laid all the evils that had afflicted the people during the past year."2
With death surrounded by so much ceremony in primitive cultures, it is but a short leap from the death and rebirth of agricultural cycles to a culture of human death that involves death and rebirth as well. The agricultural cycle is personified in the myth of the death and resurrection of the Egyptian god Osiris, but the same structure can be seen in Asian and Christian religions as well. Joseph Campbell cites rites of initiation in Greek culture that involved the death of Demeter's son Plutus, and his subsequent rebirth and return to her, but as her consort: "[I]n those rites of initiation . . . the initiate, returning in contemplation to the goddess mother of the mysteries, became detached reflectively from the fate of his mortal frame (symbolically, the son, who dies), and identified with the principle that is ever reborn, the Being of all beings (the serpent father): whereupon, in the world where only sorrow and death had been seen, the rapture was recognized of an everlasting becoming."3
Implicit in this conception of cyclical death and rebirth is a notion of immortality that has appeared in religions throughout the world. Campbell sees such an implication in the legend of the Buddha. "When he placed himself on the Immovable Spot beneath the Tree of Enlightenment, the Creator of the World Illusion, Kama-Mara, 'Life-Desire and Fear of Death,' approached to threaten his position. But he touched the earth . . . and the demon fled. The Blessed one that night achieved Enlightenment."4 In other words, by confronting death directly, it is transcended and points the soul in the direction of immortality.
The Christian view of death is connected with sin. Catholic doctrine, for example, cites biblical verses to show that except for original sin, or the act of disloyalty in the Garden of Eden, man would not have had to suffer physical death at all....