Domain: Death — the peaceful, natural end of life Symbol: Dark wings, an inverted torch, a wreath of poppies, a sheathed sword Roman Equivalent: Mors
Overview
Thanatos is the god of death — not the violence that cuts a life short but the quiet, natural close that comes to all in time. He is a son of Nyx, primordial Night, and the twin of Hypnos, sleep; the two were born together and belong together, the pair of dark powers that end the day and end the life. Where his brother releases you to wake again, Thanatos leads you down to Hades and does not bring you back. The Greeks distinguished him carefully from the Keres, the fierce spirits of bloody and violent death on the battlefield: Thanatos is the gentler agent, the one who comes for the dying in their beds and carries the shade across the border with a kind of grave courtesy.
He was pictured as a winged figure, sometimes bearded and grim, sometimes a beautiful youth with a downturned torch and folded wings, mirror-image of his sleeping brother. He is not cruel and takes no pleasure in his work; he is inexorable, which is a different thing. Even the gods regard him warily, for his is the one office that cannot be finally cheated — and the myths in which mortals try to cheat it are precisely the ones that show how the natural order strains and buckles when death itself is bound.
Key Myths
Sisyphus in chains. The crafty king Sisyphus, condemned to die, tricked Thanatos when the god came for him — asking to be shown how the fetters worked and then snapping them shut on Death himself. With Thanatos bound, no one on earth could die: the sick lingered, the mortally wounded rose again, and the whole order of mortality seized up until the gods intervened to free him. It is the sharpest statement of what Thanatos is — the necessary end without which life becomes a horror — and Sisyphus paid for the trick with his eternal punishment in the underworld.
The twin of Sleep. Homer names Hypnos and Thanatos together as the twin brothers who bear the slain hero Sarpedon, son of Zeus, gently home from the field of Troy to be buried in his own land. The image is tender rather than fearful: Sleep and Death, the soft-handed sons of Night, carrying a body out of the noise of war into rest. It captures the Greek sense that natural death is the near kin of sleep, a passage rather than a savaging.
Related
- Hypnos — His twin brother; death and sleep, born of Night, mirror-images of one another
- Hades — The lord and the realm to which Thanatos leads the dead
- Morpheus — His nephew, the dream-shaper, another of Night's line of quiet powers
- Mythology
- Greek Mythology Index