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Cultures have come up with lots of personifications of death: Young and attractive? Yes. Riding a black buffalo? Check. Covered in tongues and eyeballs? Uh-huh. But in the West there’s only been one go-to soul taker for hundreds of years: The Grim Reaper.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too, harvesting souls. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.
That's right. Yeah.
I'm excited about this one, Chuck. Do you want to know why?
Why's that?
Well, mainly because it's Halloween-esque, and I love Halloween. Sure.
That's it?
No, that's not it. There's so much to know about the Grim Reaper. But the biggest thing that I've learned about the Grim Reaper is there's actually not that much to know about him. Because, listen, out of all of the different ways that death has been represented, the Grim Reaper is actually like the least invested with like lore or background or mythology. It just is what it is, man.
Is what it is. But we can talk about Bill and Ted at least.
For sure. Well, that's the spoiler. There's the best part of the whole episode. Oh, no.
Well, that's coming in act three. So you got to stick around if you want to hear what, you know, what Bill and Ted have to do with this.
That's right. So if you are not a Westerner, if you're one of our listeners who lives outside of the West, you might not be familiar with the Grim Reaper, although the chances are probably pretty slim. But I say that because the Grim Reaper is an entirely Western representation of death all around the world over time. The eons that humans have been around, there have been different ways of people like kind of putting a face on death. Not the faces of death. That's totally different. Putting a face on death itself, like death with a capital D.
Yeah. And, you know, I guess the idea or at least people speculate the idea behind this is if there is a, you know, a visible personification of an abstract, scary thing like death that we're all going to face. Right. that it might make it a little bit easier to face. And, you know, depending on what history and what religion and what culture you're looking at, there have been a lot of ways that that's been done over the years. Some kind of super scary and some not as scary. Right.
I found that pretty interesting, too. Chuck, let's take it back a step, though. I'd like to talk in real depth about some creation myths.
Great.
Just kidding. We'll just kind of cover this. This point, to me, is very important, that there's creation myths from all over the world, from all different cultures that have some really like detailed stuff in common, like people being made out of clay or that there's like a, like creation was supposed to be perfection at one point, but then some trickster figure came along, say a serpent and managed to ruin the whole thing. And then what really kind of, um, it applies to this episode. Um, in a lot of different creation myths, humans were originally intended to be immortal beings, but because they broke some rule through free will of their own, they became mortal, right?
And the whole point of even bringing that up is that it's kind of like that, how long have people been aware of death? Well, since the first person witnessed the other first person dying, this is kind of like Codifying that in text, our oldest myths that have ever been written down that predate writing by centuries and probably thousands of years all talk about people dying. Like that is a thing that's part of the creation myth. It's that important. Right. So you can kind of chalk up.
We've been thinking about death at the very least, if not pretty scared of dying, you know, mortal terror and all that. Yeah. For for. A very long time, which I've now very beautifully set the table for talk about Grim Reaper and other personifications of death. Yeah.
And, you know, like I said earlier, like sometimes, depending on the culture, it could be something super scary. Sometimes it's a little more, I don't know about friendly, but yeah, I mean, maybe friendly. Like if you look at ancient Greece, they had Thanatos, who was a twin. I don't think I knew that until this. Thanatos had a twin brother.
which was Hypnos, the god of sleep, like hypnosis. And they were, you know, they were young dudes. They weren't a chore to be around, like both pretty handsome, I think. And Thanatos had a job, and that was to, and as you'll see, this is a pretty common thing, of accompanying the dead to whatever their version of the afterlife is.
In this case, it would be Hades.
Yeah, and he was friendly, like you said. His catchphrase was, hi, guy, time to die. And people loved it. They went crazy for it.
That's pretty scary, actually.
Yeah, especially if he's got, like, a creepy smile.
Yeah, that's what I was picturing.
Yeah, I guess. So, yeah, he'd accompany you to Hades. He'd drop you off with Charon, the ferryman who crossed the River Styx, took you across the River Styx, and then you were officially in the underworld, right? And the fact that Thanatos' job... was to guide you, the dead person's spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it.
That makes him a very specific kind of personification of death, a psychopomp, which is, it's a pretty word to look at in some ways.
Yeah, and that's, there has to be a band named psychopomp.
Gotta be, yeah.
There's just no way. That one's too good to ignore, especially with the meaning of it and everything. Yeah, but that's one way you can go. It's generally kind of split in half as far as, what your culture or religion personifies as death. You can be the psychopomp, which just sort of helps guide you to the afterlife and drop you off at the front door. Or you could be a collector. And that is like, you know, you know what that means. That means the Sith comes along and actually causes your death.
Yeah. And so there's, there's like psychopomps. It's a pretty recurring theme, like Anubis, the dog headed God from Egyptian mythology.
Love and noobs.
It's like Psycho Pump. Me too. I like him a lot.
You know why? Why? Because he's a good boy.
Oh, my God. He would smite you so quick for doing that.
Yeah, you're right.
But, I mean, I guess if he was to score you the afterlife anyway, you're dead already. So what do you have to lose?
That's a good point.
Baron Samedi, who I had not heard the name of, but once I read the description of him, I'm like, oh, yeah, he's in The Man with the Golden Gun. Yeah.
Oh, yeah, for sure. And just also, like, I think that's a, like, a lot of these things are things that you may not have heard of, but you recognize from either, like, a Grateful Dead sticker or, like, some other piece of pop culture.
Or a metal album cover art.
Yeah, but definitely, I mean, yeah, which one was that, Live and Let Die?
I thought it was the man with the golden gun, the one with Yafit Koto. Is it Live and Let Die? I think you're right.
It is.
It's Live and Let Die.
I think Live and Let Die was the sort of voodoo-centric one.
Yes, then that would be it, yeah. But Baron Samedi, he's depicted as often like a skeletal figure. He wears a top hat. He wears a coat with tails. He also wears sunglasses all the time.
Sure.
He drinks rum. He smokes cigars. He chases women. He tells dirty jokes.
My kind of dude.
Yeah, he's pretty interesting for sure. But he's a psychopomp because when you die under Haitian voodoo tradition— He comes and digs you up and is like, let's go to the afterworld. And hey, you got a cigar on you?
Yeah. And would you like a Mai Tai?
Yes, is the answer to that.
The collector, again, that's a different thing. That actually causes the death. There are plenty of examples from this. There's one that comes from the UK, which is Anku. It comes from the Britain mythology and Welsh, mainly Welsh and Cornish traditions. And this, again, is a robed skeletal figure. You know, you're going to see these recurring themes over and over. And this guy actually carries an actual Sith.
So I think kind of the first time we've seen that particular implement. And the Sith is used to cut down wheat and also cut down life short.
Yeah, or long. You know, when it's your time, that's how you go.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Is Anku comes and takes you is the rhyme.
Right. But Anku is not death, is not death, is basically a shimp, an employee for death.
Yeah. And he's a collector, right? He's not guiding you anywhere. He doesn't care where you go after that. And that's like another subcategory you just touched on. He's a bureaucrat. There's like a whole type of personifications of death that are like, I just I'm just here to do my job, man. Just I'm sorry, I can't do anything for you. It's your time.
That's right.
You know. You're now dead. Sorry. I got to move on. Yeah, he punches the clock. And the Anku is a good example of that. And like you said, they're a worker for death. And it's actually a changing role. Like you could be the Anku in your village if you wanted to. You just have to die at the right time.
Yeah, if you're the first person to die that year, then you are the Anku, I guess, for the remainder of the year.
Yeah. And you die going, Anku, like you called it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's pretty interesting. The bureaucrat thing also is like, like I said, it's kind of a recurring theme across cultures, including in the Bible. Yeah. So there's a lot of like, I don't really know my Bible that well, especially like real detail stuff. But supposedly in the entire Bible, there is no angel of death named.
There's an angel that's called the destroyer at one point, and then that's it. There's not really a lot of lore about who comes and gets you and, you know, takes you to heaven or whatever or hell. Like there's there doesn't seem to be anything like that in the Bible. It's all just kind of been added over time through like Christian fanfic, basically. Yeah.
Like Michael and Gabriel have both sort of taken that role as the angel of death and in the religion, but not like in the Bible. Like there's no actual story in the Bible about Gabriel being the angel of death.
Right. But Michael and Gabriel, again, they're bureaucrats. As angels of death, they're bureaucrats because they're working at the behest of God who says, smite that guy.
Yeah. And you know what you do then? You better smite that guy.
Yeah. You don't really have a choice because you will be the one who's smote.
Yeah. And you don't get the pay bump either.
You get skipped over on your Christmas bonus.
Should we take a break?
Yeah, we'll take a break and come back and talk a little more about Angels of Death because it's fun. And then I guess we'll start to get into the Grim Reaper, huh?
Let's do it. All right. So before the break, we mentioned Michael and Gabriel in Judeo-Christian religion, but they also appear in the Islamic faith as death angels, as does the Islamic angel of death, who is Azrael in this case. And Azrael can appear as a This is maybe the creepiest image, I think, out of all these as a spirit with eyes and tongues covering his entire body. That's pretty good. Yes.
I wonder if he makes a sound when he walks.
Probably so. Or you ought to hear that thing run.
Just like wet slapping all over the place. So I've seen discrepancies on whether Asriel is the actual angel of death or if the Malak al-Ma'at is, which is actually just Arabic for angel of death. But regardless of which one it is, they both perform the same function. They get handed down from Allah a ledger every year right before or right after Ramadan. I don't remember exactly.
I think it's the month before, yeah.
The month before. Okay. And in that ledger, it's everyone who's going to die in the coming year. And that's it. You have what's called an ajal, right? Your fixed state of death. And there's not a lot you can do. And by a lot, I mean there's nothing.
Yeah. Pretty much. I mean, get your hands on that ledger if you can.
I guess so. I'll bet you there's a story about that, about somebody trying that. And the lesson probably is don't even try.
Yeah, well, you know, as we'll see, there's a lot of, well, we'll get to that, but people trying to cheat death in various ways. That's coming soon. If you go back to the very, very most ancient of cultures, God, like, needs no helpers, basically. It's like, hey, I'm God, so I don't need bureaucrats to help me rid the planet of people. I can just do it myself. And that is the case with Motu. the god of the ancient Canaanites and Phoenicians. And there's also one in Hindu, right?
This one sounds pretty cool. Yeah, Yama rides a black buffalo and carries a noose. That's also a pretty creepy visual.
Yeah, he uses it to capture the souls that he harvests, right?
Yeah, not bad.
Yeah, but then he personally takes them into the underworld, and then he, I guess, puts a robe on, He takes his traveling sweater off and puts his robe on and judges that soul.
Right.
So he does it all for sure. Yeah. The pictures I've seen of Yama are pretty intense, but cool.
Yeah. I got no beef with the Valkyries either. They have appeared in the Marvel Universe most recently, I guess, is where I've seen them. And they are Odin's messengers. But they also fly in. And these are attractive women on horses, like flying horses. So what's not to love?
I can't think of anything because I've heard they also smell like strawberry shortcake, the doll.
Oh, man. You just made it creepy.
Did I? Is it creepy to sniff old strawberry shortcake dolls at the store?
At the garage sale?
Yeah.
Yeah, you'll get thrown out of a front yard for that.
Hasn't happened yet.
All right. Well, keep that run going.
Okay. I really do love that smell.
Oh, do you really?
Yeah, man. It's one of the best smells ever. All of the different strawberry shortcakes smell great. All right.
I'll have to give him a sniff.
Didn't you have any girlfriends when you were little?
No, I was raised Baptist. I wasn't allowed interaction with young girls.
I got you. Okay.
When I was a young boy, I was only allowed to go to boy-boy parties.
None of them like strawberry shortcake?
No, which also explains why I was so into the village people.
That's probably where that originates.
Yeah. Yeah.
So you're talking about the Valkyries. They're a bunch of different atypical things going on. Rolled into one. One, they're feminine personifications of death, which in the West typically is not. It's usually it's almost always a man in a lot of Slavic cultures. It's a woman. But yeah, in Norse mythology, Valkyries are women. The other thing is, is they're bureaucrats and that they're coming in harvesting souls. They guide you.
So they're also not just collectors. They're psychopomps. But the big thing that differentiates them is they're like, you, you're going to die. Like they choose who lives and who dies. Yeah.
And I think it's usually like a wartime thing. Like on the battlefield, they'll choose, you know, who they think is the bravest, which isn't very good strategy for winning any war. But whatever, you know.
No. But I think they take them where they're needed more, which is Valhalla, to await the Ragnarok or just Ragnarok. Which I know all about, not from the Marvel Universe, but from our friend John Hodgman. He used to talk about it ceaselessly.
I remember his Ragnarok days.
Yeah. He really went through a Ragnarok phase for sure.
I think we're finally the capital TGR Grim Reaper, right? Mm-hmm. So this is the big daddy. This is the one here in the West that everybody has seen. In movies and on glow-in-the-dark posters and various album covers as the robed, well, I was about to say skeleton, but the robe is kind of the thing that keeps it shrouded in mystery.
So generally you see like a robe and then sort of darkness and then that Sith.
Yeah, but sometimes the giveaway is that it's a skeletal hand holding the Sith.
Ah, true.
Skeletal finger pointing at you. And you're like pointing yourself and looking around like me.
So what you're saying is the skull is assumed because it matches the hand.
Yeah. And then also it does like the Grim Reaper is often depicted like with a skull without the hood on or anything like that.
Okay.
So let's talk about this, right? Because there's some, all of them symbolically, is that a word?
Symbolically. I think it is. Yeah. I like symbologically, actually.
I do, too. It sounds more academic, you know?
Yeah, let's go with it.
Okay, so symbologically, all of these things are kind of obvious in a lot of ways, but they really work, even if they are a little on the nose. But I said earlier that the Grim Reaper's almost loreless. He's got no backstory. He's not some cursed soul who has to, you know, rove the earth for eternity. Didn't do anything wrong as far as I know. Um, it's not Fats Domino.
I looked and it's, he just doesn't have a backstory. And the reason why is because he was assembled from different parts and pieces over the course of centuries before he finally, it wasn't until like the 1850s where he had been fully packaged into what we think of as the Grim Reaper, but he had been kind of slowly assembling like a death-based Voltron or something. Right. Since the 13th century, basically.
Yeah. I mean, if you go back to the European religion in the Middle Ages, you kind of get your first representation of the angel of death as a skeleton. I think that was from a 13th century illustration called The Three Living and the Three Dead, where you had these three skeletons wearing burial shrouds. They have maggots crawling all over them. Uh, one of the skeletons is like peeking out from the page. It's like, like looking at the reader and smiling. Yeah. It's a, it's a totally cool illustration. Yeah.
I mean, it's a big, like not even a mean or, or like, um, scary smile. Like it's a big grin. Like, Hey, good to see you. Kind of. I love that picture.
Yeah. Me too.
Um, yeah, it's not knowing, like, I know what's going to happen to you and you're not going to like it kind of thing. Yeah.
If we really want to see where this took hold, you've got to look at the Black Death, which I figure it seems like we've talked about that several times semi-recently.
I think we did an entire episode on it.
Yeah, that was a while ago, but it's just popped up here and there. Has it? Yeah, just like how many people died, which was at least 25 million people in the initial outbreak. Mm-hmm. And I know we talked about this in the episode, but it changed the way like so many people died. It changed the way that people thought about death. Like everyone knew death was eventually coming.
But when the when the plague hit, death was at the forefront of everybody's mind all the time.
Yeah, that initial outbreak over just a couple of years, the estimates are something like 30 to 50 percent of the entire population of Europe at the time. And everybody, men, women, babies, old people died. Rich people, poor people, everyone just started dying. And the living were subjected to living among the dead.
And yeah, how could that not just completely alter not just you and then the people who are young and being impressed upon for the rest of their life, but just society as a whole?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that was a morbid pall that hung over a continent. For a long time. And the books that were coming out, the poems and the odes and the paintings, like all this stuff was pretty dark at the time. You saw a lot of skeletons, never seen more skeletons in your life and paintings than during the plague.
Everybody was talking about it.
It was the hot thing. And then eventually that would lead to the dance macabre, the dance of death.
Yes, which I think dance macabre, D-A-N-S-E-M-A-C-A-B-R-E, is a really cool term.
Yeah, it looks like a band name or an album, like a dark metal album cover or something.
I think it was a nonfiction book that Stephen King wrote in the 80s, too, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, there's something about a slight misspelling as we know it. That ups the creep factor. If it was D-A-N-C-E, it is 75% less scary. Yeah.
Remember that band Dead Can Dance?
Was that with a C? Yes. If they would have made it with an S, you know how scary that band becomes?
I know. They would have only gotten booked around this time of year, you know?
This is the one where I think of the Grateful Dead sticker. I don't know if that is strictly Grateful. A dance macabre, but the skeletons dancing, like that's what that is, right?
Yeah, I think anytime you see skeletons dancing, it somehow, some way has its roots in the dance macabre because that's how that was the depiction. It was skeletons cavorting, dancing, partying with the living.
Yeah.
And in a lot of cases, the living depicted in these images like clearly aren't aware that the skeletons are partying with them. Yeah. But they are nonetheless. So death is always around you. And then another part of it is like they would sometimes dance and party, lead the party right to the grave. And that was, you know, everybody's going to end up there eventually. That's essentially the basic message of the dance of death. But it goes even deeper than that, really. Yeah.
And actually, I don't do this often, but I just looked up and apparently there was an actual event called Dance Macabre featuring the Grateful Dead and who else? Country Joe and the Fish.
Back in the 60s?
Yeah, I think it was 1966.
That's awesome.
Because, you know, if you want to evoke death, you got to have. I'm going to go to the country.
Oh, is that Country Joe and the Fish?
I think so. Isn't that like their one big song?
I don't know. Oh, my God. That's hilarious.
That song is just I don't know why it's endlessly funny to me.
That'll change the tone of an acid test like in a snap.
I diverted it. So where were we?
We were talking about the dance macabre is basically like death is inevitable, but there's more to it. And really the more to it was also like the people who are often depicted in the dance macabre illustrations were from all stations in life, right? So there could be like the Pope and there could be like a peasant and, you know, some merchant or whatever. Just a bunch of different people meant to just basically say like death does not care about your social strata. It just levels everybody.
My brother and I used to crack up at the Black Sabbath line. Would you like to see the Pope at the end of a rope? Do you think he's a fool? For some reason, maybe it was because soap on a rope. I don't know. My brother just thought that was the funniest thing ever.
That is pretty good. Which one is that from?
I don't even know.
It sounds familiar, but I can't place the song. Yeah.
I never thought I would literally sing twice in this episode. Didn't see that coming.
Maybe there's a third time coming, too. You know any Dead Can Dance songs?
Oh, I don't. But they had a hit, right?
I don't know. I just, I knew they were good. They had a weird, they had their own unique sound, if I'm thinking of the right one. I often confuse them with Rusted Root, and I think they were like nothing alike. I think Dead Can Dance was way more like goth and dark, but also cigarose-y, maybe?
Oh, I love cigarose.
Yeah, well, you'd probably like Dead Can Dance. I think the guy also sung like Ian Curtis from Joy Division 2 a little bit.
Oh, well, that's good.
I could be making this up, but I'm putting together an ideal band as I speak.
But it wasn't like Oingo Boingo. It's a dead man's party.
No.
Who can ask for more?
Do you know who the lead singer was of that band?
Come on. Seriously?
I didn't know. I should have known.
Wait, when did you find that out?
No, no, I didn't know that you knew, but I should have known that you knew. I found that out. Man, I was in diapers when I knew that.
The great Danny Elfman, for those of you who don't know, and I'm not shaming you if you didn't know that, by the way. I did just see, by the way, I just sang a third time.
Yeah, you did.
Danny Elfman at a music festival recently did the Simpsons theme on stage. Yeah. And it's pretty great.
Man alive. I'll bet it is. Can you imagine?
Yeah.
Where did you, what music festival?
I don't know. I just saw it on Instagram. It popped up.
I thought you went to the music.
Oh, no, no, no. I don't know. I don't go to this anymore. I'm too old for that stuff.
But that is cool. I'm glad you told me. I'll have to go check it out.
All right. So back to the Dance Macabre.
Yeah.
Did you mention the first depiction of that?
No.
The first one, I think, was a big mural. on the wall of the Charnel House at the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris in the 1420s. But then it became a kind of a play where you would perform this at like, you would get some churchgoers together and perform it in a cemetery or churchyard or something.
And it's basically a play that says like, hey, death is coming for you and you and you, and we all understand this, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Can you just imagine the kind of spread out like sporadic claptor at the end? People standing around the graveyard watching it. Oh, man.
Worst performance ever.
Should we take a break or talk about some of the symbology?
No, I'm all out of songs. So let's take a break and we'll come back.
You could sing I'm All Out of Love first.
That's for you only, buddy.
Okay. All right. We'll take a break and you can sing it to me then. Okay, that was a great rendition, Chuck. I actually teared up a little bit, so thank you for that. I feel like it really kind of reinvigorated our partnership.
Well, I know how you feel about air supply.
So I love them. I told you about that time Yumi and I went and saw them in Jacksonville, and I said it was like a church tent revival somehow. It was amazing to just be there and experience that.
That's so cool. Yeah.
So we're talking about the symbolism of the Grim Reaper, which I said earlier is pretty– you can– just if you stop and think about all of it, you're like, yeah, of course that makes sense. But I don't know how much of that is because– You're just so used to seeing the Grim Reaper with like, say, Scythe or the Hourglass or whatever. Or if it's because they were already common sense elements that were added over the years to create the whole Grim Reaper package.
Yeah, I've been saying Sith. Have I been saying it wrong this whole time?
I think you were talking about the Dark Lords, the anti-Jedi.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
So it makes sense. They're kind of evil.
Yeah. Scythe, isn't it?
I think so.
Yeah. And you're very sweet for not correcting me.
I didn't want to upset you.
You didn't want to upset me like all the other times where I'm like, Josh, never do that again.
I know, man. If we had an outtake reel of you yelling at me for correcting you, it'd be something else.
Well, hopefully you would live with the best of those, like Casey Kasem and Bill O'Reilly. Those are so great.
And Winnebago Man.
Oh, well, sure. They made a whole documentary about that guy.
Yeah, he was great.
All right, so back to the Grim Reaper and the symbolism. You're not surprised to hear us talk about skulls and skeletons, of course, and this was just a a common thing during the plague. Like people saw more bones than they'd ever seen in their life. And so that became just a popular depiction, obviously, in that era.
Yeah. I think it's interesting, don't you, that you can basically place an event that essentially gave us the Grim Reaper because it was so awful.
For sure.
So you talked about the cloak and the black cloak, specifically in the West, black is associated with death and mourning and funerals. I mean, have you ever seen a, Like a bottle green hearse? You haven't. No. Sometimes they're white, though. I feel like I've seen a white hearse here or there.
Wasn't the hearse in Six Feet Under green?
Maybe so.
Isn't that weird that you said green?
Yeah. And there's a literal.
Cultural green hearse?
Yeah. To contradict me?
Right. I think it's bottle green. I don't even know what that is, but....
Yeah, bottle green is like a green from the 70s, a car green, not metallic pee. This is a different kind of like darker, more attractive green than metallic pee.
All right. Let's talk about that scythe.
Okay. The scythe itself is, this one is the money implement, if you ask me, but it's not exactly clear what the Grim Reaper is doing with this, right? So earlier, the Grim Reaper used to hold the arrow and Or darts. Nah. I guess he was a dart champion at his local pub.
Yeah.
A spear? What about a spear?
That's creepy, yeah.
What about a crossbow?
Yeah, I mean, that's scary, but I think I could see a Grim Reaper with a spear in my mind's eye more than I could a crossbow.
I'm sure the crossbow would be distracting because a lot of people would be like, man, can I see that thing? I want to hold the crossbow. It's pretty cool.
Have you ever shot one?
I don't think I have. I've just always admired them. Remember, we did a whole episode on them.
Did we really?
We totally did.
Oh, good Lord.
I think we both kind of fanboyed out the whole time.
Yeah. So eventually it became the scythe. And, you know, it was, I think I said earlier, like this thing was used with a big swing to bring down a lot of grain. So I think just sort of symbologically, yeah. The idea of a scythe like sweeping through and taking out humans is like a pretty good visual or, you know, at least creepy. Right.
Especially during a plague like the Black Death, where a lot of people were cut down at the same time. So and that's where the scythe got added was out of that experience. Right. So it totally makes sense. Plus, also, this is like an agrarian society.
Oh, yeah.
Like that whole allegory of death coming along to harvest souls. In just the same way that a farmer comes along and harvests wheat and say like the fall when the earth itself is about to die. All of it is, it's a pretty good analogy, I think, or it's a pretty good prop.
Yeah.
The question is, does the Grim Reaper use the scythe to cut you down and take your life? Or is he just holding the scythe because it's just part of his whole look? That's unclear. The fact that he used to hold arrows and darts and spears and crossbows makes it seem like the scythe is the implement he uses to cut your life out. He also used to carry a candle snuffer I saw sometimes. So that makes it seem like he's actively taking your life. But if you think about more modern depictions of the Grim Reaper... Maybe once in a while if he touches you. I think there was a Grim Reaper that touched your head and it killed you. I don't remember on what. But for the most part, he's just there. He's like a bureaucrat
collector is basically what he seems to be depicted as mostly these days. Yeah.
So like he walks up, you see the scythe, and you're like, oh. And he goes, that's just for show. Don't worry about the scythe.
It's made of plastic.
That's right. And he bends the blade like, see?
It's a retractable scythe blade.
The hourglass is another symbol. You know, obviously, you know what an hourglass is. It has the two bulbs with the sand. And I believe it takes an hour for the sand to fall from one bulb to the next. But if the Grim Reaper walks up to you or here's a fun trick, get like a foot tall hourglass and just like walk up to somebody's table in an outdoor cafe with a creepy look on your face and look him in the eye and turn it upside down and walk away and leave it on their table. The message isn't, you know, if you finish that meal before the hourglass is up, it's free.
I would take it like that. Yeah. So, yeah, the hourglass also, I mean, now you're conflating time with death, right? Everybody has a certain amount of time. So, yeah, I mean, you put all those together, you get yourself a Grim Reaper. There's not too many other implements. He's pretty, he travels light, I guess.
He rides a horse, right? Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know. That's not necessarily true. So he rides a horse if the Grim Reaper is also considered the same as the horseman Death, who rode a pale horse to bring about the apocalypse along with war, pestilence, and famine.
In the Bible, that is.
I should say that, yes. So the reason we bring that up— well, you brought it up— is because that horseman, one of the four horsemen, was— is often depicted as looking identical to the Grim Reaper. He's just on a horse.
Yeah. You got pestilence, you got war, you got famine, you got death. And those are the four equestrians.
That's right. I guess death is the only one that's specifically named in the Bible and they call him Thanatos.
Oh, really? All right. From the ancient Greek.
I guess so. He was supposed to be friendly, not, you know. horseman of the apocalypse, something happened to him. I guess he got dumped and took it really hard, maybe. And do you remember I said that he didn't come as a full package until the middle of the 19th century? That's when he finally got the name, the Grim Reaper.
And it came from a Christian devotional text called Circle of Human Life. That's where the name Grim Reaper originally came from.
I love it. Do we know who wrote that?
No.
All right.
Jack Handy.
Well, now we're at the part where we can talk about a little bit more of the fun stuff in pop culture. We promised to talk of Bill and Ted, but the way it's handled in Bill and Ted is the way that it's handled in a lot of cases, like I mentioned, is where someone's trying to cheat death. A lot of times in stories and movies and books and stuff, it's like someone's trying to trick the Grim Reaper to escape death, maybe steal that scythe, maybe break that hourglass or something. Mm-hmm. And it can be funny, obviously, in the case of Bill and Ted's, or it can be very symbolic and kind of heavy if you're talking about Bergman's The Seventh Seal.
I've never seen The Seventh Seal. Have you? No.
I mean, I've seen clips of it in film classes and stuff, but it's, you know, that type of Bergman stuff is a tough watch for me.
Yeah, I've seen it depicted in like perfume ads sometimes.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, like they always seem to be kind of tapping into that somehow. But essentially, it's like an existential angst type movie where in this film, very famously, a crusader, a knight on his way back from the Crusades, finds death waiting for him. And to basically say like, I'm not ready to die yet. How about this death? Let's play a game of chess. And Death, I guess, kind of bored is like, all right, let's play. And Death actually loses. I don't know what happens after that. But the upshot of the Seventh Seal in mentioning this personification of Death is because if you ever see Death in a black cloak with just a white, like super pale face, they're pointing to the Seventh Seal, that depiction of Death.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And that's where exactly where Bill and Ted were trying to pull from because... they challenge him to a game, except in this case, it's Battleship. Yes.
And if you want to find a piece of bizarre AI slop, go look up the enigmatic legacy of William Sadler's Grim Reaper. It's the strangest article I've ever read. And I'm You didn't get to read it, did you? I sent it to you and you said it came up with a virus alert.
He sent me two links that were both virus alerts to the point where I thought someone had like hijacked your phone or something.
No, this is really a thing. I stumbled upon it. William Sadler is the guy, the actor, the very frequently used character actor who plays death in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. But this article writes about it as if the cultural impact of his depiction of death was just so sweeping and so wide that it changed art forever, basically.
It's just completely mad and made up. And then even more bizarre, the pictorial... in it are all of Prince William. There's no, and he doesn't look anything like that. It's just normal stock photos of Prince William. And I want to know what AI test produced that because it is a very strange article. I just happened to stumble upon.
Yeah. I think I'd rather hear your description of it. Actually, that's more fun.
Pretty funny to read, though, in itself. Sure. So what else?
Well, you've got the Blue Oyster Cult, or just Blue Oyster Cult, and their cowbell-heavy song, Don't Fear the Reaper, of course. Don't Fear in parentheses.
The Reaper. I don't know why they did that, because they never just say the Reaper. It's always Don't Fear the Reaper.
Yeah, the 70s, they were just wild about the parentheticals for some reason.
Yeah, they were. Like, I'm All Out of Love by Air Supply. Did you read that poem by Emily Dickinson, Because I Could Not Stop for Death?
Yeah, I read that in college.
I had never read it before, and I went and read it today. And it is a beautiful, it's a nice short read, very crisp, efficient, economical. And it's just basically about her riding in a cart through death and going past all the phases of her life until she ends up at the grave. And she seems pretty okay with it.
Yeah, E.D., one of the best.
Yeah, it's definitely worth reading, everybody. Of course, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come was very clearly based on the Grim Reaper, although that's often depicted as somebody you just don't see, like you don't see necessarily as a skeleton. It's just basically hidden in shadow.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, and I think that's a great inclusion by Dickens.
Yeah. Uh, I want to throw out death takes a holiday because that was actually remade into a pretty bad movie. Uh, the 1934 film was supposed to be good. I never saw it, but it was about death decision to take a break basically, uh, and like take a mortal form and see what that's like. And the 1998 remake was of course, meet Joe black, uh, with Brad Pitt is death.
And it's, it's, I never saw it because it was, it's pretty legendarily bad.
Oh, you didn't see it? It is as bad as you think. He acts blank, and you get the impression that he's just kind of being himself in a lot of ways.
Oh, interesting.
It's a very strange— he made some strange choices. Almost as strange as the voice he used as the Amish man in 12 Years a Slave, which almost threw the entire movie off the rails. It was such a weird decision. It's so weird. But there's a Simpsons treehouse of horror. That kind of plays off of that.
Of Meet Joe Black? A little bit.
Or Death Takes a Holiday, where Homer accidentally kills Death, and so everybody stops dying. So Homer actually has to become Death, and it's a really good one for sure. I think it's called Reaper Madness.
That's so good.
They are so great.
I did just see Obsession, by the way. Not about the Grim Reaper, but I know that you had recommended that, and I finally checked it out.
It's a good one, isn't it?
Yeah, I thought it was good. You know, a pretty clever idea done well.
Yeah. I don't remember the name of the actor, but the main girlfriend.
Oh, man, she was so good.
Somebody was saying there's like Oscar buzz around her and it would be a really unusual, non-traditional Oscar. I'd love it. But if you give actors Oscars for their performance, she definitely should be in the running for sure.
No, she was fantastic.
It was great, though, but not as good as Back Rooms.
I think I liked it more as far as enjoying a movie, but I thought Back Rooms was definitely more kind of creative and out there.
Yeah, I got shouted down at dinner last night with you, me, and my sister-in-law and brother-in-law and niece. All of them didn't like Back Rooms either.
Oh, I liked Back Rooms. It fell apart for me more after I sort of thought about it more.
La, la, la, la, la, la, la.
But I did like it for sure, but I liked Obsession more.
I got you. And then there's a third one I can't think of right now. Oh, yeah. Disclosure Day. I didn't see that. Is that any good or not? Didn't you see it?
Yeah, it's on the theater. Yeah, I like a really good Steven Spielberg movie, I thought. All right.
I'll check it out.
Not scary, though.
You know how sometimes when you don't hear as much buzz about something as you expect to, you just presume it wasn't very good? That's kind of what happened with me in that movie.
I mean, I don't think it lit it up, lit the critics on fire, but I thought it was good. Had a little bit of Spielberg magic.
Let's rattle off a couple more very famous or very creative uses of the Grim Reaper, okay?
All right. What you got?
The Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. Death is actually a main character who comes to become very fond of humans and is kind of an offbeat take on death. Death rides a horse. A pale horse, but the horse is named Binky. And Death has a granddaughter named Susan. So it kind of gives you a rough sketch of what the Discworld novels, the fantasy novels are like. They sound pretty good.
Yeah, haven't heard of those.
Have you ever seen Dead Like Me?
Who was in that? Was that Christina Applegate?
I don't know. No, no. Oh, what was that movie? That was a good one, too. Or not a movie.
That was a show.
I can't remember what it was called.
That's something, wasn't it?
Yeah. I don't remember what that was. No, this is different. It's about a girl who dies. And rather than going on, she gets recruited to be a Grim Reaper. So kind of like Anku. It's like recently killed people have to act as Grim Reapers. It's pretty cute.
Ah, okay.
And then there's the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, the cartoon. It's pretty great.
Haven't heard of that.
And then let's end this on the MST3K. One of the best Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes ever was Soul Taker. And it has Joe Estevez in it as the main soul taker. And I can't remember the other actor's name. He's got a very famously has an enormous face. But they are these like, again, recently dead dudes who are tasked with collecting souls into these rubber glow rings, essentially.
And then they take you to the afterworld.
What's the name of that one?
Soul Taker.
Soul Taker with an actor with a famously large face.
At least if you are familiar with B and C movies, he is famous for his very large face.
Hmm. I'm going to have to see who that guy is.
You should. You can also see Ninja Cop. He's a bad guy in Ninja Cop, too.
And that actor's name is Robert Zadar.
Yes, that's exactly right. I would never have come up with it, but yes, I've heard that before.
That's the dude.
Okay, well, Chuck just found out the name of Robert Zadar, and as predicted in 2008, when Jerry broke open that envelope containing the eighth seal, we just triggered listener mail.
That's right, this is by a cat named Chester. Hey guys, my family and I have enjoyed your show, and I recently got my 10-year-old interested. On road trips and playing out loud to help my kid to go to sleep, your voices are becoming a regular sound in my home. However, I have a cat named Chester who's taken to digging at my phone when I play your podcast out loud.
He's gotten so irritated by your voices that it's become a routine to move my phone around or literally hold him back while playing your show. I've experimented with you because this is my question is like, is it everything? I've experimented with music and other podcasts, but it's just you. Wow. When I play just your podcast, he is set on destroying you too. Help, guys. My screen is getting scratched.
Please apologize to Chester for whatever you did that offended him. He's a smart cat. He might forgive you. And we can listen to you in peace in my house again. That is Lasko and family. So, Chester, we want to say to you.
Meow, meow, meow.
Meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow, meow.
Yeah. And meow, meow, meow for me as well.
Agreed.
Well, thank you from Lasko and family. And again, Mao Chester, really Mao from the bottom of our mouth. If you want to be like Lasko and get in touch with us, you can send us an email. Send it off to Mao podcast at Mao radio dot Mao.
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