- Google death and this is what you'll get as one of the first images.

The figure is so ingrained in our culture.

It's hard to separate death from, well, death.

This iconic image of death personified is a skeleton that wields a scythe and is named the Grim Reaper, but why?

To answer this question, we have to look at ancient religion and artwork, Aramaic scripture, and yes, the Black Plague.

How we conceptualize death and how we choose to personify it changes over time.

And there's more of the Grim Reaper than just doom and gloom.

(upbeat music) I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, And this is "Monstrum".

Macabre images of death personified have been around since at least the late 13th century.

This illustration, the legend of "The Three Living and Three Dead" is often considered to be the first known European image of an animated skeletal death figure.

It's based on a popular story also from the second half of the 13th century.

And I mean, a very popular story with versions in French, English, Italian, and German.

The story goes that three finely dressed young men, aristocrats, or sometimes kings, are out hunting when they come across three animated corpses, all in varying stages of decay.

To their horror, they recognize them as their own ancestors or perhaps even the men themselves.

The corpses warned the living trio of the fleetingness of life, the grossness of death, and the need for repentance, turning the men toward a more righteous path.

The frescoes of the Camposanto in Pisa, a part of the Piazza del Duomo, known as the monumental cemetery or holy field were also inspired by this story.

The frescoes portray a flying death with bat wings holding a scythe.

That same century and event of global proportions fundamentally changed humanity's relationship with and perception of death, the Bubonic Plague or what we now commonly call the Black Death.

Its monumental spread in the mid 14th century in Europe, Asia, and Africa killed a huge portion of the global population.

How did we even attempt to manage the horror of such widespread death?

To give us more insight into the Black Death, here's Caitlin Doughty of Ask a Mortician.

- Hi Emily, hi everyone.

So let's understand that by the end of the 14th century, anywhere from 20%, which is already a huge percentage, to 75% of the global population had succumbed to the Bubonic Plague.

And, yes, that's quite a range, but there was inconsistent, inaccurate record keeping, and no reliable census or data collection.

But any way you slice it, just a monumental amount of death causing economic, psychosocial, and cultural effects on the population, turning death into a humanoid figure, "Death, why he's just like us," may have been a way to help us cope.

As the plague continued to rage on, skeletons and even half decomposed corpses became a common visual trope.

They emphasized the universality of death and served as a reminder of death.

"As I am, so you, too, will will be, folks."

"The Three Living and the Three Dead" story, which I love, was just the beginning.

Churches and cemeteries across Europe featured allegorical scenes of the "Danse Macabre", showing skeletons, corpses, and living people from all backgrounds, all walks of life, interacting together.

King or pauper, no one was safe from the plague.

Money and status can't save you.

- We also see the emergence of a singular death standing over bodies or collecting the dead.

Triumph of death motifs that illustrate the huge numbers of dead the grave could consume.

This period also marks the appearance of artistic renderings of these skeletons with weapons a bow, sword, sickle, or a scythe.

For example, in the mid 14th century, the poet Petrarch wrote his poem, "Triumphus Mortis", "Trionfo Della Morte", after viewing the Camposanto frescoes.

The tax popularity inspired more illustrations and paintings depicting death as a skeleton or a corpse standing on a cart, riding over a dying population with a large scythe over her shoulder.

That's right, her shoulder.

Death's gender can be either male or female, depending on the country and time period.

Those of us in the Slavic in Germanic language groups more often imagine a male Grim Reaper, while a female version has been more dominant in Romance and Latinate languages.

Don't forget that much of European culture hearkens back to the same Greco-Roman roots.

Thus, male death gods in Greek and Roman culture deeply influenced the Grim Reapers appearance.

Thanatos, the winged Greek personification of non-violent death, has been compared to the Grim Reaper, but there are two main differences.

Thanatos is always male and he carries away the dead.

The Grim Reaper is more often conceptualized as forcefully claiming the deceased, cutting down lives indiscriminately.

There's Chronos, the male Greek god of time, who is often confused with Kronos, the ancient Greek god connected to agriculture portrayed as an old man with a beard, sickle in hand.

The physical resemblance of these three gods and the natural associations with harvest, the passing of seasons, and time align them with death and each other.

When Renaissance artists and authors were looking for ways to depict death, they adopted elements from Thanatos, Chronos, and Kronos and replaced the handheld sickle with the larger, more efficient scythe.

- Just butting in here for some side facts.

During the same time in the early 14th century when we see the increase in imagery of death as a skeleton in art and literature, the long handled scythe that you can use standing up was gaining popularity in the corn harvests of medieval Europe.

Scythes went viral in the corn harvesting scene.

It was a faster way of mowing than the sickle and the increased productivity meant fewer laborers were needed, but because of the strength and height needed to use this larger tool, it was perceived as a masculine object.

Those who wielded sickles in the fields were called reapers.

Those who used scythes were mowers.

So the Grim Reaper should technically be the Grim Mower, which just doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Up to this point in medieval history, there are clear associations of death with time and the harvest, which helps explain why this Grim Reaper, this figure representing death, is portrayed with scythe in hand, mowing down the living quickly and in great numbers, much like the Black Plague.

- Personifications of death continued to be popular reminding the living of the inevitability of their end.

But death was also a symbol of compassion waiting with open arms in the afterlife, a sign of comfort and acceptance.

From this came associations of death with love, leading to its portrayal as a bridegroom of young maidens during the Renaissance period.

And, eventually, as the eroticized demon lover, which gained popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries.

So how did death come to be named the Grim Reaper?

That actually didn't happen until hundreds of years after the Black Death.

The word grim has been in use since the late 10th century to mean something fierce, cruel, savage, or harsh in disposition or action or fiercely angry.

The moniker, the Grim Reaper, in reference to the personification of death first appears in English literature in 1847 in "The Circle of Human Life", a partial translation of an earlier German devotional text from 1841 that tracks the life of a Christian.

So there you have it.

Death as a figure that takes lives with the scythe has been around for a long time, but the name Grim Reaper is more modern.

- The Grim Reaper pops up everywhere in popular culture.

The interpretation can be more lighthearted like in "Death Takes a Holiday" from 1934 or meet "Joe Black" from 1998 or the TV show "Dead Like Me".

The Reaper here is meant to humanize death and show that they have motivations and physical forms much like humans.

And it makes sense that in times of mass death, we know a little something about that right now, it helps to see death as not some terrifying, invisible, indiscriminate force bearing down on us, but something with a face, maybe even a personality.

Better that death is like a bureaucratically focused DMV worker, annoying, but relatable, than a black hole of nothingness.

It's easy to see that would make us less anxious.

And I'm fascinated to see how art and literature personify death as we continue to fight and, hopefully, recover from the pandemic.

- Like Katelyn said, more relatable interpretations of the Grim Reaper in the 20th and 21st centuries lessen the blow of his scythe, so to speak.

- It's the Grim Reaper, dude.

- Oh.

- But whenever there is a large loss of life in the real world, death returns to its allegorical role as something to be feared.

Like in 1987, when Australia used the cloaked figure to raise awareness about aids or more recently in 2020 when political cartoonist and one Florida lawyer use the Grim Reaper to emphasize the dangers of COVID-19.

Around the world, people evoked the dramatic figure to emphasize high death tolls by the global pandemic or as a warning of what might meet someone who fails to recognize the significant dangers of the virus.

Death is both personal and collective, after all death is universal.