The Meeting of the Three Living and the Three Dead
THE MEETING OF THE THREE LIVING AND THE THREE DEAD The meeting of the three living and the three dead shows an occasional meeting of three carefree very relevant men (normally three kings or a priest, a nobleman and a member or the upper-middle class) who enjoy life in their adulthood. These three men, apparently not acquainted with pain, go hunting and, on turning a curve or reaching a crossroads marked by a landmark, come up against three dead whose corpses are rotten and eaten by maggots. In some versions the dead ones regain consciousness for a moment to warn the living ones, we once were as you are, as we are so shall you be. However, in others the dead ones lie lifeless inside their coffins and it is a hermit that warns the living ones about the expiry of earthly goods. The living ones, impressed by the vision, change their existential attitude and, from that moment on, look after their souls, afraid of death’s proximity. The topic comes from the Buddhist sapiential literature by which the Prince Siddhartha Gautama had four meetings, one of them with a dead, before becoming Buddha. It must have passed to both the Persian and Abbasid literature through the trading routes and it reached the West deeply transformed, with the main characters tripled to gain dramatic intensity. Keywords: Dead, living, skeletons, hermitage, hermit, hawk, hunter, harnessed horses, noblemen, princes, kings, crossroads, landmark, cemetery, crown. Subject: The meeting of the three living and the three dead is found in French literature and bibliography under the expression: le dit des trois morts et des trois vifs or les trois vivant et trois mortis.
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