Messengers of the Lord of Death

The yamadutas are the messenger-servants of Yama, the Vedic and Hindu god of death and the first mortal to die according to Rigvedic tradition, sent to retrieve the souls of the dying and escort them to Yama's court for judgment. Puranic and epic descriptions typically give them a fearsome appearance, dark-skinned, sometimes with the heads of animals such as buffaloes, carrying ropes or nooses used to bind and drag the soul from the body, an image meant to convey the terror of death's approach rather than to describe literal physiology.

Hindu devotional and philosophical literature frequently uses the yamadutas as a counterpoint to describe the alternative fate available to a devotee: several Puranic stories recount a sinner saved at the final moment when Vishnu's messengers, the Vishnudutas, arrive to argue the yamadutas out of taking a soul whose deathbed utterance, even accidental, invoked Vishnu's name, making the yamaduta narrative a vehicle for teaching about grace and devotion as much as a description of the mechanics of death itself.