Risen

In this series of articles, “Risen”, is as a term used to describe the dead coming back to life, usually gracefully, and not for any form of vengeance. For that kind of “Risen”, seek Revenant down at the bottom of the page in the list of other links. To be Risen from here on out, means “resurrected”. Resurrection has its origins placed all over the world, and even the Hebrew Bible contains substantial evidence that its themes of resurrection were based on Canaanite beliefs, circulating the cycle of Baal in Northern Syria.

Resurrection is a very popular theme in mythology from cultures all over the world, but holds special significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in which primary religious figures are resurrected by a single God from the dead in order to continue their work on earth. Literally, resurrection means to return completely to life, with free will, and being the same figure in their first life, as they are after resurrection. However, resurrection is still often confused with other events, and creatures, such as zombies, which are still dead, and have no free will, as well as the Hellenistic theory of immortality, in which the soul lives on after death, without being tied to its body.

Also, resurrection is not a purely Judeo-Christian, or Islamic event, –long before people were coming back from the dead in those religions, annual resurrection was celebrated in other cultures. Some examples are those in Mesopotamian tradition, Greco-Roman mythology, in which the gods rise and die in a divine and infinite cycle, Egyptian religious beliefs and worship of Osiris, Syrian and Greek belief and worship of Adonis, closely related to rural religious traditions revolving around the Corn King, and the story of Tammuz in Ancient Babylon.