This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Death Spirits gathers two figures, from unrelated traditions, associated with claiming or attending a death, one recent and largely fictional in origin, one ancient and specifically tied to violent ends on the battlefield.
Shinigami are the death bringing spirits of Japanese usage, figures who draw a person toward death or attend it. The word itself is comparatively recent, appearing first in Edo period puppet theatre and comic storytelling rather than in older Shinto or Buddhist vocabulary, and it has no fixed place in either; modern manga and animation have since given the name a far more definite shape than the folklore ever held, a shape that now feeds back into popular belief about it.
The Keres are older and more sharply defined. Daughters of Night in Hesiod's Theogony, they swarm over battlefields in ancient Greek religion to claim the newly slain, fighting over corpses and drinking their blood. Distinct from the Moirai, the Fates who determine the length and shape of a life, the Keres were specifically associated with the manner of a violent end, and Homeric epic pictures individual warriors as each carrying a personal ker, a doom that catches up with them at their fated moment of death.
What the two share is only the grouping's own label: a spirit or class of spirits whose role is to draw toward, claim or attend a death, not to judge, punish or transport the dead once claimed, a narrower function than a psychopomp or a messenger of death performs.