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Dying-and-rising god

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Life-death-rebirth deity
The Return of Persephone by Frederic Leighton (1891).
DescriptionA life-death-rebirth or dying-and-rising god is born, suffers a death-like experience, passes through the underworld, and is subsequently reborn.
ProponentsJames Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, Carl Jung
Key textsThe Golden Bough
SubjectMythology

A dying god,[1][2][3][4] also known as a death-rebirth, 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, Greek, and Norse deities Baal,[5] Melqart,[6] Adonis,[7] Eshmun,[8] Attis [9] Tammuz,[10] Ra the Sun god with its fusion with Osiris/Orion,[11] Jesus, Zalmoxis, Asclepius, Orpheus, Dionysus,[12] and Odin. Female examples include Inanna/Ishtar, Persephone, and Bari.[13]

History

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,[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] He also proposed that the myths of the pagan gods who symbolically died and resurrected foreshadowed Christ's literal/physical death and resurrection.[17]

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?"[18]

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.[19]

Criticism

Tryggve Mettinger argues that there is a scholarly consensus that the category is inappropriate.[20] 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.[21]

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."[22] 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”.[23]

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, gourmandizing, 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

See also

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, Encyclopedia 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. ^ Ackerman 2002, 163, lists divine kingship, taboo, and the dying god as "key concepts" of not only Frazer, but Harrison and others of the ritualist school, in contrast to differences among these scholars.
  16. ^ Miles 2009, 193
  17. ^ Crowley, Vivianne (2000). Jung: A Journey of Transformation:Exploring His Life and Experiencing His Ideas. Wheaton Illinois: Quest Books. ISBN 978-0-8356-0782-7.
  18. ^ Lewis, C. S. "Myth Become Fact" in Walter Hooper (ed.) God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Eerdmans, 1994.
  19. ^ 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.
  20. ^ Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. (2001). The Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East. Almqvist & Wiksell, p. 7.
  21. ^ Detienne 1994; see also Burkert 1987
  22. ^ Smith, Jonathan Z. (1987). "Dying and Rising Gods," in Mircea Eliad (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Religion: Vol. 3. Simon & Schuster Macmillan, p. 521.
  23. ^ Dag Øistein Endsjø. Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009.
  24. ^ Myth, ritual and religion, Volume 2 By Andrew Lang.
  25. ^ "Völuspá". p. 10.

References

  • Ackerman, Robert (2002). The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. New York: Routledge.
  • 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 0-674-03386-8
  • 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 0-391-00611-8
  • Endsjø, Dag Øistein 2009. Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-61729-2
  • Frazer, James George (1890). The Golden Bough. New York: Touchstone, 1996.. ISBN 0-684-82630-5
  • Gaster, Theodor, H. 1950. Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient Near East. New York: Henry Schuman. ISBN 0-87752-188-3
  • Godwin, Joscelyn. 1994. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany: State U of New York P. ISBN 0-7914-2151-1
  • Jensen, Adolf (1963). Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-39823-4
  • 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 0-8028-0868-9
  • 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 978-91-22-01945-9
  • 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 0-87552-559-8
  • 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.
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