If “age is just a number”, what number would death be? Some would consider it as 0, others ∞.
The position du jour regarding death is far more likely to be a blend of both, but tilting to the infinite consideration. Thoughts on our mortality is that we should simply accept that the body is finite, because consciousness, or the spirit, may be infinite.
This is what is viewed as most healthy: be it the re-appreciation of Stoicism (usually in the form of Amor Fati and Memento Mori t-shirts purchased on Etsy.com and worn at the gym), or the generalisation that our (whose exactly?) ancestors universally met their deaths with a primal form of grace, a practical yet (instagrammably) beautiful set of rituals to mark a passing; y’know the sort of thing - lots of wild flowers run through tightly braided hair, every lyric in a folksy-sounding celebratory song alluding to the sun, or a matronly personification of the planet, or an arpeggio’d “aaa” or “ooo“ that sounds nice and old-timey.
NB: The folk “revival” of the 60s and 70s in England produced some beautiful music, but ancient it certainly ain’t - listen to some Morris dancing music. Quite different.
Although some cultures maintained different versions loosely approximating both these approaches, others feared death intensely, demonising the symbols that are commonly attributed to our mortality, associating the end of life with the uncanny, the unknown, and the unreal.
Crows = sinister. Burial sites = bad luck. Corpses = probably going to come back and eat you, so when you’re burying a relative, you’d better place a scythe blade over the neck of Aunt Jules lest she dig her way out of the pit you dropped her lifeless body into and come home for a nibble (“∞” starts to look hellish at this point).
In Cymru (Wales), the more modern, pan-cultural sensibilities about death have come to prevail over older taboos and superstitions. From quiet acceptance to full-throated celebrations, these contemporary attitudes and rituals are observed from Swansea to San Francisco, Barry to Buenos Aires: death has lost the cultural specificity it once held in Cymru. Taboos and a sense of existential dread were always at the heart of the Brythonic/Welsh attitude to death. Allusions to gore and waste, treatment of loss and woe, and a heavy heaping of pain (instead of peace everlasting), was the way we once computed mortality in our small corner of Britain.
Despite this clear distaste for not living, mourning the death of others sometimes went so far as to beget more death: take the haunting song Lisa Lân (see video below). Songs like this are no longer known by heart, and the song’s message, one of heartbreak and wishing for death to join a departed loved one, is left unheeded by modern Cymru. Where death is usually to be avoided, the death of loved ones tends to beckon the living to join them, so said the Cymry (Welsh) of old. Galar (grief) could be as transmissible, and as deadly, as any pox or plague.
Where pearls glisten in moonlight, so do scars.
(translation of the lyrics here)
Different peoples treat death differently from one another, but there are broad patterns. Pastoral, hunter-gatherer, and our own advanced technological societies tend to hold the gentler, sometimes celebratory view of death. So too the war-like cultures, for the most part, albeit in a more cavalier, violence-loving fashion. The war-weary, transitional, and frontier-agrarian societies seem to edge towards the latter, fearful tradition outlined above, having some pretty heavy death taboos, probably due to the populace becoming sick of encountering preventable deaths too often, precluding the collective psyche to endure anymore. The folklore and tales that accompany such practices are usually wild, with some of the most incredible, often enigmatic, usually terrifying characters stemming from such a tradition.
Let’s focus on one such figure from my homeland: Y Brenin Llwyd, or
The Grey King.
Unlike the popular folkloric/mythical figures the Lady of the Lake, King Arthur, or Twm Sion Cati, the Brenin Llwyd hasn’t retained his once vaunted position in the psyche of the Cymry. It seems that attitudes surrounding dark nights, deep woods, and death that were represented by native folk motifs have been replaced by pop culture representations from elsewhere. Somewhat ironically, Welsh people are far more likely to cite the Grim Reaper, a character whose appearance is largely based on the Breton figure of Ankou as their idea of personified death (with Breton being a descendant culture of Brythonic/Welsh, displaced in northern France).
This enigmatic figure once served an important role in the folkways of Cymru, a guardian of the mountains, cloaked in a blanket of mist, or a prowling monster, staring watchfully lest some pitifully lost soul come a-wandering by. Then, it was said, the Brenin Llwyd would take you.
In the north of Cymru, he was a powerful king, clearly an echo of more ancient beliefs and figures. He seems to be culturally descended from more well-documented figures like Arawn, the mighty king of Annwfn (the otherworld from our mythological cycle - a world beyond our own populated by the Tylwyth Teg - the fair folk), or Gwyn ap Nudd, a later incarnation of ‘king of the otherworld’, and fittingly for the hypothesis we’re discussing, a psychopomp figure.
Both figures have been depicted as stand-ins for the devil in monastic writings, a clear attempt to dissuade the locals from persisting in their belief in older ways (maybe even veneration of such figures). As the protector of the highlands, the Brenin Llwyd’s presence in such places leads us to consider that the Britons of northern Cymru thought of the mountains as being (at least partly) in the Otherworld.
In the south, he was far more of a bogey man, haunting highlands with the mists swirling about him, snatching rather than guarding, hungering for the living rather than gently guiding lost souls. Alongside equally visceral monsters in southern Brythonic traditions, like the flayed demons called the Cyhyraeth (“a thing of muscle“) that stalk lonely mountain roads, enticing travellers to follow their lamps, and the ghostly, murderously malevolent, bat-winged (!) counterpart to the Irish Banshee named Gwrach y Rhibyn (“the witch of the Rhibyn“ - this could be a lost name for a stream once called ‘y Rhibyn’, it may be an old and/or colloquial word for ‘fog’, or even taken to mean ‘dribbling’… the dribbling witch with bat wings? No thank you).
NB: Let us consider the figure of Gwrach y Rhibyn for a moment of contextualisation; she is a portent of death, much like her Irish cousins. Unlike the banshee, however, it is not a desirable or honourable thing to encounter her. It is terror. It is awful. Her visage enough to strike the viewer dead, her mournful calls tinged with rage. She is not a figure of the good death, rather a symbol of the possibility that whatever lies beyond this mortal existence may not be good.
It seems that the king of this unnerving consideration is the Brenin Llwyd.
Probably…
The strangest, and certainly saddest thing about this character, this figure at the end of a long line of kings of the Otherworld, psychopomps, and stand-ins for the devil, is that I haven’t heard a single tale about him. I’ve never heard a present-day resident of a mountainous area of Cymru reference the Brenin Llwyd. There’s enough writing around the subject to convince me that he was once a commonplace figure in folklore, but no trace of him remains today, as though, like the mists that envelop him in his mountainous abode, he has dissipated with the sunshine of modernity.
A sad end, I’m sure you’d agree. An end which alludes to the very idea this figure once symbolised all those years ago.