Dying god

Life-death-rebirth deity
The Return of Persephone by Frederic Leighton (1891).
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]

History of the concept

The term "dying god" is associated with the works of James Frazer,^[14] Jane Ellen Harrison,^{[citation needed]} and their fellow Cambridge Ritualists.^{[citation needed]} In their seminal works The Golden Bough^[15] and Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

Jesus

Main article: Christ myth theory

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?"^[16]

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.^[17]

Criticism

Tryggve Mettinger argues that there is a scholarly consensus that the category is inappropriate.^[18] 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.^[19] 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."^[20] 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”.^[21]

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.

List of life-death-rebirth deities

Australian Aboriginal mythology Julunggul Wawalag Akkadian mythology Tammuz Ishtar Arabian mythology Phoenix Aztec mythology Quetzalcoatl Xipe Totec Canaanite mythology Adonis Baal Eshmun Melqart Christian mythology Jesus

Dacian mythology Zalmoxis Egyptian mythology Osiris Amun Amun-Min (Amen-Min) Etruscan mythology Atunis -Also known as "Adonis" (Greek) Greek mythology Adonis Cronus Dionysus Orpheus Persephone

Indian Mythology Kali Shiva Chinnamasta

Japanese mythology Izanagi Khoikhoi mythology Heitsi-eibib [22] Native American mythology Kaknu Norse mythology Gullveig [23] Odin Baldr Phrygian mythology Attis

Religion in ancient Rome Aeneas Bacchus Proserpina Slavic mythology Veles Jarilo Sumerian mythology Dumuzi Inanna Yoruba mythology Obatala Moremi

See also

• Descent to the underworld
• Greco-Roman mysteries
• John Barleycorn
• List of virgin births
• Mytheme
• Osiris-Dionysus
• Resurrection
• Sparagmos
• Vegetation deity

Notes

1. ^ Leeming, "Dying god"
2. ^ Burkert 1979, 99
3. ^ Stookey 2004, 99
4. ^ Miles 2009, 193
5. ^ Mettinger, Riddle, 55-81.
6. ^ Mettinger, Riddle, 83-111.
7. ^ Mettinger, Riddle, 113-154.
8. ^ Mettinger, Riddle, 55-165.
9. ^ http://www.christianity-revealed.com/cr/files/pagangodattisdiedresurrected.html
10. ^ Akkadian Dumuzi, Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed April 21, 2010; Mettinger, Riddle, 185-215.
11. ^ Mettinger, Riddle, 167-183.
12. ^ Dionysus, greekmythology.com, accessed April 21, 2010.
13. ^ Persephone, Encyclopaedia Britannica, April 21, 2010.
14. ^ Miles 2009, 193
15. ^ Miles 2009, 193
16. ^ Lewis, C. S. "Myth Become Fact" in Walter Hooper (ed.) God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Eerdmans, 1994.
17. ^ Price, Robert M. "Jesus at the Vanishing Point" in James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy (eds.) The Historical Jesus: Five Views. InterVarsity, 2009, p. 75.
18. ^ Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. (2001). The Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East. Almqvist & Wiksell, p. 7.
19. ^ Detienne 1994; see also Burkert 1987
20. ^ Smith, Jonathan Z. (1987). "Dying and Rising Gods," in Mircea Eliad (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Religion: Vol. 3. Simon & Schuster Macmillan, p. 521.
21. ^ Dag Øistein Endsjø. Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009.
22. ^ Myth, ritual and religion, Volume 2 By Andrew Lang. http://books.google.com/books?id=1NonAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=heitsi+eibib#v=onepage&f=false. 
23. ^ "Völuspá". p. 10. http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe03.htm. 

References

• Burkert, Walter
  • 1979. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. London: University of California Press.
  • 1987. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP. ISBN 0674033868
• Cumont, Franz (1911). The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. Chicago: Open Court.
• Cumont, Franz (1903). The Mysteries of Mithra. London: Kegan Paul.
• 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 (1890). The Golden Bough. New York: Touchstone, 1996.. ISBN 0684826305
• Gaster, Theodor, H. 1950. Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East. New York: Henry Schuman. ISBN 0877521883
• Godwin, Joscelyn. 1994. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany: State U of New York P. ISBN 0791421511
• Jensen, Adolf (1963). Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226398234
• Leeming, David. "Dying god". The Oxford Companion to World mythology. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. UC - Irvine. 5 June 2011 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t208.e469>
• 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
• Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. (2001). The Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East. Coniectanea Biblica, Old Testament, 50, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, ISBN 978-9122019459
• Miles, Geoffrey. 2009. Classical Mythology in English Literature: A Critical Anthology. Taylor & Francis e-Library.
• Nash, Ronald H. 2003. The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought?. Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R. ISBN 0875525598
• Price, Robert M. "Jesus at the Vanishing Point" in James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy (eds.) The Historical Jesus: Five Views. InterVarsity, 2009
• Smith, Jonathan Z. (1987). "Dying and Rising Gods." In The Encyclopedia of Religion: Vol. 3.. Ed. Mircea Eliade. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan.

• Stookey, Lorena Laura. 2004. Thematic Guide to World Mythology. Westport: Greenwood.