First off, watch the video.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/video/2009/dec/19/terry-pratchett-religionSecondly, it is always the week after you turn in a quite long thesis on something (in my case, Psychopomps and DEATH), that something like this comes along. So I'm going to grab a bit of it and throw it in here because it seems to fit.
Really hope I haven't missed any typos.
Were one to take the Death from Rethel’s Auch ein Todtentanz and place him next to Pratchett’s DEATH, they would not look so different. A human skeleton imbued with animation, a scythe to reap and a pale horse to ride. And yet, though physically similar, they are so psychologically distant as to nearly unrecognizable from the inside (which is how Gaiman’s Death would view them, and judge them not). Somewhere along the line we learned to embrace Death and see ourselves in them. They may be alien presences, kept distant by each having only a single meeting with them (and one a mortal could hardly report back from), but where before they were a thing feared they have been turned into a thing more human than not. Were you to place the Death of the Todtentanz next to DEATH, one feels now that there would be a kindly countenance from one of them.
Psychopomps serve as a guide for the soul, and in their modern incarnation humans begin to serve as guides for the psychopomps. Gaiman and Pratchett together write an ancient Death in Good Omens, but left on their own they write Deaths with feeling, ones that flirt and flirt with the rules. As much as Death causes permanent change in every mortal, mortals are allowed to change modern Deaths.
Some of this comes from our technological progress, though wars and plagues still affect the world we can seek to control both more now that ever before in our history. As Robert Oppenheimer said at the first nuclear blast, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Humanity has progressed to a state of control far beyond our imaginings in the primitive and pre-Technological Revolution societies. When we have progressed so far that we have trouble imagining the lives of the generations beyond us, something fundamental about human nature shifts.
We may still fear personal Death, and the specter of atomic holocaust remains, but we now no longer need fear the Grim Reaper as we once did. When Rethel shows [urlhttp://2.bp.blogspot.com/_XOYqXek4p4w/SCxrY8asuII/AAAAAAAAAuI/t0G4UWNdKDU/s1600-h/triomphe_rethel2.jpg]Death playing his bony violin[/url] during the outbreak of cholera in Paris there was little to do but fear the disease, and blame the Death that spread it. What killed five or six in ten now kills less than a percent when treated.
When we do not fear death as we once did, we begin to get to know them.
