The miracle of the godded one who dies or is killed and comes back to life has a long and extraordinary history in the myths and ritual patterns of many cultures, most familiarly those of ancient Greece and the ancient Near East. Isis searches for the scattered parts of her husband, Osiris, binds them together and animates him to produce new life; Demeter calls forth her daughter, Persephone, from her dwelling place in the Kingdom of the Dead; Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus all are destroyed and all are remade.

In the Greco-Roman world these acts of resurrection were celebrated in the Mystery Religions. These ecstatic forms of piety involved dramatic, highly ritualized inward journeys of anguish, grief, loss, resurrection, redemption, joy and ecstasy. The Mystery Religions provided the alienated individual lost in the nameless masses of the Roman Empire with an intimate environment and community of the saved, in which he counted as a real person and in which he found a deeper identity. Identifying with the God-man or the Goddess-woman of the mystery cult, the initiate died to the old self and was resurrected to personal transfiguration and eternal life.