Death (Personified)

Death as a personified being — as opposed to the mere event of dying — is one of the oldest and most widely-attested archetypes in world religion, mythology, and visionary experience. Almost every culture has represented death as an agent: the Greek Thanatos, the Roman Mors, the Norse Hel (as both being and place), the Vedic Yama, the Buddhist Māra (in his death-god aspect), the Aztec Mictlantēcuhtli, the Slavic Morena, the Breton Ankou, the Mexican Santa Muerte — the same functional slot occupied by strikingly different visual figures across cultures.

The most familiar Western image — the black-robed skeletal figure carrying a scythe, commonly called the Grim Reaper — was substantially crystallised in late-medieval European art, particularly through the Danse Macabre tradition that arose in the wake of the 14th-century plagues. The scythe borrows the agricultural metaphor of harvest; the black robe borrows monastic imagery; the skeleton renders death as reduction to essentials. But this figure is only one culturally-specific iteration; the Aztec Mictlantēcuhtli is skeletal but crowned and jewelled, the Hindu Yama is a majestic buffalo-riding king, and Santa Muerte in her contemporary Mexican devotion is variously black-robed (for protection), white-robed (for purification), or golden-robed (for prosperity).

In the world's psychopomp traditions — the beings who conduct souls between worlds — the personified Death often plays the guide-role rather than the antagonist role. Hermes in Greece led souls to Hades' realm; the Egyptian Anubis weighed the heart of the deceased; the Aztec Xolotl guided souls through the underworld. Death, in these framings, is neither cruel nor kind but the necessary companion for a passage no one takes alone.

In psychedelic and near-death encounter reports, meetings with a distinctly personified figure of Death are widely reported — often initially frightening, often ultimately experienced as gentle, and often described as an experiential preparation for the biological death everyone eventually faces. The Buddhist bardo teachings and the Tibetan phowa practices are explicit trainings in this encounter; contemporary psychedelic-assisted therapy for end-of-life anxiety (Ross et al., 2016; Griffiths et al., 2016) has documented substantial reductions in death anxiety following experiences that participants often describe in exactly these terms.

Sources:
Wikipedia — Death (personification)
Wikipedia — Psychopomp