Life-death-rebirth deity
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The category life-death-rebirth deity also known as a "dying-and-rising" god is a convenient means of classifying the many divinities in world mythology or religion who are born, suffer death or an eclipse or other death-like experience, pass a phase in the underworld among the dead, and are subsequently reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense. Such deities might include Osiris, Adonis, Jesus, and Mithras. Female deities who passed into the kingdom of death and returned include Inanna and Persephone, the central figure of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Historically, this category has been most strongly associated with two different approaches to the study of religion. The first, which might be labelled the "naturalist" approach, seeks to explain such myths in terms of parallels with natural processes. The second, which might be labelled the "internal" approach, seeks to explain such myths in terms of individual spiritual transformation.
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[edit] The naturalist approach
Of the two major life-death-and-resurrection approaches to hermeneutics, the naturalistic explication has more support in ancient sources. These rituals were closely linked to the cycle of seasons, as when Athenian women planted "gardens of Adonis" in pots and then, when the young green growth withered in the heat of the summer, wept for the dead young god. Already in antiquity, the rationalizing approach of Aristotle could be elaborated to a rigidly naturalistic interpretation of myth origins as explanations of natural seasonal phenomena. Such a reductionist interpretation was apparently epitomized by Euhemerus (late 4th century BC), giving the term "euhemerist". Rational Stoic Romans like Cicero and Seneca, who saw the official and civil nature of ritual as paramount, were prepared to explain the myths and festivals of Attis, Adonis and Persephone in terms of natural phenomena. The abduction and return of Persephone, Cicero argued, was symbolic of the planting and growth of crops.
In the late eighteenth century, the naturalist interpretation took on renewed vigor, as freethinkers like Richard Payne Knight sought to explain all religious phenomena in terms of solar activity. Thus the tribulations of Jesus and Osiris were both taken to represent the course of the sun through the day, night, and dawn (Godwin, 1994).
The naturalist hypothesis reached a further apogee in the works of James Frazer and 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 only echoes of rituals, and that all rituals have as their primordial purpose the manipulation of natural phenomena by means of sympathetic magic. The rape and return of Persephone, the rending and repair of Osiris, the travails and triumph of Baldur would therefore all be rooted in primitive rites to renew the fertility of withered land and crops.
[edit] The internal approach
By the Victorian era, the solar-phallic ideas of Payne Knight along with the less risqué work of scholars like Max Müller had taken strange turns as they made their way into popular discourse. Groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn were using scholarly parallels between Christ, Osiris and other putative solar dying-and-rising gods to build up elaborate systems of mysticism and theosophy.
By the twentieth century, this spiritualized turn to the universal-dying-god hypothesis had made its way into the academic discourse. From his studies of alchemy and other spiritual systems, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung argued that archetypal processes such as death and resurrection were part of the transpersonal symbolism of the Collective Unconscious, and could be utilized in the task of psychological integration. Jung's line of argumentation has been followed, with modifications, by scholars like Karl Kerenyi and Joseph Campbell.
[edit] Christianity
In academic disciplines such as Mythography, Sociology and Anthropology, Christianity and its symbols are categorized as a myth system, along with all other world religions. The universal dying-and-rising god motif, and the particular existence of mystery religions concerned with dying and rising gods around the Mediterranean Sea (e.g. Osiris, Dionysus, Attis and Adonis or Adonai), have led scholars in diverse fields to classify the mythical figure of Jesus Christ as a syncretized example of this archetype. For example, the Encyclopedia Mythica states that:
"Adonis is a complex figure, for the outlines of his tale were fully as a part of the sub-Olympian Greek mythology by Greek and Roman authors, and yet he also retains many deep associations with his Semitic origins. The name "Adonis" is a variation of the Semitic word "Adonai", which means "lord", and which is also one of the names used to refer to YHWH in the Old Testament." [1]
Others point out that Jesus may well have been historical, with only the story of his resurrection added under the influence of the Hellenistic mystery religions (see Historicity of Jesus). C. S. Lewis after his conversion to Christianity believed that the resurrection of Jesus 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?" (Lewis, "Myth became fact").
[edit] Criticisms of Universality
The chief criticism that has been brought against the universal life-death-resurrection deity category is that it is reductionist: in seeking to fit disparate myths into a single box. Marcel Detienne argues that the hypothesis obscures distinctions that really matter.[citation needed] Furthermore, since death and resurrection are more central to Christianity than some other faiths, Detienne argues that an application of the motif risks making Christianity the standard by which all religion is judged.[citation needed] For extended arguments in this vein, see e.g. Burkert, 1987 and Detienne, 1994.
Beginning with an overview of the ritual growing and withering of herb gardens at the Athenian Adonia festival, Detienne theorizes that rather than being a stand-in for crops in general and therefore the universal acknowledgment of the cycle of death and rebirth, these herbs (and Adonis) were part of a complex of associations in the Greek mind that centered around spices.[citation needed] He postulates that these associations included seduction, trickery, gourmandise, and the anxieties of childbirth.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]] Similarly, a god like Osiris, whose functions relate to crops and the dead rather than spices and love, would call for a very different interpretation, despite the common theme of having died.[citation needed] Such, then, are Detienne's objections to the dying-and-rising-god hermeneutic.
[edit] Proposed life-death-rebirth deities
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[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Burkert, Walter (1987). Ancient mystery cults. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-03386-8
- Detienne, Marcel (1994). The gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek mythology. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-391-00611-8
- Frazer, James George (1996). The Golden Bough. New York: Touchstone Books. ISBN 0-684-82630-5
- Godwin, Joscelyn (1994). The theosophical enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-2151-1
