generally Death can be seen to be forcing himself on an unwilling woman, almost as a rapist; a striking counter-example is the quite modern tweak on the theme by Edvard Munch (1893 and 1894, in oil and engraving, respectively), in which the nude woman passionately returns Death's embrace, either as the triumph of Love over Death or as a case of extreme amor fati, depending on your outlook (for me, of course, the glass is neither half empty nor half full; rather, there was a clear error in determining the appropriate specifications for the glass).

Answer: The Seventh Seal, by Ingmar Bergman (1957)

Starring Max von Sydow as the knight and Bengt Ekerot as Death personified, The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet) tells the tale of a knight and his squire who return to Europe after the crusades to find plague rampant. Death comes for the knight, but agrees to play him at chess for his life.

Their game takes place over days or weeks as the knight travels the macabre country that was once his home. I will not spoil the ending for those who are not yet familiar with the film; it is considered one of the twentieth century's greatest film masterpieces. (The films listed as wrong answers all exist, and are all "chess movies," but none involve Death personified.)