| Life-death-rebirth deity | |
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The Return of Persephone by Frederic Leighton (1891). |
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| Description | A life-death-rebirth or dying-and-rising god is born, suffers a death-like experience, passes through the underworld, and is subsequently reborn. |
| Proponents | James Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, Carl Jung |
| Key texts | The Golden Bough |
| Subject | Mythology |
A dying god,[1][2][3][4] also known as a dying-and-rising or resurrection deity, is a god who dies and is resurrected or reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense. Male examples include the ancient Near Eastern and Greek deities Baal,[5] Melqart,[6] Adonis,[7] Eshmun,[8] Attis [9] Tammuz,[10] Asclepius, Orpheus, as well as Krishna, Ra, Osiris,[11] Jesus, Zalmoxis, Dionysus,[12] and Odin. Female examples are 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.[13]
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The term "dying god" is associated with the works of James Frazer,[14] Jane Ellen Harrison, and their fellow Cambridge Ritualists.[15] In their seminal works The Golden Bough[16] 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 Baldr, 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 argument, in combination with that of the Cambridge Ritualists, has been developed by Károly Kerényi and Joseph Campbell.
Some scholars, beginning with Franz Cumont, classify Jesus as a syncretized example of this archetype. 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 Jesus belonged in this category of myths, with the additional property of having actually happened: "If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic?"[17]
New Testament scholar Robert M. Price writes that the Jesus narrative has strong parallels with other Middle Eastern narratives about life-death-rebirth deities, parallels that he writes Christian apologists have tried to minimize.[18]
Tryggve Mettinger argues that there is a scholarly consensus that the category is inappropriate.[19] The chief criticism 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.[20] Jonathan Z. Smith, a scholar of comparative religions, writes the category is "largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts."[21] Dag Øistein Endsjø, another scholar of religion, points out how a number of those often defined as dying-and-rising-deities, like Jesus and a number of figures in ancient Greek religion, actually died as ordinary mortals, only to become gods of various stature after they were resurrected from the dead. Not dying as gods, they thus defy the definition of “dying-and-rising-gods”.[22]
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. These associations included seduction, trickery, gourmandise, and the anxieties of childbirth. 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.
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