Rise & Descend

Though we talk a lot about dying & rising gods & goddesses these days, there isn't often a discussion beyond the fact of their existence. While there is a surface similarity to the agricultural cycle of grains that die at harvest and are 'reborn' as the seeds are replanted, and a better similarity to the seasonal pattern of trees that seem to die each year and come back to life again once milder weather returns, there was much more to these deities than just their ability to go below. Dying and Rising weren't the only things they were doing.

In fact, the focus on the death & resurrection obscures another facet of their purpose and these deities' jobs. They were not originally there to conquer death and give hope of resurrection -- whether physical or spiritual -- to their followers. They were there to minister to the dead.

Caretakers of the Dead

Reconstruction of early Minoan myth illustrates this best. Ariadne, the Daughter goddess & Queen of the Ancestors, went down to the Underworld at the start of summer; but she did not die nor was her return at the end of summer a sign of death conquered. Her job was to tend to the dead souls who lived in the Underworld in the same fashion that she tends to us above. This echoes the common view throughout the ancient world of the Otherworld being an opposite land: where we have a growing season, the Otherworld is barren; when we have a barren season, the Otherworld is growing. These early stories of deities who go Below were not epics of avoiding death, but of belief in the dead as still existing, just living in a different realm. (See Labrys & Horns, pg 33 by Laura Perry, first edition [red cover]; I have not had the chance to read the new edition [blue cover], so cannot refer to the correct page there, unfortunately.)

And these deities likely went down in summer specifically. The early myths with Ariadne and later Persephone, and later still the many other dying and rising deities, come from a different area of the world than most of us. For the Mediterranean and Middle East, their dying and rising gods went away to the Underworld at the start of summer: that extremely hot, dry, and dusty part of the year. Unlike the familiar European harvest cycle of planting in the spring, growing all summer, harvesting in autumn, and lying dormant in winter, these regions planted in the milder, wetter autumn, grew all winter, and harvested in the spring, retreating instead during the hot, dry summers. The only plants that would continue to be grown during the summer months are those like the grape vine and the orchard trees that grow according to the amount of sunlight rather than rainfall. This post, this post, and this post on Laura Perry's blog cover this differing cycle in a little more depth -- the key here is that the Mediterranean at least has really only two seasons, rainy & dry. The rainy, mild weather from autumn to spring allowed for crops to grow; though the Minoans were excellent builders and did have irrigation canals, these were reserved for those few summer plants of vine and tree rather than attempting to water crops.

Descent of Inanna

Where we see other versions of this tale, they are not commonly portraying the defeat of death. The Descent of Inanna, for instance, is not a tale of Inanna going to conquer death. The epic is rather a tale of injustice at how Inanna constantly meddled in others' affairs for her own benefit, often causing others to die: "[i]n The Epic of Gilgamesh, her [Inanna's] sexual advances are spurned by the hero and so she sends her sister's [Erishkigal's] husband, Gugulana, The Bull of Heaven, to destroy Gilgamesh's realm. After hundreds of people are killed by the bull's rampage, it is killed by Enkidu, the friend and comrade-in-arms of Gilgamesh. Enkidu is condemned by the gods for killing a deity and sentenced to die; the event which then sends Gilgamesh on his quest for immortality."

The Descent then begins with Inanna arriving at the Underworld to attend the funeral rites of Gugulana, whose death would not have happened without her. Inanna's death is given her as punishment for her misbehavior that has resulted in so much chaos and is represented in the epic as justice being brought against a wrongdoer; this justice is perhaps poignantly delivered by Erishkigal herself (otherwise known as Irkalla), wife to Gugulana whose funeral rites Inanna has interrupted. Inanna is only able to leave the Underworld due to her preplanned escape that brings the food and water of life to resurrect her, after which her consort and his sister take her place: one staying for six months until the other comes to replace them for six months. (The Underworld in Sumerian belief is amazingly 'sticky': no one can leave, even if you are deity, unless you can find someone to take your place.) This is not inherently a story of Inanna's conquering death for herself or anyone else, though it would come to mean that over time.

Star Gods

At the end of the Descent above, we have a hint at another pattern most people look over. This is the astronomical information preserved in many old myths we have. In a way, this plays into the description of these deities as mere agricultural references, as they record the movements of the stars usually in ways that are useful for successful farming. However, it does not do to think of these deities as only personifications of the stars, or that these myths are only for agricultural purposes: even without the stars, farmers, hunters, and gatherers alike who know the land they live on are quite able to tell the appropriate season for planting, harvesting, and hunting without the stars.

Noted in passing in the Descent linked above is that the two deities who come to take Inanna's place are agricultural deities. Of course the connection is immediately made that this is because they die and return like the crop, but that is not necessarily the case. Venus, the Morning and Evening Star, nearly always shows up in myth as twins or siblings: a pair. This is due to the movements of this planet. It appears on the horizon as a shining point quite easily seen with the bare eye (Venus is the third brightest object in the sky, with the Sun & Moon taking first and second place) and appears for several months in the evening before disappearing altogether for a time, then rising before the sun in the early dawn. Many ceremonies worldwide are attached to the arrival of the Morning Star and the arrival of the 'twin' Evening Star as they appear and disappear across the course of time. The reference to two deities (brother and sister) alternating 'going down' to the Underworld and then leaving while the other takes their place is a clear reference to this astronomical movement. (There may be additional astronomical information in this story, given that the literal bull rampaging about is also a Zodiac sign and could refer to the Taurid meteor shower, but that is going a little off topic for this article!)

No Archetypes Here

Rather than conquering death for their followers, or representing an agricultural cycle, or describing some modern New Age idea of integrating your shadow self, these deities would originally have been caretakers, tending to the dead souls like they did us; or teachers, giving vital information on how to travel through the otherworld to the cult they were patron of. Historically, we see cults that showed initiates how to navigate the otherworld, important information such as maps or passwords were memorized by the dead and sometimes buried with them so they could reach better parts of the afterlife that others normally could not reach. Where the deity is a caretaker, everyone pays honor to the deity that will eventually be taking care of them in that other realm, and helps out in that duty as we see in numerous examples worldwide of providing for the dead through the offerings of food, clothes, money, even vehicles through various means. Ancestors and the 'dead' are seen as vibrantly alive: it is only much, much later in the evolution of cultures and stories and society's needs that these views change, morphing deities from caretakers and travel guides to saviors who were in some way able to transcend the bonds of death for their followers.

That is why I think we miss the point when we claim the ancients' views were just personifications of agriculture; that we miss the point when we say a deity is just another example of the archetypal savior deity come to break the bonds of death. And it is where, I think, though I love Moura and the beliefs we have in Filianism, we miss the point when we view the Daughter as coming to break the bonds of death. That is not what these deities were here for, and I think we lose a deal of richness from these old views.

Before Christianity, the 'bonds of death' never needed to be broken. Ancestors were a vital part of the community as they were believed to help the crops grow, to bestow fertility on the land both wild and cultivated, and to function as personal guardian angels for their descendants. Christian writers attempting to convert pagan Europe constantly decried 'inappropriately festive' funerals that were more party than sombre memorial, constantly told their local villagers off for going to sleep by the mounds of the dead to receive guidance in a dream, constantly insisted to their flock that the dead were gone far away, locked in heaven or hell and they could not be reached. Before these beliefs were introduced, death was not something that needed conquering, and since these beliefs have been introduced we have constantly struggled with the fear of death, with existential crises about what happens after we die, with the need for this 'impassable gulf' to be breached by a god great enough to conquer death.

But death has never needed conquering.

 

~*~

Disclaimer
I am at best an armchair archaeologist who likes to read a lot on these topics. I also have terrible memory. If anything is misrepresented here, please point it out to me! There are thousands of interpretations of these deities and mine is not in any way authoritative. This is personally what I see from my research; further reading in this area since I wrote this post has given me additional perspectives on some of the ideas that I present here, though I have not had time to really explore how the new-to-me information meshes with my earlier reading. I would appreciate your input!
There is a definite split, very early on, between Northern European thinking and Middle Eastern/Mediterranean thought on the subject. Where we see there was something very near to it as with the Minoans, the dead were always much more immediately apparent in the landscape of the Northern European. For the Mediterranean, particularly the Greek, the dead were buried away from the living beyond the walls of a town and carried a pollution with them that the ordinary human must be wary of; much of the Middle Eastern & Mediterranean beliefs portray an underworld kingdom (not necessarily pleasant) that the dead went away to live in; while the Egyptian had a complex and dangerous journey through the sky that must be successfully completed. This realm became more and more inaccessible over time, while the dangers of the path to this kingdom were emphasized leading eventually to the rise of saviour cults whose gods in some way helped you get to the better parts of that kingdom, safely past the danger zones that could get your soul annihilated or lost forever in the wilds of the other world. Whereas with much of Europe and Scandinavia, the belief in the dead dwelling (more or less) amicably in their mounds and walking across the landscape was held until very late date, mixing uncomfortably with the ideas brought up from the south from at least Roman times and well throughout the Christian conversion periods. Though I tend to prefer the Northern European views on this subject, it is by no means gospel truth or the way a Filiani needs to view the afterlife.

Excellent Sources for Further Reading

Don't let the titles fool you! Each of these books covers a lot of ground, so much more than what their titles promise. While Dancing Goddesses or Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies don't sound much like they have anything to do with the topic at hand, they absolutely abound with information on the afterlife and beliefs surrounding death. Both of these books with misleading-sounding titles spend a lot of time on the worldviews in the eras they cover to explain how these aspects of a culture appeared and originally were viewed and are absolutely indespensible in my humble opinion. While I didn't do much by way of citation in this post, all of the ideas represented here are pulled from these books or from the links in the post itself.

Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance
     Elizabeth Wayland Barber
The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind
     Claude Lecouteux
Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages
     Claude Lecouteux
Lost Goddesses of Ancient Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths
     Charlene Spretnak
Labrys and Horns: An Introduction to Modern Minoan Paganism
     Laura Perry

Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Claude Lecouteux should be read by anyone and everyone interested in the time periods they cover, but they should also be required reading for pagans who want to truly change their worldview from the modern Christian mindset so many of us still have.  

A lot of the information these books contain are not readily found on the internet. I have deliberately searched at times, and it's either not there at all, or only in fragmentary ways. This is really unfortunate as, like I mentioned above, so many people are involved with paganism and trying to reconstruct old ways are left without important keys to those worldviews. While it isn't in everyone's reach to go shopping for books that are likely only going to be found through internet shopping or a really lucky thrift day, do also check library systems, put in requests with library systems to carry new books, and check for cheap used copies on places like Abebooks (it's where I got all of mine!).