The iconography I mean. You know, the skeleton covered with a shoddy, dirty peasant cloak, wielding a scythe. The deep, booming voice. Does this character hail from a specific vein of mythology? The skeleton obviously suggests the decay of the body after death, but what’s the symbolism of the cloak & scythe? When & where did this guy enter our collective consciousness?
The image is similar to Old Man Time, also equipped with scythe & hourglass.
Apparently the scythe is because death was related to the harvest. It was also associated with time, hence the similiarity with Father Time.
I’ll bet the cloak has something to do with how ghosts are often petrayed as wearing winding sheets(Sp?).
It goes at least back to the Black Death of medieval times (that is, the 1300s, I don’t mean the restaurant chain). Death was often depicted as a skeleton “harvesting” victims with a scythe–the cloak over the skeleton was just pretty much normal clothing of the time.
Well, a reaper is someone who reaps grain by cutting it down with a sythe. Can’t be a reaper without a sythe! I mean, unless he used a combine, I suppose. But how gruesome would that be! :eek:
There are plenty of New Testament passages that refer to the resurection of the righteous and the destruction of the wicked as a harvest, either metaphorically or allegorically. And of course, John Barleycorn was the personification of the harvested barley grain, who was cut down upon reaching maturity by the reapers’ sythes. Not much of a leap to imagine a supernatural reaper who cuts us down at the appointed time.
Not surprisingly, Wikipedia has an article on the Grim Reaper, though it does little to answer your question.
“This is Mr. Death. He’s a Reaper!”
Oddly enough, I’ve seen some depictions of Death from Europe in the middle ages (I think) which showed him as a skeleton wielding an arrow, though no bow.
This suggests the figure goes back to the ancient Greeks:
Now we’re getting somewhere…
But I didn’t *have * the salmon mousse!
You have a restaurant chain called Black Death! You Americans are funny… 
OB
I’d eat at “Black Death” before I’d eat at “Medieval Times . . .”
“You might be a king or a little street sweeper,
but sooner or later you’ll dance with the reaper.”
Images of the Reaperman from the 1500s
Durer’s Knight, Death, and Devil (1513) showing a robed Death with an hourglass.
Death as a mounted hunter and as a reaper. From Der Ackerman aus Böhmen (The Ploughman from Bohemia), Bamberg, 1463.
As Shirley Ujest once said:
“Black Death! That is racist! Where is Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson? Where is White Death or Yellow Death or Latte Colored Death? The rest of the world demands to have a terrible plague named after their skin color!”
From this thread:
That’s commonly understood to be a work hazard for Starbucks employees. 
-rainy
This is just a guess but I would assume that the arrow refers back to Greek mythology when the arrows fired from Apollo’s bow would bring disease. I want to say that the name of the bow was ‘Toxos’, where we get Toxin et al from, but I can’t seem to find a cite for that.
Per Etymonline, toxin comes to us from toxon, meaning “bow”. Not a specific bow, just bow.
I did find several references to Argurotoxos as an epithet for Apollo, meaning having or using a silver bow. Most of the references seem to be pulling the info from the same source, but I can’t id where that is.