Thread:AZS/@comment-46173343-20200713031315/@comment-46173343-20200714061711

Sorry I left my computer to walk my dog. Hopefully this will clarify things for you.

About Death:

~Firstly, I never said death was a race. I was not talking about race. I said death is a concept,      a personification of an idea.

Definition of Personification for Clarification:

  Personification occurs when a thing or abstraction is represented as a person, in literature or      art, as an anthropomorphic metaphor.

~What I was proposing in my previous comment was that we could list creatures/beings/dieties    that metaphorically represent the concept of death and dying on the Death page.

~Another Idea is that we could just create a "Personifications of Death." category page.

~About Death in Abrahamic religion, at least in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, death is        mentioned like a character, but these are likely symbolic metephors about the concept of            death. Not necessarity an actual character.

~In Exodus, there is an "Angel of Death." that seems to be separate from death itself a                concept.

About the Grim Reaper

~In Western thought the Grim Reaper is a single entity- not a race or category of beings. The      category you seem to be calling "Reapers" is actually called "Psychopomps." The definition        of a Psychopomp is:

''  Psychopomps are creatures, spirits, angels, or deities in many religions whose responsibility      is to escort newly deceased souls from Earth to the afterlife. Their role is not to judge the            deceased, but simply to guide them.''

About Terminology

~In the English speaking world when someone wants to be scientific, precise, or professional,      that person would more often than not use Greek or Latin terminology. When biologists name    a new species they use Greek or Latin. Latin is used frequently by lawyers in the legal                system, and so on. One of my personal goals is to make this wiki more scholarly and                  professional.

About Complications in Categorizing Creatures from Mythology and Folklore:

It can be really difficult categorizing creatures from mythology and folklore even for a native English speaker. Here are a few reasons for this to look out for:

1. Ideas about an indivdual creature change over time, even within the same culture. This means that what is factual about the creature being referenced is relative to a specific time period.

2. Ideas about an individual creature are relative to the religion, or even the denomination, of the person describing the creature. This means the things that are considered true about the creature will differ depending on religious views. For instance, Saint Paul of Tarsus, who wrote large sections of the Christian New Testament, believed that all the Greek gods and godesses were really mearly Daemons, and that the only thing that can truly be called a "god" is the Abrahamic God. Obviously, the Greek pagans from Paul's time period would disagree with him. So how you describe Daemons is going to be relative to weather you are talking from a Greek pagan or Christian perspective.

3. There are sometimes lots of different names for the same creature. For instance, Satan, which means "the accuser" is also called "Diablo" or "Devil" meaning "Scatterer." And is also called "Fiend" meaning "Enemy."

4. Sometimes a term that originally meant a single specific creature can be coopted to stand for a broader category of beings. An example of this is Psychopomps. A Psychopomp originlly is a specific creature from Greek mythology that guides souls. But the definition was broadened by scholars to include mythological creatures from around the globe that perform the same role. So Psychopomps has at least two separate definitions, so if we dont specify which definition we are using it will creat confusion.

Hopefully this was helpful.