Down and Back Again: Myths of Death, Descent and Return

Sumerian poem in which Inanna passes seven gates and is stripped of her regalia at each, is killed by her sister Ereshkigal, and is revived through creatures Enki fashions. She may leave only by naming a substitute, and she chooses her husband Dumuzi. The half year Dumuzi and Geshtinanna then share below is read by later scholars as a seasonal origin story.

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells a Greek version of the same bargain. Hades takes Persephone, Demeter withholds the earth's fertility, and the pomegranate seeds Persephone eats bind her to spend part of each year below. The hymn also credits Demeter with founding the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Here the descent is a rescue attempt that fails. Orpheus wins Eurydice's release from Hades and Persephone on the condition that he not look back, breaks it, and loses her a second time. The earliest surviving tellings are Roman, in Virgil's Georgics and Ovid's Metamorphoses.

In Egypt the dead god does return, though only briefly. Set murders and dismembers Osiris, Isis searches for and reassembles him, and he is revived long enough to father Horus before becoming ruler and judge of the dead. The fullest surviving version is Plutarch's, composed long after the older material in the Pyramid Texts.

The Norse story withholds the return. Baldr is made invulnerable except to mistletoe, killed by a mistletoe dart thrown by the blind Hodr at Loki's urging, and held in Hel when the giantess Thokk, Loki in disguise, refuses to weep for him. Snorri Sturluson tells it in the Prose Edda.

A disappearance rather than a death. After her brother Susanoo's violence the sun goddess Amaterasu seals herself in a cave and the world goes dark, until Ame-no-Uzume's dance and the gods' laughter draw her out to see her own reflection. The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki both record it.

An Inuit narrative of descent as transformation. A young woman is thrown from a boat, her fingers are cut off as she clings to it, the pieces become the sea mammals, and she sinks to the ocean floor to become the spirit who controls the animals hunters depend on. Regional variants differ in her name and in the details of the tale.

The central Christian narrative of death followed by a return, told in the four gospels with differences in detail. Paul quotes an earlier list of appearances as already traditional in 1 Corinthians 15. The Qur'an states in 4:157 that Isa was not killed or crucified but that it was made to appear so, so the same account is a foundation for one tradition and denied by another.

The trail ends with a cycle that repeats the pattern every year. In Wicca's Wheel of the Year the God is born at midwinter, is cut down at harvest and dies at Samhain to await rebirth. Historians of modern paganism, notably Ronald Hutton, read this as a mid twentieth century synthesis rather than an unbroken survival.