“List of death deities”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Deities associated with death take many different forms, depending on the specific culture and religion being referenced. Psychopomps, deities of the underworld, and resurrection deities are commonly called death deities in comparative religions texts. The term colloquially refers to deities that either collect or rule over the dead, rather than those deities who determine the time of death. However, all these types are included in this article.

Many have incorporated a god of death into their mythology or religion. As death, along with birth, is among the major parts of human life, these deities may often be one of the most important deities of a religion. In some religions with a single powerful deity as the source of worship, the death deity is an antagonistic deity against which the primary deity struggles. The related term death worship has most often been used as a derogatory term to accuse certain groups of morally abhorrent practices which set no value on human life. In monotheistic religions, death is commonly personified by an angel instead of a deity.

Occurrence

In polytheistic religions which have a complex system of deities governing various natural phenomena and aspects of human life, it is common to have a deity who is assigned the function of presiding over death. This deity may actually take the life of humans or, more commonly, simply rule over the afterlife in that particular belief system (a single religion may have separate deities performing both tasks). The deity in question may be good, evil, or neutral and simply doing their job, in sharp contrast to a lot of modern portrayals of death deities as all being inherently evil just because death is feared. Hades from Greek mythology is an especially common target. The inclusion of such a "departmental" deity of death in a religion's pantheon is not necessarily the same thing as the glorification of death which is commonly condemned by the use of the term "death-worship" in modern political rhetoric.

A death deity has a good chance of being either male or female, unlike some functions that seem to steer towards one gender in particular, such as fertility and earth deities being female and storm deities being male. A single religion/mythology may have death gods of both genders existing at the same time and they may be envisioned as a married couple ruling over the afterlife together, as with the Aztecs, Greeks, and Romans.

In monotheistic religions, the one god governs both life and death (as well as everything else). However, in practice this manifests in different rituals and traditions and varies according to a number of factors including geography, politics, traditions, and the influence of other religions.

African mythology

Igbo

Yoruba

Ancient Egyptian

Aztec

Cahuilla

Guarani

Haida

Inca

Inuit

Mayan

Narragansett

Other

Taíno

Vodou

Canaanite mythology

Caucasian mythology

East Asian mythology

Chinese

(Note: in some versions, Xie Bian and Fanjiu are the He Wuchang and Bai Wuchang.)

Korean

Japanese

European mythology

Albanian

Balto-Slavic

Basque

Celtic

Etruscan

Finnish

Greek

Roman

Norse

Mesopotamian mythology

North and Central Asian mythology

Oceanian mythology

South Asian mythology

Elamite

Hindu/Vedic

Persian/Zoroastrian

Southeast Asian mythology

In fiction

Death is the protagonist in the science fantasy novel On a Pale Horse, book one in a series of 8 books, the "Incarnations of Immortality".

In the novel The Book Thief, Death is the narrator of the story.{{citation needed|date=March 2013}}

Death is the name of one of "The Endless" in the DC Universe.{{citation needed|date=March 2013}}

Death is a recurring character in the Discworld series written by Terry Pratchett. Books featuring Death include Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music, Hogfather and Thief of Time. He also makes a cameo appearance in Interesting Times.

In A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, the guild of assassins known as the Faceless Men believe that all death deities are simply different incarnations of the same god, known to them as the Many-Faced God or Him of Many Faces, while the Faith of the Seven worships The Stranger as one of Seven Aspects of God representing Death and the Unknown.

In the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, especially The Silmarillion, Nàmo AKA Lord Mandos is the Doomsman of the Valar, Judge of the Dead and Lord of the Halls of Mandos (where Elves await reincarnation and humans retreat before making the Journey into the Beyond).

In the CW TV show Supernatural, Death makes a crucial appearance. He is portrayed as existing alongside God since the beginning of time and being so ancient he cannot remember when he came into existence; he may even be older than God. In the show he is the oldest and most powerful of the Four Horsemen-Death, Famine, War and Pestilence. He is not portrayed as a villain.

In the Sailor Moon franchise, the last Sailor Guardian (of the Sol System) introduced is Sailor Saturn. Her powers revolve around destruction, ruin, and death and she can be thought of as a "god" of sorts (all Sailor Guardians can). Her weapon is the Silence Glaive that is capable of utterly obliterating and destroying entire worlds/planets if used to its maximum potential.

The Transformers mythos features the character of Mortilus, a Cybertronian deity who represents death and who later betrayed his brethren and was destroyed, leading to the longevity of the Transformer race. A similar character is The Fallen, a member of the Thirteen Primes who is identified as the guardian of entropy.

In the manga and anime, Death Note, gods of death (shinigami) exist in their own realm and are owners of Death Notes, which are used to kill humans. When a note falls into the human world, the person who touches it first becomes the new owner of the note, can recognize the god of death to whom it belongs, and the god follows them for the rest of their life. However, shinigami are more like Grim Reapers with freakish appearances than deities who are worshiped. This is because shinigami are a fairly recent concept in Japanese folklore directly inspired by the European figure of the Grim Reaper, and thus, aren't "true" death gods. Despite their Western origin, many people will refer to both the Death Note characters and the folklorical shinigami using the Japanese name instead of the English translation or even "Grim Reaper". For similar cases of shinigami being more akin to Grim Reapers in anime, see Bleach (anime) and Soul Eater (anime).

In the first campaign of the roleplaying adventure podcast The Adventure Zone, the character Kravitz is a bounty hunter who apprehends people disrupting the natural order of life and death. He even remarks on being called the Grim Reaper by some societies. While Kravitz starts out as a minor antagonist in the story, he returns as an ally to the heroes. Kravitz is gay and the romantic love interest of Taako, one of the main protagonists.

See also

References

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4. ^http://www.azteccalendar.com/god/Mictlantecuhtli.html
5. ^{{cite book|last=Jaimoukha|first=Amjad M.|title=The Chechens: a handbook|publisher=Routledge|date=2005-03-01|edition=1st|pages=110|isbn=978-0-415-32328-4|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PnjAlei9fe0C&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110|accessdate=2009-08-14}}
6. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/finnish-mythology.php?deity=TUONI|title=TUONI - the Finnish God of the Underworld (Finnish mythology)|author=|date=|website=godchecker.com|accessdate=25 March 2018}}
7. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/finnish-mythology.php?deity=KALMA|title=KALMA - the Finnish Goddess of Death (Finnish mythology)|author=|date=|website=godchecker.com|accessdate=25 March 2018}}
8. ^ A page describing Hades.
9. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/Makaria.html|title=MACARIA (Makaria) - Greek Goddess of Blessed Death|author=|date=|website=www.theoi.com|accessdate=25 March 2018}}
10. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.infoplease.com/cig/mythology/hades-takes-wife-persephone.html|title=Classical Mythology: Hades Takes a Wife: Persephone|author=|date=|website=InfoPlease|accessdate=25 March 2018}}
11. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Thanatos.html|title=THANATOS - Greek God of Death (Roman Mors)|author=|date=|website=www.theoi.com|accessdate=25 March 2018}}
12. ^¹Kveldulf Gundarsson. (1993, 2005) Our Troth. {{ISBN|0-9770165-0-1}}
13. ^¹The dwelling one went to after death varied depending on where one died, at the battlefield or not. If not at the battlefield, one would go to Hel (not to be confused with the Christian Hell). Of the slain at the battlefield, some went to Folkvang, the dwelling of Freyja and some went to Valhalla, the dwelling of Odin (see Grímnismál). The ninth hall is Folkvang, where bright Freyja. Decides where the warriors shall sit. Some of the fallen belong to her. And some belong to Odin.
14. ^"The counterpart to these deities of sky, air, water, and earth was the underworld, the realm of the dead, originally seen as ruled by the powerful Goddess Ereshkigal." Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History. Berkeley: University of California Press. {{ISBN|0-520-23146-5}}
15. ^"After consulting his mistress Ereshkigal, the queen of the Nether World, he admits Ishtar" Kramer, "Ishtar in the Nether World According to a New Sumerian Text" Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 1940. [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ereshkigal&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&btnG=Search Google scholar results] as [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1355317 the JSTOR link] is unlikely to be universally available.
16. ^{{cite web|url=http://www.gatewaystobabylon.com/gods/lords/undernergal.html|title=Nergal - www.GatewaysToBabylon.com|author=|date=|website=www.gatewaystobabylon.com|accessdate=25 March 2018}}
17. ^{{citation|chapter=Ahriman|last=Duchesne-Guillemin|first=Jacques|title=Encyclopaedia Iranica|location=New York|publisher=Routledge & Kegan Paul|year=1982|volume=1|pages=670–673|chapter-url=http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ahriman}}
18. ^{{citation |chapter= Asto Vidatu | title= Encyclopedia Mythica | date=27 July 1997 | author=Micha F. Lindemans}}