Images of scythes

Today I have been thinking about how images of scythes are used in Western culture.

In the summer I had a day’s holiday and got up quite late (10 am). I went round the house opening the curtains, and from one upstairs window saw a small white van parked on our land near the house. I went out to see who it was, and found emerging from a deep ditch a council worker carrying a scythe on his shoulder. He looked like a character from a film by Serge Eisenstein (one of those montages from October where the land workers unite with the industrial workers to storm the Winter Palace). I asked him what he was doing and he said he was part of a council team keeping the drainage ditches clear. Apologies for the lopsided photo.




Above: Sickles and scythes hung up on the exterior wall of a stone barn. The hammer and sickle was adopted as the official emblem of the Soviet Union in 1922, and later became recognised as a communist symbol around the world. The hammer and sickle is meant to symbolise the unity of the peasants and workers (a statue of sickle-weilding workers from a collective farm adorned Soviet Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition.








Above: stone carving in a dark corner of a cathedral. Azreal, one of the four Archangels, is traditionally known as the angel of death (the grim reaper) and is supposed to be the angel of the Lord who took the firstborn children in the tenth plague of Egypt. Azreal works continually at a great book, listing all the living on the Earth (entering their names at birth and erasing them at death).