She was the last face the living saw.

The Angel of Death wasn’t a priestess or a murderer; she was the technician of death.

Among the Rus’ people, Viking traders who settled along the great rivers of Eastern Europe in the tenth century, this woman was known simply as the Angel of Death.

But who was this cruel ghoul?

When a powerful chieftain died, she performed the killing of a chosen slave to follow him into the afterlife.

She Was No Murderer — More Like a Midwife or Doctor of Her Time

She was chosen for her skill: probably older, experienced, and trusted to manage both the ritual and the body.

She had experience. While the men shouted and drank, she remained calm and precise. To her people, she wasn’t a killer but a specialist, part doctor, part midwife, guiding the soul across the threshold. The Angel of Death was not paid in silver instead she gained power, trinkets and protection.

Her psychology?

Sacred Duty

Years of ritual had taught her this was mercy, not murder.

The mind makes its bargains, calling obedience faith, and violence virtue.

She wasn’t taking life; she was escorting a soul.

And what she did still lives in us.

We simply call it a matter of duty.

What She Carried: The Tools of Death

• Cord or garrotte – to take the breath.
• Broad-bladed dagger – to pierce the heart.
• Cup of strong drink – mead or spirits to dull fear and steady the victim.
• Threshold board – a wooden doorframe held above the girl so she could ‘see’ into the next world.
• Assistants – two men who held the rope while she worked the blade.

She belonged to a broader human pattern.

In Mesopotamia, Queen Puabi’s attendants at Ur (c. 2600 BCE) were found adorned with jewellery, their skulls showing fractures from execution blows.

For Shang-dynasty China, ritual specialists used bronze axes to decapitate retainers with exacting precision.

Egypt saw priests known as slaughterers of the god perform sacred killings during funerary rites.

Each civilisation trained its own death officiants, people who turned killing into a ceremony.

The Angel of Death saw the procedure.

She ensured the gods were appeased, the crowd believed, and the passage to eternity ran on time.

Every civilisation has its Angel of Death, the one who keeps the gods’ hands clean.