Attis and the Question of a Dying-and-Rising God

James Frazer's Golden Bough grouped Attis together with Osiris, Adonis and Tammuz as instances of a single recurring type, the dying and rising god whose death and return were read as symbolic of the agricultural cycle of vegetation, and this comparative framework shaped a great deal of twentieth century popular and scholarly writing about ancient Mediterranean religion.

More recent scholarship, notably the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, has argued that the category was constructed by selectively emphasizing resurrection language that appears only in late, syncretic sources and is largely absent or ambiguous in the earlier material for several of the figures Frazer grouped together, Attis included, where a clear statement of the god's return to life is not solidly attested before the Roman imperial period sources that already sit inside a religious environment influenced by the spread of Christianity itself. This entry records the disagreement between the older comparative mythology tradition and the more skeptical modern position rather than asserting that Attis was, or was not, a dying and rising god in the sense Frazer meant. The debate matters beyond Attis specifically, since the dying and rising god category was for much of the twentieth century used as a comparative lens for reading Christian resurrection belief against a supposed wider pattern of Mediterranean religion, a use current scholarship treats with considerably more caution than it once received.