Grim Reaper
Death as a skeleton carrying a scythe. The figure comes from the pictures of Death that followed the Black Death in late-medieval Europe.
Meaning
The Grim Reaper is Death in person, a Skeleton and skull who comes for everyone whatever their rank. The figure goes back to the Dance of Death, which the Cleveland Museum of Art traces to a 14th-century drama staged in churchyards after the Black Death, with actors dressed as skeletons summoning people of every class. On tarot trump 13, as A. E. Waite described it in 1910, “a skeleton with a great scythe” mows a field of heads and arms rising from the ground, one of the heads crowned (see Death).
Origin and history
The Black Death of 1346 to 1353 killed about a third of Europe’s people. The first painted Dance of Death, in the Holy Innocents Cemetery in Paris, is dated 1424 (Ed Simon, Hyperallergic).
Hans Holbein the Younger designed his Dance of Death as a series of separate scenes. His 41 designs were cut in wood by Hans Lützelburger before Lützelburger’s death in 1526 and published in 1538. In “The Emperor” a grinning skeleton lifts the crown from the emperor’s head; in “The Ploughman” it whips the horses of a peasant at work; in “The Child” it pulls a child toward the door while an hourglass stands on the ground, and Ed Simon calls this figure “the Grim Reaper”. Simon notes that nobody in Holbein’s series actually dances.
Read next
- Next in Halloween symbolsBonfireA bonfire lit on Halloween night. Hallowe’en fires were recorded in the Scottish Highlands and in Wales, and 31 October is still a bonfire night in Ireland; in England the fires moved to 5 November.
- Tarot trump 13 shows Death as a skeleton with a great scytheDeathTrump XIII of the tarot: in older decks a skeleton mowing with a scythe, in Waite's a rider on a pale horse. A. E. Waite read it as end, mortality and destruction.
See also
Skeleton and skull, Jack-o’-lantern, Black cat, Witch’s hat and broom, Bat, Ghost.
Sources
- Dance of Death: The Child (Hans Holbein the Younger; Cleveland Museum of Art, 1929.169), Cleveland Museum of Art, collection record 1929.169, woodcut designed by Hans Holbein the Younger, cut by Hans Lützelburger, Cleveland Museum of Art, object description
- Holbein the Younger Looked Death in the Eye (Ed Simon, Hyperallergic, 2024), Ed Simon, Hyperallergic, 14 October 2024, Hyperallergic, article text
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major: 13. Death
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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