Deities associated with death take many different forms, depending on the specific culture and religion being referenced. Psychopomps, deities of the underworld, and resurrection deities are commonly called death deities in comparative religions texts. The term colloquially refers to deities that either collect or rule over the dead, rather than those deities who determine the time of death. However, all these types will be included in this article.
Many cultures have incorporated a god of death into their mythology or religion. As death, along with birth, is among the major parts of human life, these deities may often be one of the most important deities of a religion. In some religions with a single powerful deity as the source of worship, the death deity is an antagonistic deity against which the primary deity struggles. The related term death worship has most often been used as a derogatory term to accuse certain groups of morally abhorrent practices which set no value on human life, or which seem to glorify death as something positive in itself.
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In polytheistic religions or mythologies which have a complex system of deities governing various natural phenomena and aspects of human life, it is common to have a deity who is assigned the function of presiding over death. The inclusion of such a "departmental" deity of death in a religion's pantheon is not necessarily the same thing as the glorification of death which is commonly condemned by the use of the term "death-worship" in modern political rhetoric.
In the theology of monotheistic religion, the one god governs both life and death. However in practice this manifests in different rituals and traditions and varies according to a number of factors including geography, politics, traditions and the influence of other religions.
In the universe of George Orwell's novel 1984, "Death Worship" was the common propagandistic English-language translation of the name of the governing philosophy of Eastasia (more accurately translated as "Obliteration of Self"). This ideology presumably made some allusion to Buddhist cultural concepts, but was functionally indistinguishable from the totalitarian "oligarchical collectivist" ideologies of the other two superpowers (Ingsoc in Oceania and "Neo-Bolshevism" in Eurasia).
Death is the protagonist in the science fantasy novel On a Pale Horse.