Thanatos, God of Death
Thanatos was portrayed as a youngster with a inversed torch in one hand and a wreath or butterfly in the other. He appears, with Hypnos, several times on Attican funerary vases, so-called lekythen. On a sculpted column in the Temple of Artemis at Ephese (4th century BCE) Thanatos is shown with two large wings and a sword attached to his girdle.
THANATOS
Eros and Thanatos
Eros, Thanatos and the negation of the will-to-live in Larkin's poetry
Freud's Thanatical Reductions: The Death Drive as Symbolic Cynicism
Thanatos tha na TOOS
Contemplation of death conjures up images of disintegration, dismemberment, flying apart. In consciousness journeys, the dreamer may be sucked through a swirling vortex into a profound blackness--black that is blacker than black--cold and utterly empty. This state of nothingness feels different to individuals, depending on their personal experience with various aspects of death.
Fearsome Thanatos, harbinger of death,
With Hypnos, his brother, conveys man to rest.
"Your thoughts reach higher than the air;
You dream of wide fields' cultivation.
The homes you plan surpass the homes
That men have known, but you do err,
Guiding your life afar.
But one there is who'll catch the swift,
Who goes a way obscured in gloom,
And sudden, unseen, overtakes
And robs us of our distant hopes --
Death, mortals' source of many woes."
[The actor Neoptólemos. Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 16.92.3]
Ways of Death in the Ancient World
