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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 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 Christ, and Mithras. Females 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 of natural processes. The second, which might be labelled the "internal" approach, seeks to explain such myths in terms of internal processes of individual spiritual transformation.
1 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 SenecaSeneca has several significant meanings: Seneca the Elder Seneca the Younger Seneca tribe Seneca crater Seneca (plant) Seneca College, Toronto, Ontario Places in the United States of America: Seneca, Pennsylvania Seneca, South Carolina Seneca, Wisconsin S, who saw the official and civil nature of ritual as paramount, were prepared to explain the myths and festivals of AttisAttis a life-death-rebirth deity, was both the son and the lover of Cybele, her eunuch attendant and driver of her lion-driven chariot; he was driven mad by her and castrated himself. Attis was originally a local semi-deity of Phrygia, associated with the, 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 FrazerSir James George Frazer ( January 1, 1854 May 7, 1941), a social anthropologist influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion, was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He studied at Glasgow University and Trinity Colleg and Jane Ellen HarrisonJane Ellen Harrison ( September 9, 1850 April 5, 1928) was a ground-breaking English classical scholar and feminist. Harrison applied current archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of Greek religion in ways that have become standard. Her books o, 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 BaldurIn Norse Mythology, Baldur (also Balder ON Baldr , the god of innocence, beauty, joy, purity, and peace, is Odin's second son. His wife is called Nanna and his son was Brono. Baldur had a ship, the largest ever built, named Hringham, and a hall, called Br would therefore all be rooted in primitive rites to renew the fertility of withered land and crops.
