Life-death-rebirth deity

A life-death-rebirth deity, also known as a "dying-and-rising" or "resurrection" deity, is a god who is born, suffers death (or an eclipse or other death-like experience), passes a phase in the underworld among the dead, and is subsequently reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense. Male examples include Osiris, Tammuz, Zalmoxis, Baldr, Dionysus, and Odin. Female deities who passed into the kingdom of death and returned include Inanna (also known as Ishtar, whose cult dates to 4000 BCE) and Persephone (the central figure of the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose cult may date to 1700 BCE as the unnamed goddess worshiped in Crete).

The term "life-death-rebirth deity" is particularly associated with the works of James Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, and their fellow Cambridge Ritualists. In their seminal works The Golden Bough and Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Frazer and Harrison argued that all myths are echoes of rituals, and that all rituals have as their primordial purpose the manipulation of natural phenomena by means of sympathetic magic. Consequently, the rape and return of Persephone, the rending and repair of Osiris, the travails and triumph of Baldur, derive from primitive rites intended to renew the fertility of withered land and crops. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung argued that archetypal processes such as death and resurrection were part of the "trans-personal symbolism" of the collective unconscious, and could be utilized in the task of psychological integration. Jung's line of argumentation, in combination with that of the Cambridge Ritualists, has been developed by Karl Kerenyi and Joseph Campbell.

Some scholars, beginning with Francis Cumont, classify Jesus Christ as a syncretized example of this archetype.^[1] In the Victorian era, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn used parallels between Christ, Osiris and other solar dying-and-rising gods to construct elaborate systems of mysticism and theosophy. Following his conversion to Christianity, C. S. Lewis believed that the resurrection of Christ belonged in this category of myths, with the additional property of having actually happened in history: "If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic?"^[2]

1 List of life-death-rebirth deities
2 Criticisms
3 See also
4 Notes
5 Sources

List of life-death-rebirth deities

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Criticisms

A number of men and women were resurrected from the dead and made physically immortal according to ancient Greek religion. But all of these, including Asclepius, Dionysus and Achilles died as ordinary mortals, only to become gods of various stature after they were resurrected from the dead.

The chief criticism that has been brought against the universal life-death-resurrection deity category charges it with reductionism, insofar as it subsumes a range of disparate myths under a single category and ignores important distinctions. Marcel Detienne argues that it risks making Christianity the standard by which all religion is judged, since death and resurrection are more central to Christianity than many other faiths.^[6]

Beginning with an overview of the Athenian ritual of growing and withering herb gardens at the Adonia festival, Detienne suggests that rather than being a stand-in for crops in general (and therefore the cycle of death and rebirth), these herbs (and Adonis) were part of a complex of associations in the Greek mind that centered on spices.^[7] From his point of view, Adonis's death is only one datum among the many that must be used to analyze the festival, the myth, and the god.

Notes

^ See also the article "Jesus Christ in comparative mythology." As with all other world religions, Christianity and its symbols are categorized as a myth system in academic disciplines such as mythography, sociology and anthropology. The correspondences between Jesus Christ and other life-death-rebirth deities are unrelated to the question of the Historicity of Jesus; even the interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus as a strictly historical event in no way precludes its subsequent mythologization.
^ Lewis (1970).
^ see references at bottom of Resurrection of Jesus
^ "Völuspá". p.14-15, 25. http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe03.htm.
^ "Völuspá". p.10. http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe03.htm.
^ Detienne (1994); see also Burkert (1987).
^ These associations included seduction, trickery, gourmandise, and the anxieties of childbirth.

Sources

Burkert, Walter. 1987. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. ISBN 0674033868.
Detienne, Marcel. 1994. The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP. ISBN 0391006118.
Endsjø, Dag Øistein 2009. Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN: 9780230617292.
Frazer, James George 1996. The Golden Bough. New York: Touchstone. ISBN 0684826305.
Gaster, Theodor, H. 1950. Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East. New York: Henry Schuman. ISBN 0877521883. (Cf. Part II, "Seasonal Myths of the Ancient Near East", p. 129. On Baal and "the seasonal motif of the dying and reviving god".)
Godwin, Joscelyn. 1994. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany: State U of New York P. ISBN 0791421511.
Lewis, C. S. 1970. "Myth Become Fact." God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper. Reprint ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1994. ISBN 0802808689.
Nash, Ronald H. 2003. The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought?. Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R. ISBN 0875525598.
Smith, Jonathan Z.. 1995. "Dying and Rising Gods." In The Encyclopedia of Religion: Vol. 3.. Ed. Mircea Eliade. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan. 521-27.