1 Ahau

I've noticed a pattern with dying-and-resurrected gods. Such patterns have been noted before by others; I'll use this blogpost as a mere marker.

As a rule, myths are composed and publicly recited when they mean something to their audience. Dying-and-resurrection has to do at minimum with earthly seasons; seasons do not pass in the underworld nor in the vault of heaven. Nor is there a life-and-death cycle outside middle earth. I suspect similar of Persephone.

Dying-and-reincarnate deities, further, mean the most to a deliberately-agricultural society. Such societies are all recent. Humans were roaming all over Eurasia for fifty thousand years - longer, if you're counting Neanders - and we didn't get past hunting and gathering until, when, the Younger Dryas 10000 BC. The hierarchical walled town came later - in Eurasia, and in the New World.

I suggest that the celestial deity who comes here, dies, is buried, and gives life has (mythically) come here so recently that he may as well be historical himself. This deity taught us to be civilised: before which time and outside which place, humans were and are still apes on feet. I'd go so far as that this deity makes possible the historical brain. He cannot be extracosmic.

Mesoamerica adhered closer to Neolithic patterns for longer than did Eurasia, such that they recorded their thoughts in hieroglyphs. In the Maya myths, 1 Ahau descended into the Xibalbá. On his emergence, or perhaps by his twins' emergence in the Popol Vuh, 1 Ahau became the Maize God. This didn't happen on Kolob out there in Zeta Reticuli. This happened right here - or at least right down there in Olmec territory. Or so the Maya believed.

By that analogy, I expect that Old World farmers also believed that their corn gods came to them to teach them the arts of farmwork, in a physical past. The first Egyptian dynasties (NOTE 2/22/21: only seven centuries from herders) asserted that Osiris had lived here on earth, that he had died here, that his widow retrieved that organ used for child-conception so to use it to conceive Horus.

Further: Horus then became king and, upon ascension, passed his sovereignty to Menes. (The Fifth Dynasty would shift to solar-worship, and the Turin Canon and Manetho would still later interpolate a series of demigods between Horus and Menes; but the Horus Name remained integral to Pharaonism.) Once the society had succeeded well enough, it would scale up. The succession of seasons became an analogue for the succession of kings in a dynasty.