The outlines of the myth of the rebirth or resurrection are universal and clear. The hero progresses from a state of nonlife to one of life. The miraculous birth is thus repeated. In some stories the Hero—Hyacinth and Adonis, for instance—dies and is turned into a living flower. In others the rebirth is in the nature of a reincarnation. The Buddha and, to a lesser extent, Dionysos fall into this category. But the major motif of the myth is that of the hero who has died violently, visited the underworld, and returned to the earth as a living being. Much of what needs to be said about the rebirth myth has been said in the commentaries of Parts 5 and 6. The myth is the final stage of the scapegoat pattern. The hero finalizes the defeat of death; he completes the cycle of nature by being reborn in the spring. The rebirth story reflects the hope of all humans.
Not surprisingly this myth very likely originated in the various natural cycles which are so much a part of our existence. Hyacinth and Adonis no doubt spring from rites of sacrifice in which the gods were paid for their gift of plant life with the gift of human life. And the various dismembered gods are frequently vegetation or fertility gods— Osiris, Dionysos, Attis. Often the various pieces of these gods were sown in the earth. Not only plant life but nearly everything in the universe contained a symbolic example of how death might be overcome. Seasons when they exist run in cycles, and the solar and lunar cycles are self-evident. The bear myth included in this section is surely the result of early man’s fascination with an animal which in the winter descended into the earth only to rise again in the spring. Bear cults still exist in parts of the world. 1 The mystery religions, including Christianity and the Eleusinian cult, have always been much concerned with the cycles, in all of which death or its equivalent plays a positive role as the most necessary step to rebirth. In death is not only pain but the possibility of rejuvenation.
It is worth mentioning in this connection the fetal position of the urn-buried peoples of so many ancient cultures. This position in death is, of course, in keeping with the idea of the return to the great mother—the world womb—and the rebirth which will result from that return.
Psychologically the rebirth myth is the culmination of the process of self-realization and individuation which produces the new, whole person. The hero has faced and overcome death and has placed humanity collectively back in the secure fold of the mother’s cycle. As plants can be reborn, so now can we. In the underworld the monsters and gargoyles of the infantile, nightmarish past have been defeated, and the individual emerges now in his new form, having experienced the very depths of his and the collective being. The hero “has died as a modern man; but as eternal man— perfected, unspecific, universal man—he has been reborn.”2
Few major works on mythology ignore the rebirth myth. The Henderson and Oakes book contains valuable information. Alan Watts
On the Christian version is perceptive. A classic work is Wallis Budge’s Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection. Jung and Kerenyi’s comments on the Eleusinian mysteries are useful. And Mircea Eliade’s Birth and Rebirth is still another important study of the subject.
1. See Rhys Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction, and Saga in the Flomeric Epics.
2. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 20.
World History
