Supernatural creature of the week: Death and reapers

Death is not only a common event on Supernatural, it’s also a character. The fourth Horseman and the Grim Reaper himself, and one of the best characters on the show.

In this most recent episode of Supernatural, Death/Billie made a mysterious announcement to Dean in the final moments of the episode. It may have only been for a few minutes, but it was the most interesting part of the whole episode. There wasn’t much else going on, aside from the continuation of Dean’s possession storyline, so Reapers and Death is this week’s topic.

On a show like Supernatural, death is almost like an old friend. Literally and figuratively. The personification of death has made numerous appearances on the series and has helped the Winchesters out on many occasions. I miss the old Death. Billie’s okay, but she’s not the original fast-food loving skeletal Julian Richings we were first introduced to in “Two Minutes to Midnight.”

His opening scene was one of the best in the series, as he walks down the street to “O Death” sung by Jen Titus, the whole thing was bone chilling. However, in a twist of irony, Death died and now we’re stuck with his replacement, Billie.

In the show, Death is the eldest and most powerful of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, referred to in the Book of Revelation as the Pale Horseman. Out of the four, he’s the kindest and the most indifferent towards human existence.

I assume the show made him a neutral player because Death doesn’t pick sides, everyone dies. While Famine, War and Pestilence thrive in causing chaos, Death has shown to occasionally admire humans and has shown a fondness for certain earthly things. One of his more endearing characteristics is his deep love of fast food. Death being pro Big Mac is hilariously on point.

Working for Death are the Reapers, beings that remove the soul and carry it to the afterlife. Before Death officially appeared in Season 5, the creators of the show were probably trying for a more traditional look for their Reapers. The first Reaper introduced was in Season 1, “Faith,” and he looked like a corpse in a suit. The second was the Reaper Tessa in “In My Time of Dying,” who showed her true form for a minute before glamouring herself to look like an average girl.

The Reapers all look like regular people in regular clothes now, but their original design follows something similar to the original Grim Reaper himself, but where did the head Reaper come from?

Black Death

The Grim Reaper was most likely created during the Black Death, a plague that broke out during the 14th century. Considered the greatest catastrophe in history, the plague killed at least 25 million people during its first run and killed millions more as it continued flaring up all the way up to the 19th century. An estimated 60% of Europe’s total population died in the outbreak and it’s believed that the entire world population was reduced by an average 100 million people in total. It took 200 years to recover from those lost numbers.

Though scientists now think they know what caused the outbreak, a spreading of a bacteria called Yersinia pestis carried in fleas, the dreaded plague created a series of radical religious and social conceptions that continues to effect society today. One of them became the personification of death.

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This isn’t the first time death took the form of a living being, cultures all over the world have a symbol or God representing death. From Hades and Charon in Greek myth to Mors in Norse myth, the concept of death is so powerful and eloquently frightful that we have given them names and faces as if they were alive. Something so cold and permanent can’t be caused by anything other than a creature in a black robe.

As the bodies piled up and more and more people suffered, the plague became a symbol of death itself, and artwork depicting the event tended to focus on skeletal figures prowling the fields of dead bodies. Usually the pictures showed death carrying a weapon of some sort, sometimes a crossbow or a knife, until a scythe became the weapon of choice because of it’s use in cutting and removing pieces of crop.

A scythe is a farming tool used to reap, or cut, grain and grass for harvest. The scythe was an extension of the agrarian society and a symbol for fall and harvesting. Death harvests souls just as farmers harvest food. His other accessories like the black robe and hourglass are pretty self-explanatory. Black is the color of mourning and the hourglass symbolizes how much time a person has left.

The Four Horsemen

In Supernatural, Death is not only the Grim Reaper, he’s one of the Four Horsemen meant to set a divine apocalypse upon the world. In the Book of Revelation by John of Patmos, the last book of the New Testament, God is described to be holding a scroll in his right hand that’s sealed with seven seals. The Lamb of God opens the first four of the seals, summoning four riders on white, red, black, and pale horses: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death.

Revelation 6:7-8

"When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come and see!” I looked and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth."

They are the harbingers of the Last Judgment. Jesus gave a prophecy in Matthew 24:4-8, where he explained that in the wake of religious deception, war and famine would come, followed by disease. The Horsemen and their order symbolize the cumulative effect of false religion.

Spiritual deception causes conflict in society, leading it into chaos which lead to war. Famine follows war, and then once everyone has starved or died of disease, then comes the inevitable death.

In the text, the Pale Horse is the only horsemen given a name and the only one not carrying a weapon, he represents the end of an empire. Much like our Death on Supernatural, who usually appears whenever a powerful destructor needs to be locked up; Lucifer, rouge Castiel, and Dean when he was influenced by the Mark of Cain.

Mot

The Grim Reaper wasn’t the first Death symbol ever created, the oldest on record is probably Mot. An ancient god from Canaan, a Semitic-speaking region in the Ancient Near East during the late 2nd millennium BC. Mot, the god of the dead who’s opposed to all things alive. Not only is he a god of death, he was a god of sterility and the master of all barren places and king of the Underworld where he sits on a throne made from a pit.

One of the seventy children of El, the God supreme and his wife, Asherah, goddess of the abyss, Mot was his father’s most dearly beloved son. He had a constant rivalry with his brother Baal, the god of rain, and in Canaanite mythology was responsible for the long droughts of the region

Most of Mot’s tales and legends revolve around his brother and their rain battle. The area of Canaan was a large desert landscape that relied heavily on rain, so in fighting the rain god, Mot was determined to bring death upon them all.

The story of Mot and Baal was discovered buried underground with hidden clay tablets in Syria. They were inscribed with poems, renamed the Baal Cycle, that detailed the battle between the rain and death gods. He’s also mentioned in the surviving fragments of Philo of Byblos’s Greek translation of the writings of the Phoenician Sanchuniathon and also in various books of the Old Testament.

Nothing about the TV Death appears to be taken from Mot, but being the first death deity, he gets an honorable mention.

Catch the next episode of Supernatural next Thursday on 8:00 p.m. on the CW.