Sleep and Death
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Ηυπνος και Θάνατος
"It is the current coin that purchases
all the pleasures of the world cheap;
and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd,
the fool and the wise man even.
There is only one thing,
which somebody once put into my head,
that I dislike in sleep;
it is that it resembles death;
there is very little difference between a man in his first sleep,
and a man in his last sleep."
—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
In Classical mythology, Hypnos and Thanatos were the gods of sleep and death, depicted by the Ancient Greeks and Romans as childlike twin brothers. The brief repose of sleep so closely resembled the eternal rest of death, so Hypnos and Thanatos resembled one another as near-identical twins; although Death was said to be the firstborn twin, and Sleep the younger.
Sleep and Death were the elder offspring of Nyx, the goddess of night, and Erebos, the god of darkness. Nyx and Erebos were counted among the host of the Protogenoi; primordial deities who emerged from the nothingness of Khaos at the dawn of time. The twins were the eldest in their shadowy brood of brothers and sisters, each of whom embodied various forces of nature and the human condition. Their various siblings were personifications of such abstract concepts as strife, vengeance, madness, old age, affection, mercy and dreams. While the Titans and the Olympians cultivated the worship of mortal playthings, the children of Night stood at the fringes of the cosmos, impersonal and abstract, coveting nothing but the fulfilment of their natures.
Though divine in their own right, Hypnos and Thanatos were not part of the Olympian pantheon. Their home was in the gloomy depths of the underworld, where they owed fealty to grim Hades and maidenly Persephone, the rulers of the dead. Therefore they were counted among the Theoi Khthonioi, the gods who dwelled beneath the earth. Still, they were subject to the authority of Zeus as the king of the gods, and could not disobey his laws. Nor either were they beyond the rulings of the Moirai, or Fates, who govern the destinies of all creatures mortal and divine.
Greek Daimones
Daimones (or daemons in the anglicized form) are the spirit-deities of Ancient Greek mythology, responsible for natural phenomena or aspects of human nature. Unlike the theoi (gods) who merely governed certain principles of the universe, daimones fully personified what they represented. A daimon could be thought of as an intermediary being between gods and mortals, although many daimones had power over the gods as well, for even the immortals were subject to the rulings of the Fates. Some lesser daimones were the venerated spirits of renowned heroes and rulers, tutelary spirits of the ancestral dead, or semidivine nature spirits like the Satyroi, but the greater daimones were full-fledged divinities like Hypnos and Thanatos.
Contrasting starkly with the grim depictions of such beings found in other ancient cultures, the Hellenes recognized Sleep and Death as youthful epheboi (adolescents) with feathered wings, resembling the cherubic god of love, Eros. Being children of Night, their angelic countenance belied their daemonic nature; particularly in the case of merciless Death, who had not an ounce of compassion in his brazen heart. Hypnos was considered a benevolent spirit, called a Eudaimon or Kalodaimon. Thanatos on the other hand was most certainly a Kakodaimon, a spirit of necessary evil, though not necessarily an evil spirit.
Roman Genii
The Latin interpretation of the daimon was the genius, a term having the same root meaning (replete with wisdom). Like daimones, genii were divine or semidivine anthropomorphisms of natural forces and human qualities, and were likewise commonly represented as winged spirits. The Romans seemed far more preoccupied with the tutelary roles of their spirits than the Greeks were. They multiplied the genii into a host of common domestic guardians such as the lares and penates. They even considered each member of the Roman household to have had their own guardian spirit, a personal juppiter or juno representing their inner psyche and their connection to the divine. The Daimones of Greek origin remained familiar, however.
The Romans designated Sleep and Death as winged genii, with their Hellenistic attributes relatively unchanged, save for their names. Thanatos became known as Mors, or occasionally Letus. Hypnos was renamed Somnus or Sopor, and his dream servants the Somnia. Their parents were still Nox (Night) and Erebus (Darkness), also mostly unchanged from their Greek roots. They served the latinized counterpart of Hades, called Pluto (from Greek Plouton, Wealthy) or Dis Pater (Father of Riches); and his wife Proserpina, equated with Persephone. The nomenclature was the only real distinction.
Post-Classical Figures
After the Classical era, Sleep and Death were represented in Medieval European folklore as the Sandman and the Grim Reaper respectively, although few if any of their original traits were reflected in these contemporary personae. Most of the Grim Reaper's symbolism derived from the Titan Kronos and the Protogenos Khronos, merged due to folk etymology as the sickle-wielding Father Time. The Sandman on the other hand was an odd combination of Hypnos and Oneiros, both a sprinkler of sleeping sands and an envoy of dreams, and was never particularly prominent outside of fairy tales and nursery rhymes.
During the Renaissance, Hypnos and Thanatos were temporarily restored to their earlier and fairer incarnations. The term Puer Aeternus, derived from the Latin poetic work of Ovid's Metamorphoses, came to be used as an archetype in reference to eternally youthful figures like Hypnos, Thanatos, Eros, Dionysos, Adonis and Ganymedes. However, the striking imagery and popular folklore of the Grim Reaper and the Sandman would prove to be more enduring in the centuries to follow, relegating the Classical versions of Sleep and Death to obscurity.
Beetroot || March 4 2018, 2:50am
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