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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three in our series on personifications of death.

When we think of death, not as an abstract concept or process, but as a person.

So I thought we should start off by recapping the things we've talked about in the past two episodes.

We've already covered a good bit of ground, wide ranging.

So in part one, we mainly talked about common types of death and categories of death characters.

So one distinction we talked about was between the moment of death character who appears to the still living person in their last moments and then either signals that death is coming or somehow causes the death directly. This would be your classic Grim Reaper figure.

And then the distinction between that and the figure known as the psychopomp, which comes from the Greek for soul conductor.

This is the figure who shepherds the souls of the dead into the afterlife.

After that, we talked about four predominant categories of death figures that were proposed about 50 years ago in an influential

book called The Psychology of Death by Kastenbaum and Azenberg. And these archetypes were the

macabre, the comforter, the deceiver, and the automaton. And we explained in detail in those

episodes what those mean we also talked about

some psychology research on these categories like what contextual factors about a death might

cause us to envision death as a was one of these characters as a seductive trickster versus a

soothing helper and so forth and then in part two we started off by talking about the cultural evolution of death demon characters and aspects of these characters,

including everything from the tools they carry to the clothes they wear, and how those things could both reflect and inform how we feel about death itself.

So an interesting example was, does it change how you feel about death if the character of death is a harvester with a scythe versus a spinner with a pair of shears versus a fisher with a net?

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