Life-death-rebirth deity
| Life-Death-Rebirth | |
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The Return of Persephone by Frederic Leighton (1891).
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| Description | A dying-and-rising god is born, suffers a death-like experience, and is subsequently reborn. |
| Proponents | James Frazer, Carl Jung, Tryggve Mettinger |
| Subject | Mythology |
A dying-and-rising, death-rebirth, or resurrection deity is a religious motif in which a god dies and is resurrected. "Death or departure of the gods" is motif A192 in Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, while "resurrection of gods" is motif A193.
Examples of gods who die and later return to life are most often cited from the religions of the Ancient Near East, and traditions influenced by them including Biblical and Greco-Roman mythology and by extension Christianity. The concept of a dying-and-rising god was first proposed in comparative mythology by James Frazer's seminal The Golden Bough. Frazer associated the motif with fertility rites surrounding the yearly cycle of vegetation. Frazer cited the examples of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, Dionysus and Jesus Christ.
Frazer's interpretation of the category has been critically discussed in 20th-century scholarship, to the conclusion that many examples from the world's mythologies included under "dying and rising" should only be considered "dying" but not "rising", and that the genuine dying-and-rising god is a characteristic feature of Ancient Near Eastern mythologies and the derived mystery cults of Late Antiquity.
The motif of a dying deity appears within the mythology of diverse cultures – perhaps because attributes of deities were derived from everyday experiences, and the ensuing conflicts often included death. These examples range from Baldr in Norse mythology to the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl in Aztec mythology to the Japanese Izanami.
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