With death surrounded by so much ceremony in primitive cultures, it is but a short leap from the death and rebirth of agricultural cycles to a culture of human death that involves death and rebirth as well. The agricultural cycle is personified in the myth of the death and resurrection of the Egyptian god Osiris, but the same structure can be seen in Asian and Christian religions as well. Joseph Campbell cites rites of initiation in Greek culture that involved the death of Demeter's son Plutus, and his subsequent rebirth and return to her, but as her consort: "[I]n those rites of initiation . . . the initiate, returning in contemplation to the goddess mother of the mysteries, became detached reflectively from the fate of his mortal frame (symbolically, the son, who dies), and identified with the principle that is ever reborn, the Being of all beings (the serpent father): whereupon, in the world where only sorrow and death had been se

Williams, Daniel Day. What PresentDay Theologians Are Thinking.

In the modern period, there has been some recasting of the tension between earthly life and the promise of salvation after death as the principal elements of immortality. Williams discusses the position of what he calls the Christian existentialist theologians, who have incorporated many elements of modern psychology and philosophy into their examination of fundamental problems facing mankind. The views of these theologians concentrate far more on the process of living and confronting the possibility of death rather than on the rules and regulations by which the consequences of mortal death can be overtaken by anticipation of eternal life. According to Paul Tillich, says Williams, who is a philosophical descendant of Soren Kierkegaard, whose meditations on death and anxiety framed the basis for much modern existential thought, "Man's existence in finitude is existence in 'ontological anxiety.' Death and guilt are, when profoundly understood, the twin symbols of man's two ultimate problems; his anxiety about the 'end' of his life and his anxiety about his spiritual isolation from God. . . . Tillich's theology . . . is a realistic account of how man feels when he has come to the very edge of despair, and can find no meaning in life unless there comes a healing disclosure from beyond himself."6 In this view, the modern Christian reaches out to the healing power represented by Jesus, but the Jesus of the modern Christian thinkers differs from the one of the early Christian thinkers inasmuch as for the moderns, there is a reach for meaning in the present life rather than a reach for guarantees about the quality of the afterlife.