The Dying God and the Spiral of Renewal

In the mythologies of Jesus, Osiris, Dionysus, and many others, we encounter a recurring pattern: the god who dies and is reborn. This motif is not merely about seasonal cycles or agricultural metaphors—it is a profound symbolic structure that speaks to the transformation of meaning itself.

When a god dies, a meaning structure dissolves. It is the collapse of a symbolic order, the end of a worldview, the crumbling of a once-coherent constellation of relations. The crucifixion is not only a historical moment; it is a cosmic rupture. Meaning—once clear, established, embodied—becomes unmoored. The death of the god is the death of meaning as it was.

Yet out of this dissolution arises not void, but renewal. The god returns, transfigured. Not as he was, but as something newly configured, bearing the memory of death within his form. The rebirth is not repetition, but reconstitution—a new symbolic pattern forged from the ashes of the old. It is the phoenix spiral: the same, yet changed; continuous, yet transformed.

This spiral of death and rebirth is central to our understanding of individuation. Each death is a letting go of inherited or collective meanings. Each rebirth is a new instantiation of the divine, now individuated through lived experience. Meaning becomes personal, embodied, storied—no longer static, but dynamic, alive.

The dying god myth, then, is not about a single event but an ongoing process: the continuous death and re-actualisation of meaning in the life of the meaner. We all carry our crucifixions, our dismemberments, our descents into the underworld. And we all, if we continue the spiral, rise again—not to the same heights, but to new constellations of meaning.

In our relational cosmology, this process is not external to the divine—it is the divine. The god dies in us, and is reborn through us. The spiral of meaning is the very motion of the cosmos coming to know itself through transformation.

Thus, to mythologise meaning is also to acknowledge its mortality. To follow the spiral is to enter into the sacred rhythm of dissolution and renewal. And in doing so, to become, again and again, an individuated face of the divine mystery.