Death and the king's horseman

Life and death, and the relationship between the two, permeate the text. The entire ritual is concerned with the passage from one state into anther, and Elesin's great failure is that he cannot properly make that journey. There is an honor and sense of divinity passing into the next world. For those of the Yoruba ritual, death is merely another state in which one can exist, and are cycles interwoven with each other. The Europeans are also concerned with life and death, but their perspective on it is different: life is sacred, death is frightening and has no greater significance other than it must come eventually -- but through God's timing, not man's.