… Face to Face with Thanatos
No, I had no idea what it meant either. I stumbled across the phrase in a biography of Freidrich Nietzsche that I’m currently reading. The book had been residing for several years in my stack of unread Christmas presents and I finally reached it. I’m not sure that I would have picked it out in a bookshop but I knew nothing about him and it was there, so I’m reading it. (It turns out that he was barking mad and a chronic hypochondriac, who ultimately went completely mad and died quite young. Evidently, there is speculation that his condition and state of mind may have been as a result of pleasure sought as a student, in a way that was more accepted in the nineteenth century, despite there being no effective cure for the malady that was commonly caught that way.)
I don’t think that Nietzsche can have been all bad; having been a great friend of and enthusiast of the music of Wagner, he later realised that Wagner’s music was shallow and intended to appeal to the nationalistic instincts that were growing in the nascent German nation. Whether you can blame Wagner for the rampant nationalism that grew in many of the German people in the next few decades is a moot point but several of their more destructive leaders were certainly big fans. Excessive nationalism was not confined to Germany at that time either and many nations had their own set of Jingoistic composers, a lot of whom are still popular today.
Anyway, back to Thanatos. The Greek speakers amongst you will recognise the word as that of ‘death’ and scholars of ancient Greece will know that Thanatos was the god of death. I didn’t, so had to look it up. In Latin, he was Thanatus but his Roman equivalent was Mors.
Evidently, he also crops up in the tale of Sisyphus, he of the pointless rock-rolling punishment. Sisyphus wasn’t a very nice man at all and had a tendency to murder travellers and guests to his palace. Zeus was not impressed and thought that he ought to be stopped and so ordered Thanatos to chain him to a rock to await his judgement in the underworld. Sisyphus asked Thanatos to show him how the chains worked and then closed the shackles on Thanatos, thus freeing himself.
The upshot of this was that without Thanatos around, no-one could die. This particularly annoyed Ares, the god of war, because it made war totally pointless. You can understand his frustration even if you don’t sympathise with his predicament.
In ancient Greece, it was important to know the genealogy of all the gods and Thanatos’ twin brother was Hypnos, not the mattress company but the god of sleep. He was also the son of Nyx and Erebos, gods of night and darkness respectively, presumably due to his tendency to sneak around in the small hours, along with his twin brother. There is also a link to Atropos, the one with the scissors, ready to cut the thread of life by which we all dangle. Her name was borrowed for Atropine which was first isolated from Atropa belladonna (Deadly Nightshade).
Gods of death appear in several different religious traditions; Mara is the Hindu goddess of death and in the Christian tradition, Death pops up in Revelations as one of the four horseman, the pale one. There’s also a film reference here to the 1973 Clint Eastwood production of Pale Rider.
I have to say that the mythology and history of death and all its representations is really quite fascinating. The problem is that as soon as one starts to look up these things, Wikipedia draws you in with its never ending network of links — well, I didn’t know that before!
During Nietzsche’s wilderness years, spending time in the mountains of Switzerland and Austria, he liked the high peaks but found the brightness of the snow hurt his eyes and was frightened by the clouds. In order to avoid them both, he spent much of the time in the dense forests below the snowline. Death stalked him in the clouds with their ever-present threat of lightning, which he believed was specially attracted to him. He was also aware that walking alone on high paths, he courted death from falls and other dangers. However, he did come up with a few good one-liners.
www.humanist.org.uk/marktaylor
