Tag: death

In ancient Egyptian belief, the ba (the element of the soul that contained the personality of the deceased) faced a series of trials on its journey to the underworld. Failing these trials would mean a second death—obliterating earthly memory of the deceased, who would wander as a ghost forever. To avoid this second death, the Egyptians covered the walls of their tombs with The Book of the Dead, texts containing spells for the soul’s protection. The scene here shows the ba (in white) accompanied by jackal-headed Anubis, who watches the soul’s sins being weighed against a feather. If the sins are heavier, the ba will be devoured by Ammit, a crocodile-headed demon.

The Book of the Dead was never codified and no two copies are the same. Each was composed at a patron’s request, incorporating prayers that best reflected the individual in order to help them in the afterlife. Composition of Books of the Dead began around 1700 BCE, replacing earlier texts. Spells were added until a body of around 200 became common by about 1500 BCE. Contained in scrolls up to 22 yd (20 m) in length for commoners, or for royalty painted on tomb walls, the spells were said to be spoken by the ba at key points along its journey. Spell 4 is to let the ba turn into a snake, Spell 89 to return to the tomb at night, and Spell 98 to grant it passage on a ferry to the underworld. So powerful was ancient Egyptian belief in their efficacy that the scrolls were popular until the Roman conquest in 30 BCE.

— A History of Magic, Witchcraft, and the Occult, Spells For the Afterlife

Sonny Crockett:

[looking at a mutilated corpse of a man of Thai heritage in the morgue.]

This mutilation: it looks too calculated not to mean something….

Martin Castillo:

It does mean something. It says the killer was a Thai assassin; this is his signature. It says its victim defied a very, very important man…. It’s a warning to anyone who sees it not to make the same mistake….

— “Golden Triangle” – Miami Vice, Season 1 (1985)

Once upon a time a friend’s psyker Player Character, Toby, decided to take as a student another Player Character, Reiko. Toby did this despite her known erratic personality. Reiko had already manifested some uncontrolled psychic ability. Toby recognized that if he did not teach her, someone else would.

He did not dismiss his concerns about her character’s character. Instead, he emphasized them in a no-nonsense lecture. He made it plain to her that his motivation was as much for the safety of the community as it was for her own. Should Reiko ever intentionally misuse what he teaches her, Toby said to her face, “I will end you.”

This scene predates Star Wars: The Last Jedi with Luke’s aborted killing of his student, Ben Solo. These are the only two instances of I know where a teacher/master is prepared to kill a student going-but-not-yet-gone rogue. The literary trope is a younger student sent against a rogue ex-student of the same master(s), e.g., Enter the Dragon.

In a milieu where great magical and/or psychic powers exist, this vigilance and grim contingency needs to be standard procedure for every teacher of them.

The most important initiation teachings concerned the way the spirit worlds are experienced after death. This was not because a candidate would have doubted there is life after death—such a thought would have been unthinkable then—but because they feared what their own experience would turn out to be. In the first instance they feared that demons, which they had evaded in their lifetime, were lying in wait. Initiation showed candidates how to navigate the after-death journey safely.

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 10

Lorien:

You can’t turn away from death simply because you’re afraid of what might happen without you. That’s not enough! You’re not embracing life; you’re fleeing death! And so you’re caught in between, unable to go forward or backward.

Your friends need what you can be when you are no longer afraid. When you know who you are, and why you are, and what you want. When you are no longer looking for reasons to live but can simply be.

…Surrender yourself to death. The death of flesh. The death of fear. Step into the abyss, and let go….

— “Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?” – Babylon 5, Season 4 (1997)

Death: the Iliad is ever mindful that war is about men killing or men killed. In the entire epic, no warrior, whether hero or obscure man of the ranks, dies happily or well. No reward awaits the soldier’s valor; no heaven will receive him. The Iliad‘s words and phrases for the process of death make clear that this is something baneful: dark night covers the dying warrior, hateful darkness claims him; he is robbed of sweet life, his soul goes down to Hades bewailing its fate. Again and again, relentlessly, the Iliad hammers this fact: The death of any warrior is tragic and full of horror. Even in war, death is regrettable.

— The War That Killed Achilles, Chapter 4

Delenn:

It should never have been allowed to happen. Not for my sake.

Lenier:

If not for yours, then who else?

Delenn:

He could have been killed.

Lenier:

Delenn, all we know is that we will die. It is only a matter of how, when, and whether or not it is with honor. He did what any of us would have done.

Respectfully, Delenn, I think this is the one thing about your position you do not yet understand. You cherish life. Life is your goal. But for the greater part to live, some must die or be harmed in its defense—and yours. There is no other way.

— “Grey-17 Is Missing” – Babylon 5, Season 3 (1996)

Herger:

The All-Father wove the skein of your life a long time ago. Go and hide in a hole if you wish, but you won’t live one instant longer.

Your fate is fixed. Fear profits a man nothing.

— “The 13th Warrior” (1999)

Emerald Seer:

The temple is at the center of the swamp where three trees grow as one.

Prince Colwyn:

How can anything grow in that place? It smells of death.

Ynyr:

Death and power are close cousins.

Torquil:

I don’t think I like your relatives, old man.

— “Krull” (1983)

Interestingly, this is a smaller category in terms of the varieties of activity found, but it has nonetheless been given a great deal of attention: the literature on modern witchcraft alone is vast. It is an interesting question as to why malign magic is not more common, and it is possible that creating and maintaining good relationships have always been more central to life than efforts at harm, though this might be seen as a romantic and unrealistically positive view of human groups.

Witches, witchcraft, and sorcery. These are people or activities that cast spells, effect unwanted transformations—such as turning someone into a frog (and counter-activity, often unwitting—kissing the frog to turn it back into a prince)—or cause harm. Such practices are very widespread: European witches are well-known, but witchcraft is also very prevalent and feared in Africa. Specific cultural differences are important: sorcery is found throughout coastal Papua New Guinea but is absent from New Guinea Highland cultures, a division that is widely recognized but poorly understood, deriving in some way from the separate historical trajectory the Highlands have followed.

Curses. Most common in competitive cultures, such as those from the Middle East to Greece and Rome, as were counter-curses. Curses can cause personal harm or illnesses, but they can also be used to help a sports team win or to make an opponent lose. Cursing is very well developed in the Mediterranean world but is probably global in its scope.

Magic as counter-culture. Ceremonial magic can be developed to deliberately attack or invert general cultural norms. This takes the form of so-called Black Magic, most famous in the recent West through Aleister Crowley and Thelema. Such attempts may involve a deliberate inversion of religious practices (the Black Mass) and use symbols in a manner similar to protective magic (mentioned above).

— Magic: A History, p. 24

Much magic involves attempts to do good in the world, or to avert bad outcomes. Benign magic is more common than its malign twin.

Relationship work. This is a very broad category, as people have multiple relationships with significant others, which can include the land on which people live, plants, animals, artefacts, houses, fellow humans and so on. Each relationship might have its own magic, so that if relationships have gone wrong in some way, or need to be rebalanced or readjusted, effective action can be taken….

Apotropaic/protective magic. This is linked to relationship work above and seeks to protect people, animals, plants, landscape or ancestors from harm, and involves practices such as those found in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (immuring cats or shoes in walls) or symbols, such as those used to keep out the devil.

Foretelling the future. This can often concern relatively local or personal issues—the health of a child, personal career prospects and so on. Here local fortune-telling or divination may take place, which we think of colloquially as reading the tea leaves. More learned forms of prediction came into being through astrology. Scrying the future can be even grander and more cosmic, through inspired prophecy, often of momentous events such as war or even the end of the world….

Understanding the past. Looking at the causes of things is also very important, with oracles a powerful technology for finding out the cause of an accident, a death or another misfortune. People want both to diagnose the cause of what happened and then to take appropriate remedial action. The classical anthropological case is the Azande poison oracle, although looking for past causes takes many forms.

Dying, death and the dead. Notions of how to die, what happens immediately after death and becoming more stably dead in the form of being an ancestor are all of great interest—the Ancient Egyptians created very elaborate means of dealing with dying and the dead, although this is a theme relevant to all humans. In addition to becoming an ancestor, widespread preoccupations include talking to the dead and making sure they do not bother the living.

Medicine, sickness, health and possession (mental and physical). Prior to the existence of germ theory (and even after its rise) people’s ideas of health often involved relationships with a range of spirits, demons or bad human relations that needed to be counteracted. Frequently, as in the case of Ancient Mesopotamia, dealing with relationships involved herbal remedies but also a series of spells or practices to negate the effects of demons or other malign forces. In most cases, little distinction is made between mind and body, something found increasingly in “Western whole-body approaches to well-being.

Understanding and effecting transformation. This involves activities such as craft production, with concerns about the practices of the smith, who is able to wield and control powerful forces, being common. Craft production often involved a series of magical practices vital to its efficacy. Alchemy was a series of varied attempts to transform base metals into gold, giving rise to more recent chemistry. People also worry about monsters and hybrids (griffins, sphinxes, etc.) or more usual transformations, such as a predator eating its prey. The arts shared between the Steppe and Europe in the first millennium BCE exhibit an obsession with transformation and ambiguity.

Manipulating desire. Siberian hunters feel they have to make reindeer desire them so that they will give themselves up during the hunt. People have ancient relationships with reindeer, going back to the Last Glaciation, and it is possible ideas of physical closeness have developed over millennia. Similar notions of sexual desire are also found in Aztec contexts. Many other cultures, such as those of Ancient Greece and Rome, concentrated efforts on love magic, with occasionally comic outcomes.

— Magic: A History, pp. 19-24

Narrator:

That year, at dawn of the twenty-first day of the tenth month—the month without gods—the main armies clashed. It was in the mountains near Sekigahara, astride the North Road. By late afternoon, Toranaga had won the battle and the slaughter began.

Forty thousand heads were taken.

— “Shōgun” (1980)

The year is 1600 C.E.

The book and television mini-series are a fictionalized account of the events leading up to this historical battle which de facto unified Japan.

40,000 heads!

Sonny Crockett:

The Rojeros Gang. Is that right?

Jake Pierson (retired Texas Ranger):

Yeah, me and my partner wiped them out. They was bringing guns up from Juarez. We were just waiting for them. Me and my partner stood toe-to-toe with seven of those boys. All we had were our Peacemakers. Load and fire, load and fire. Rojeros had one of them Tommy guns; he and his boys were trying to pepper us with.

Suddenly, Roy yelled “Jake, look out!” and he stood up, and he took the bullet that would’ve killed me. I spent the rest of my life trying to make that up to him. Took care of his wife. Raised his son like he was my own.

But part of me died with Roy.

— “El Viejo” – Miami Vice, Season 3 (1986)

Harry “the Hunch”:

Who’s the muscle on the Cerrera hit?

Vinny:

Nobody I know.

Harry “the Hunch”:

Well, if it weren’t for outside contracts, Americans wouldn’t eat pizza.

Vinny:

How do you figure?

Harry “the Hunch”:

Aww, this business is doomed ’cause you kids ain’t got no sense of history! Now Lucky figured the best way to get rid of a business problem was to bring in outside muscle. Make the hit, send ’em home. Works to this day. But Genovese, he opened a pizza parlor in Red Hook. Brought in Sicilian muscle to work it. They’d stay a week, a month; get a go on a hit; and boom. Back to Sicily with an American fortune. Next thing you know, there’s pizza stands from Brooklyn to Baltimore.

— “New Blood” – Wiseguy, Season 1 (1987)

Used without permission.

Demeter’s hair was yellow as the ripe corn of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain. The threshing floor was her sacred space. Women, the world’s first farmers (while men still ran off to the bloody howling of hunt and battle), were her natural worshipers, praying: “May it be our part to separate wheat from chaff in a rush of wind, digging the great winnowing fan through Demeter’s heaped-up mounds of corn while she stands among us, smiling, her brown arms heavy with sheaves, her ample breasts adorned in flowers of the field.”

Demeter had but one daughter, and she needed no other, for Persephone was the Spirit of Spring. The Lord of Shadows and Death, Hades himself, the Unseen One, carried her off in his jet-black chariot, driven by coal-black steeds, through a crevice in the surface of Earth, down to the realms of the dead. For nine days, Demeter wandered sorrowing over land, sea, and sky in search of her daughter, but no one dared tell her what had happened till she reached the Sun, who had seen it all. With Zeus’s help, the mother retrieved her daughter, but Persephone had already eaten a pomegranate seed, food of the dead, at Hades’s insistence, which meant she must come back to him. In the end, a sort of truce was arranged. Persephone could return to her sorrowing mother but must spend a third of each year with her dark Lord. Thus, by the four-month death each year of the goddess of springtime in her descent to the underworld, did winter enter the world. And when she returns from the dark realms she always strikes earthly beings with awe and smells somewhat of the grave.

— Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, p. 3

…The close formations and the dominance of armored warriors in medieval fighting tended to result in relatively many wounds and few deaths for so long as the combat remained undecided. Once the balance tipped, the situation often changed rapidly and dramatically. Two quotations from the chronicler Jean Froissart nicely illustrate the point: “When once an army is broken, those that are defeated are so much frightened, that if one fall, three follow his example, and to these three ten, and to ten thirty; and also, should ten run away, they will be followed by a hundred”; “but in flight there is more danger than in the heat of the battle, for, when any one flies, a pursuit is made, and, if overtaken, he is slain.” When fighting face-to-face, a soldier strikes with some caution, needing to keep his guard up, but blows against a fugitive can be delivered with abandon, lose none of their force to an attempted parry, and are much more likely to be lethal even against an armored man. Even those who refuse to flee can be easily overwhelmed, with little danger to the lives of their opponents, once those around them have fled. The logical implication of this is that battlefield deaths were usually very lopsided, with the defeated suffering sometimes very severe losses and the victors losing only a few men killed. The testimony of eyewitness sources confirms that this was typically the result of medieval combats.

— Soldiers’ Lives Through History, pp. 214-15

Emphasis mine.

D’Artagnan:

When I became a Musketeer, I was told that each time I drew my sword, I should consider not what I was killing but what I was allowing to live.

— “The Man in the Iron Mask” (1998)

Jack Gretsky:

Remember that night in the hills of Mae [Hong] Son, when the Hmong warlord sent his assassins? They had us cornered in a temple…like this one. And we lay there waiting in the dark…and the air was so thick and ancient, you couldn’t breathe it. And when they came, we stood in the middle of the floor; leaning with our backs to each other. It was our swords against their swords.

We should’ve died then.

— “Bushido” – Miami Vice, Season 2 (1985)

In the underworld dwelt the spirits of the dead, who could affect the living, along with a range of other devils, potentially troublesome. Gods were treated respectfully at all times, but lower-order spirits and the ancestral dead could be cajoled, mistreated and forced into acts through binding oaths or attacks on their effigies…. Spoken or written spells produced powerful effects.

— Magic: A History, p. 83