The perennial theme of death and rebirth
Some thoughts for Easter 2024
Goddesses’ Mirror,
The and terror of “life in all its rambunctious, teeming, vigorous manifestations and bubblings.”
This myth surely inspired the story of Greek Aphrodite and Adonis.
Adonis, an extremely ancient deity identified with the Babylonian god Tammuz, but later adopting the Phoenician name Adon (“Lord”), in Greek mythology became regarded as the epitome of the most beautiful and desirable of all men, beloved of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, love and fertility. Killed by a bore while out hunting, he descended to the underworld where Persephone fell in love with him and desired to keep him with her. But Aphrodite wanted him, so, again, a compromise resolved that each goddess would have him for half the year.
The yearly death of Adonis was loudly and publically lamented with fasting throughout Mediterranean lands, red Anemone flowers representing his blood. Prophet Ezekiel (c.570 BCE) witnessed “women weeping for Tammuz” at the north gate of the Jerusalem temple (Ezekiel 8:14).
A direct link between the myth of Adonis and the later Christian Easter festival is provided by the ancient annual constructing of gardens by women adherents of this dying and rising vegetation god — sowing small earthen receptacles, containing soil, with various seeds — wheat, barley, fennel — tended for eight days. Sprouting rapidly, soon withering for lack of roots, then cast into the sea or other water source — symbolising new life, death, abundant rain. In contemporary Sicily small gardens still sown in Spring at the approach of Easter by the descendants of those women, flourishing sprouts surrounding tiny replicas of the empty tomb; finally disposed of on Good Friday, accompanied by wailing lamentations. Connecting today’s participants to the cycle of nature, and our ancient heritage.
Christian theologian Jerome recorded that at Bethlehem, “House of Bread”, traditional birthplace of Jesus, the grove of trees there was sacred to Lord Adonis, Spirit of the Corn — Adonis and the Christ figure linked in life-bestowing potency. Jerome who died in Bethlehem in 420 CE is buried near the Church of the Nativity.
CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE OF THE DEATH AND REBIRTH MOTIF:
What relevance can this rich wisdom of antiquity contribute to life in
Sicily: Easter Garden symbolising death and new life. our contemporary suffocating spiritual Wasteland? We continually lament that the certainties and concepts of the past are hollow; people treated as objects, hordes of helpless pawns ravaged by the callous greed of bigots and megalomaniacs.
As David Kinsley suggests, the concept of a journey, a search for the true self, offers a key to these seemingly enigmatic myths. Evoking the enduring images of the search for new life out of death — such as the Phoenix — as well as the ordeal of the quest, the pilgrimage — a lengthy, arduous voyage to discover and protect something of inestimable value, culminating at a place of sacred revelation — enlightenment.
The individual search for identity, traversing the elusive reaches of the psyche, through the valley of the shadow of death, an odyssey towards new beginnings — a cyclical journey, entailing hard and bitter agony; never completed.
Our human story preserves accounts of myriads of wayfarers, from Gawain, to Chaucer’s pilgrims, seeking enlightenment through encounters with death — the Christian knight’s assignation with the Green Man, personification of ever-regenerating Nature; and the tomb securing the spilt blood of Thomas Becket.
T.S. Eliot offers disquieting, but revitalising, insights into the human condition — humanity languishing in the desolation of the Wasteland – “the dead land… cactus land … death’s twilight kingdom.”
“We are the hollow men, We are the stuffed men,
Leaning together,
“Headpiece
RIGHT: The Green Man, personification of ever-regenerating Nature. filled with straw…”
A spiritual bankruptcy resulting in alienation, heartlessness and the impotence of fatuous human intercourse, devoid of authentic contact with others and nature — a living death waiting for meaning that never happens. “Crowds of people walking round in a ring.” The inertia of “a hundred indecisions”, stifling recognition of darkness as the place to slough off the dried skin of unreal existence, allowing regeneration from the gloomy shades of death; arising from this zombie-like existence to embrace rebirth and vitality.
Sometimes referred to as The Dark Night of the Soul, marked by anxiety, helplessness, stagnation of the will; withdrawal from self and others. Many twilights, dark, terrifying midnights, followed by the brilliance of dawn offering illumination and elation.
As Sufi Inayat Khan stated: “There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.”
Evelyn Underhill’s illumination: “Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond; too arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition; for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness …. Those who do this, discover they have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of morning-glory… where every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life.”
Acknowledging life as an unavoidable progression of turning points: birth, puberty, marriage, childbearing, death, frequently marked by symbolic rites of death and rebirth; seeking, discovering, rejecting, embracing various identities
— multiple deaths and rebirths of self.
THE REDEMPTIVE SYMBOL OFNEWLIFE
end; in my end is my beginning.”
“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
Breaching the gulf separating us from our authentic self, offers illuminating liberation; a blinding awakening, affirmation of life, involving despair and courage; the agony of death and rebirth.
Evelyn Underhill discerned: “the apprehension of the Infinite Life in all living things is the experience of most great painters, poets, musicians, even philosophers — an indescribable inebriation of Reality.”
The inspirational, creativity and imagination of the primordial unconscious, flying free, offering ever-new vision. Transforming stone, bone, wood, marble, glass, words, textures — a new life-force speaking a new language; never fully completed or finished. Everywhere you turn there is the face of sacredness.
Karen Armstrong notes that those who achieve a quiet confidence, an apprehension of a deeper reality, discover hidden reserves of power, exhibiting more resilience and equilibrium through terror, ecstasy, joy, suffering and death.
American novelist Flannery O’Connor’s lament that “Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul”, intimates that the darkest hour is before the dawn, heralding red streaks in the east; where for the women mourning at the gates, exiting the old, entering the new, redemption will manifest new birth out of the stony rubbish.
Diarmuid O’Murchu, social psychologist: “In the world of particle physics, all annihilation means transformation, not into nihilism, but into something radically new and vibrant. The cycles of life manifested in the seasons of nature, and in so many species within it, indicate that the spectrum of birth-death-rebirth evolves unceasingly. Change and decay are all around us in the visible spectrum, yet, at the unmanifest, quantum level, nothing is ever lost.”