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An image in your mind, a foreboding skeletal man cloaked in black, wielding a larger than life scythe, waiting to seal your fate with one fell swoop of his sickle. Something from a child's' worst nightmare or perhaps a campy horror flick directed by Peter Jackson, more like the son of the ancient Greek gods Uranus and Gaia. The ancient Greeks believed that Gaia gave her son Kronos a sickle so that he might free himself from her womb where his paranoid father Uranus imprisoned Kronos and is siblings. After Kronos freed himself he proceeded to castrate his father Uranus and bleed him dry. When Kronos had children of his own, following his fathers paranoid delusions, feared his children. Instead of imprisoning them he ate them. Kronos was one bad dude and definitely has earned his place in history as the first Grim Reaper.

Now we certainly can't give all the credit to the Greeks. There is anthropological evidence that even before the story of Kronos hit the Greek tabloids that the sickle was associated with fall harvest. A fall harvest to ancient civilizations meant the difference between surviving the winter and starvation. The harvest also represented death, the end of the growing season and the beginning of winter. But leave it to the Greeks to put such a twisted, nightmarish spin on harvest time.

Learn more about this author, Dolicia Dunstan.
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