Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

In my last post I went over the possibility that the story of Jesus's suffering, death, and resurrection is influenced by initiation rituals: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10580

This post is about royal coronation influences in the stories about Jesus and the connection between royal coronation ceremonies and mystery cult initiation rituals.

Scholars have pointed out the possible influence of the Roman imperial cult on the NT texts, especially Mark. What's interesting though is that the royal coronation ceremonies seem to have a connection to the initiation rituals in the mystery cults. The coronation of the king or the pharaoh was something like a transfiguration where the king was deified and declared to be the son of a deity. This was essentially the same thing that happened to initiates into the mystery cults. By being initiated, they would become divine in some form after they died because they became closely associated with a deity. Both kings and initiates were usually given some type of new clothing and a crown that signified their new status. You find some of these same motifs in the NT. When Jesus is baptized the spirit of God descends on him and he is declared to be "God's son". He's being "adopted" by God. In the story about his crucifixion he is given a purple robe and a crown of thorns and is said to be king of the Jews like some sort of mock royal coronation. His suffering, death, and resurrection is similar to a royal coronation ritual and a mystery cult initiation ritual where the king or initiate is given new clothing (such as a robe) and a crown.

Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2014), M. David Litwa:

Recently, Michael Peppard has fruitfully compared Mark’s use of “son of god” with its use chiefly among Roman emperors (the cosmocrators of Mark’s day). Peppard emphasizes that Roman imperial sonship occurred through adoption, that is, the election of a grown man by the ruler producing a transfer of power (since the adopted one inherited the rule of his father). With Marcus, Peppard views the formula “You are my beloved son” spoken at Jesus’ baptism—and restated at the transfiguration—as a means of adopting him to divinity. This is not a low christology. “To the contrary,” Peppard observes, “adoption is how the most powerful man in the world gained his power.” This “most powerful man in the world”—the Roman emperor—was also a god. Peppard, in accord with new trends in conceiving of the emperor’s divinity, concludes that “son of god”—when applied to the emperor—does not imply “absolute” divinity or an abstract divine essence. (This notion of divinity, he rightly points out, is restricted to philosophical circles.) Rather, like the emperor, Jesus was divine in terms of his status: as Yahweh’s declared son and heir, Jesus was now able to exercise Yahweh’s power and benefaction... For Peppard, Jesus’ baptism is “the beginning of his reign as God’s representative.” Virtually the same declaration (“This is my beloved son!”) heard by the disciples at the transfiguration, Peppard observes, confirms Jesus’ adoption as if it took place in a comitia curiata or “representative assembly” (practiced in Roman ceremonies of adoption). In the transfiguration, Jesus’ divine rule is proved to be more than a private vision. It is a revelation to faithful witnesses. Now the disciples know (or should know) that Jesus is Yahweh’s divine son and thus ruler of the world. The rule of God, as Jesus said, has come in power (Mark 9:1)... Mark’s understanding of Jesus as “son of God” is—as in emperor worship—less a matter of being than of rank: Jesus is the divine Messiah, empowered by God to inaugurate the kingdom.

King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2008), Adela Yarbro Collins and John J Collins:

Eckart Otto has argued persuasively that Psalm 2 combines Egyptian and Assyrian influences... The declaration that the king is the son of God, however, has closer Egyptian parallels. The idea that the king was the son of a god is not unusual in the ancient Near East... Only in the Egyptian evidence, however, do we find the distinctive formulae by which the deity addresses the king as "my son". The formula, "you are my son, this day I have begotten you," finds a parallel in an inscription in the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut: "my daughter, from my body, Maat-Ka-Re, my brilliant image, gone forth from me. You are a king, who take possession of the two lands, on the throne of Horus, like Re." Another inscription of Amenophis III has the god declare: "He is my son, on my throne, in accordance with the decree of the gods." At the coronation of Haremhab, Amun declares to him: "You are my son, the heir who came forth from my flesh." Or again, in the blessing of Ptah, from the time of Rameses II: "I am your father, who have begotten you as a god and your members as gods." Such recognition formulae occur frequently in Egyptian inscriptions of the New Kingdom period. Otto suggests that the psalm does not reflect direct Egyptian influence, since the closest Egyptian parallels date from the New Kingdom, before the rise of the Israelite monarchy. Rather, the Hofstil of pre-Israelite (Jebusite) Jerusalem may have been influenced by Egyptian models during the late second millennium, and have been taken over by the Judean monarchy in Jerusalem. The formulation of the psalm, "this day I have begotten you," is widely taken to reflect an enthronement ceremony. The idea that the enthronement ritual in Jerusalem was influenced by Egyptian models was argued by Gerhard von Rad... Von Rad's insights were taken up and developed in a famous essay by Albrecht Alt, who argued that the passage in Isaiah 9 was composed for Hezekiah's enthronement, and celebrated not the birth of a child but the accession of the king. The interpretation of Isaiah 9 in terms of an enthronement ceremony is not certain. The oracle could be celebrating the birth of a royal child. The word is not otherwise used for an adult king. But the accession hypothesis is attractive, nonetheless, in light of Psalm 2. The list of titles is reminiscent in a general way of the titulary of the Egyptian pharaohs. Most importantly, the passage confirms that the king could be addressed as elohim, "god"... The king is still subject to the Most High, but he is an elohim, not just a man. In light of this discussion, it seems very likely that the Jerusalem enthronement ritual was influenced, even if only indirectly, by Egyptian ideas of kingship. At least as a matter of court rhetoric, the king was declared to be the son of God, and could be called an elohim, a god.

Temples of Ancient Egypt (I.B. Tauris, 1997), Byron E Shafer:

The royal ka was the immortal creative spirit of divine kingship, a form of the Creator's collective ka. The ka of a particular king was but a specific instance, or fragment, of the royal ka... Possessing the royal ka and being possessed by it were potential at a person's birth, but they were actualized only at his coronation, when his legitimacy upon the Horus Throne of the Living was confirmed and publicly claimed. Only at a person's coronation did he take on a divine aspect and cease to be solely human. Only in retrospect could he be portrayed as predestined by the Creator to rule Egypt as truly perfect from the beginning, as divine seed, son of the Creator, the very flesh of god, one with the Father, god's incarnation on earth, his sacred image.

Becoming Divine: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), M. David Litwa:

The ka was the divine spirit of the king, a spirit he shared with all pharaohs who came before him and all who would come after. Although the king's ka was shaped and molded as the "twin" of the king at his birth, it was officially inherited at his coronation. For the Pharaoh, the ka was the divine principle in his person: the "immortal creative spirit of the divine kingship". It was the spirit of the creator and king of gods Amun-Re himself. Apart from his ka, Amenhotep III was a normal human being, subject to all human foibles and frailties. Endowed with the divine force of ka, however, Amenhotep III was son of the living God and god himself... In the ancient world, typically only kings and pharaohs claimed the divine prerogatives of immortality and ruling power. Yet in the mysteries of Dionysus - the topic of chapter 3 - deification was made available to all who underwent initiation...Orphic deification is experienced, interestingly, as a postmortem rebirth from the goddess Persephone and consequently an assimilation to Persephone's divine son, Dionysus. As Orphic initiates identified with the god Dionysus, so the Apostle Paul morphed with the divine Christ. "I have been crucified with Christ," he once claimed, "I no longer live- Christ lives in me"(Gal 2:19-20).

In ancient Egypt, the ritual coronation of the pharaoh involved some of the same rituals that are found in the mortuary initiation ritual.

"Njswt nhh - Kingship, Cosmos, and Time", Katja Goebs, 2002, Z. Hawass, L. Pinch Brock (eds), Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century. Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Egyptologists, Cairo, 2000:

Moreover, as authors such as Gardiner, Leclant, and Assmann have noted, the texts and images that describe the royal accession (repeated during the Sed Festival) contain, besides the assumption of crowns, various other elements - such as purification, suckling, induction - of rituals that are commonly known as the Rites of Passage first discussed by Van Gennep, and whose structure was then applied to the rituals surrounding the accession of kings by Hocart. It is not surprising, therefore, to find them reappearing in funerary literature, which is concerned with the rites connected to the deceased's "passage" to the sky and his transfiguration. Indeed, already Hocart asserted of the ancient Egyptian rituals (pp. 83-4): "The funerary rites which consecrated the dead as gods were identical with those which made (the king) a god during his lifetime. We may either say that when the living king is represented on monuments as being suckled by the wife of the principal god ... he is imitating the rebirth of the dead, or that when the dead are suckled by Isis they repeat the king's consecration. It is all one since death = birth = coronation."

It's at Jesus's baptism that he is declared to be the son of Yahweh. You had to be purified before having any kind of contact or connection with a deity. You find this in royal coronation ceremonies and mystery cult initiations.

"Water Rites in Ancient Egypt" by Jan Assmann and Andrea Kucharek in Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity (Walter de Gruyter, 2011):

What is the function of the "Baptism of Pharaoh" - the purification of the king - within the sequence of rites outlined at the beginning? Its mediating position can be seen from the situation within the sequence: the purification stands between leaving the palace and the coronation by the gods and is thus before entering the actual temple to settle: the purification, as the formulas 'Your purity is mine purity' and 'Your purity is the purity of Horus' etc., offset the king into a god-like state of purity, which first enables him to face the gods in action and to be recognized by them as one of their kind... In the three-part scheme of a "rite de passage" the purification would thus occupy the mediating phase of the transformation. The first phase, the detachment, is marked by leaving the palace, the third phase is reintegration through coronation, initiation and crowning confirmation. This ritually repeated coronation was evidently presented as a rejuvenation or even rebirth of the ruler... A purification as a prerequisite for initiation to the deity was also required when entering the afterlife... This was precisely the function of the cleansing also when the king enters the temple... The oldest depiction of the cleansing of the deceased from "hes" vases, its iconography, show similarities with that of the "Baptism of Pharaoh". The godlike state gained through physical cleansing through embalming and moral purity through the judgment of the dead enables the deceased to to face the gods, just as he allows the king – and in his deputy part of the priesthood – already on earth in the temple.

In some of the rituals performed by the pharaoh, he is ritually identified with the sun god and Osiris just like the deceased in the mortuary ritual. He seems to go through some kind of ritual death and rebirth in imitation of the sun god. Christians are ritually identified with Jesus in baptism, reenact his death and resurrection, and are reborn.

Becoming Divine: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2013), M. David Litwa:

In the birth room, the king fully merged with his newborn ka in a secret ritual... After his rebirth, the king entered a long hall oriented east-west with twelve pillars. The twelve columns may have represented the twelve hours of the Sun God's journey through the netherworld. By processing through the colonnade, the king imitated the voyage of the Sun God in his journey by night in the netherworld. Now seething with divine energy, the king finally reappeared as if from a divine womb into the sunny court. The assembled throng had been anxiously awaiting to see if the rites had proved efficacious. When the Pharaoh emerged from the shadows, he reflected the bright Sun with his robe of shining gold and silver. The people roared at the sight of the regenerated divine king, splendidly crowned and glorious in triumph. By now, the humanness of the king had almost been fully submerged. The king was glittering with divinity. As the living manifestation of the Sun God, the people adored their transformed king as the source of their own life.

"Conceptions of Purity in Egyptian Religion" by Joachim Friedrich Quack in Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism (Brill, 2013):

The person of the king was strongly connected to purity concerns in Egypt. Indeed, there exists a detailed royal ritual focused on purification rites...

"Spell for the water: O Water, may you abolish all bad defilement of the pharaoh, O inundation, may you wash off his errant demons... Spell for water, speaking words [by...]: [O you Gods..., Come] that you [erase] all evil in him. Any taboo he did, [...] at the lake!... Another spell for purification, speaking words: Pharaoh has [purified himself] with the great waters Which come forth from Elephantine, which originate from the [primeval ocean]... Pharaoh is purified with this water which came out from Osiris... Another spell for purification, words to be spoken. Pharaoh is Re, arising in the primeval ocean, [His] purity is [the purity of... in the] water, With big flame... Great illuminator when he shows himself in the flood in the morning, Who abolishes all evil, as he arises in his purity from the flood. May pharaoh arise in the flood(?)—...shine... pharaoh... May he be divine in the earth!..."

The royal ritual has links to the ideal of the sun god, in which, according to the Egyptian conception, the morning purification precedes the sunrise.

Amenhotep III: Egypt's Radiant Pharaoh(Cambridge University Press, 1992), Arielle P. Kozloff:

The royal jubilee, or heb-sed, was a festival of renewal rooted in Egypt's most ancient history...The Sed festival traditionally took place during the thirtieth year of the reign...Timing was crucial for the climax of the festival deep inside the royal tomb. There Pharaoh faced the images of the gods represented on his tomb walls and remained for a period of time before going to his funeral bed, where he "died" and was "reborn" in a series of rituals, incantations, and offerings...This resurrection was the culmination of a process of deification that had begun with Amenhoteps III's coronation. At the time, like all Egyptian kings, he was the representative and high priest of each god on earth.

Some scholars think that there's a possible Egyptian influence on the Greco-Roman imperial cult.

"Assessing representations of the imperial cult in New Testament studies", Pieter J J Botha in Verbum et Ecclesia 25 (2004):

The imperial cult, it is claimed, is of Hellenistic and especially Egyptian background... From Tiberius onwards we find examples of the continued qualification of each individual deity in the cult of virtues so as to appropriate them to the godhead of the imperial cult. In other words, these virtues had ceased to be separate divine forces, but had become, as it were, persons within the corporate godhead of the divine emperor... The importance and implications of taking the imperial cult seriously as a profound aspect of the life-worlds of first-century followers of Jesus should be clear... The importance, value and power of the imperial cult in the first two centuries of the common era should be acknowledged, and consequently the early Christian’s interaction with it carefully rethought. There may be much more at stake than simple contrasts.

"The Traditional Egyptian Antecedents of Graeco-Roman Post-Mortem Ascent", Eliezer Gonzalez in El Futuro del Pasado, vol. 5, (2014):

The impact of traditional Egyptian religion and its views of the afterlife on the Graeco-Roman world is an enormous area of research which is still largely untapped and unresolved. Segal, for example, observes the profound impact that Egyptian ideas of immortality had upon Rome and notes that these "penetrated deep into Roman consciousness". Egyptian views of the afterlife foreshadowed Graeco-Roman, Jewish, and early Christian conceptions, particularly in terms of the motif of post-mortem ascent... A prime example was the manner in which the Romans formulated the idea of the apotheosis of the emperor, which was a key plank of the emperor cult from the time of the early empire... Manfred Clauss has argued forcefully that the emperor was viewed as a god in a theological sense, and that emperor worship was primarily a religious, rather than merely a political phenomenon. He goes further, making a link between Roman imperial apotheosis and the development of the Christian concept of ascent to heaven... In spite of the apparent distance in time, culture, and geography, key elements of the Graeco-Roman motif of post-mortem ascent are significantly foreshadowed in the earlier Egyptian funerary texts such as the Pyramid Texts and the later Book of Coming Forth By Day. In this sense, as the earliest texts of this nature known, the ancient Egyptian conceptions may be seen as either the archetypes of Graeco-Roman notions of ascent, or at least as being closer to those archetypes... Traditional Egyptian religion was still vibrant, preserving its essential elements, well into late antiquity.

As already mentioned, Jesus receives a purple robe and a crown of thorns during his crucifixion. Some scholars think this is supposed to represent a mock coronation ritual.

The Purpose of Mark's Gospel: An Early Christian Response to Roman Imperial Propaganda(Mohr Siebeck, 2008), Adam Winn:

Another significant piece of Flavian propaganda was the triumph of Vespasian and Titus in 71 C.E. Though its official purpose was to celebrate the Roman victory over the Jews, it also illustrated the new emperor's great power and glory. Josephus gives a vivid description of the triumph. He reports that the entire military, arranged in companies and divisions, came out to the site of the triumph while it was still night. At day break, Vespasian and Titus came out from the temple of Isis wearing purple imperial robes and laurel crowns... Schmidt also sees the parallels between the costume the Roman soldiers placed on Jesus and the royal dress the triumphator wore. The triumphator was regularly adorned with a purple robe and a crown, both of which adorn Jesus in Mark 15. The color of Jesus' robe is evidence that Mark has intentionally created this parallel... The crown of thorns that Jesus wore is akin to the laurel crown that was often worn by the triumphator. Here we find two striking similarities between Jesus and the triumphator - a purple robe and a crown (thorny vs. laurel) - with evidence that the former similarity is a Markan creation.

The Gospel to the Romans: the setting and rhetoric of Mark's Gospel (BRILL, 2003), Brian J. Incigneri:

Mark seems to have deliberately reminded his readers of that spectacle in his depiction of Jesus as king. T. E. Schmidt has argued, building on the work of Versnel, that Mark modelled his crucifixion procession in a way that evokes the traditional pattern of a Roman triumph... It has long been recognised that the purple robe and crown of thorns in Mark’s account portrays Jesus as king in a contrast to the Roman emperor. Schmidt, however, points out a number of other connections to the typical Roman triumph, including the gathering of the whole guard, the name Golgotha as a pointer to the Capitol (meaning ‘head’ = capita), and the time of day. He proposes that, in 15:20, the purple robe alludes to the robe worn by the emperor in the triumph, and that Mark’s ‘triumph’ depicts Jesus as the true triumphator. Versnel emphasises that the triumphator was considered an exceptional bearer of dynamis, and that the Roman triumph had its roots in the arrival of the sotèr, the man or god who had saved people from distress. The arrival of the sotèr was celebrated as “the parousia of a god,” and he was seen to be the bearer of good fortune, bringing peace and prosperity.

So Jesus's "triumphal entry" seems likely to be based on Roman triumphs. The Roman triumph seemed to have a connection to Dionysus because he was the deity known for triumphal entries.

"From the pragmatics of textures to a Christian utopia: The case of the Gospel of John" by Gerhard van den Heever in Rhetorical Criticism and the Bible: Essays from the 1998 Florence Conference (A&C Black, 2002):

It is on the level of story facts-as-presented that the language of the imperium intrudes as the way the story of Jesus is told, as the way in which Jesus' bios is presented in the terms of the political reality of the imperium...From Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem to his execution, the mood that prevails is shot through with political realities an Ephesian audience would have been well acquainted with. Jesus' triumphal entry in Jn 12.12-19 is portrayed in the same fashion as the adventus or triumphus with a description of the festive procession, the decoration of the scenery and the songs of praises. Jesus is hailed as the coming King of Israel. In the context of Ephesus this was a well-known phenomenon ever since the triumphal entry of Mark Anthony as 'New Dionysus' in 38 BCE and the adventus of Hadrian as 'New Dionysus' in 129 CE; the latter event marks the outer limit of the time frame under consideration. The religious roots of the adventus or triumphus never became extinct. The point that John is making through the portrayal of Jesus' entry is that this is the advent of a conquering god.

This line of portraying by means of political language is taken up again in the passion narrative from 18.28-19.27, especially from 19.1. In an ironical portrayal Jesus' trial is presented as the installation of a Roman imperial pretender. The scenes that follow one another are reminiscent of usurpation of power by an imperial pretender. In 19.1-3 the soldiers acclaim Jesus as king and invest him with the 'symbols of power': 'crown' and 'purple toga'... Jesus is received into the city as 'King of Israel', a judgment with which the Jewish leaders do not concur. It is they who deliver him over to the Roman governor on a charge of sedition, vying to be king in Caesar's place.

Dionysos (‎Routledge, 2006), Richard Seaford:

The processional epiphany of Dionysos tended to celebrate the mythical first arrival of the god, and these myths often contain an episode of resistance to his arrival, as for example did the Theban myth dramatised in Bacchae... The social disintegration that results from the neglect of communal cult is often expressed in myth as disease. And Dionysos is often envisaged as purifier or healer, as in the passage of Sophokles quoted in the final sentence of this book. His healing power consists in the social unity achieved by communal ritual and by his status as an outsider. As we saw of Dionysos Aisymnetes at Patrai (Chapter 3), the alien quality of a deity who arrives from elsewhere may serve to fascinate and unite the community... Dionysos is chased away or imprisoned by mere mortals, or just disappears (e.g. Plutarch Moralia 717a), but returns in triumph: he is often associated with victory (e.g. kallinikos at Bacchae 1147, 1161). Indeed, the Greek word for triumph, thriambos, first occurs in an invocation of Dionysos (Pratinas 708 PMG), and is also a title of Dionysos (as well as a song). In later texts the practice of the triumphal procession is said to have originated with Dionysos (Diodorus 3.65.8; Arrian Anabasis 6.28.2; etc.). His entry into the community is not just an arrival. It is associated with his victory over disappearance or rejection or capture, with the unity of the community (envisaged as its ‘purification’ from disease), and/or with the arrival of spring.

"The Return of Hephaistos, Dionysiac Processional Ritual and the Creation of a Visual Narrative", Guy Hedreen, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 124 (2004):

To judge from the aetiological myths associated with them, the epiphanic processions symbolized the triumph of Dionysos over, and his belated acceptance by, those who denied his status as a god... Several cities in Asia Minor, for example, celebrated a festival of Dionysos known as the Katagogia, the 'bringing in' of the god. In this section of the paper, I argue that the visual narrative of the return of Hephaistos to Olympos is structured essentially along the lines of an epiphanic procession. The similarities between the iconography and the ritual (so far as it can be reconstructed) go beyond superficial visual resemblance (both include groups of people or demigods on foot escorting a deity): as a symbolic act, the ritual 'bringing in' of Dionysos is comparable to the plot of the myth of Hephaistos' return because both are characterized by the themes of initial rejection of a god and his subsequent triumph... Both aetiological myths associated with Athenian epiphanic processions of Dionysos are characterized by the same idea, that the god Dionysos triumphs over non-believers and persecutors... In the prologue of the play[The Bacchae], Dionysos claims that he has returned to his city of birth having already established his religion throughout the Near East (13-22). He claims that he will lead his followers in battle against the Thebans if necessary (50-2). The entrance of the chorus into the orchestra mimics a Dionysiac procession that accompanies the epiphany of the god, and represents the triumph of the god over non-believers.

Initiation into mystery cults also involved the receiving of new clothing and a crown. Being initiated meant that you were reborn into a new life or "adopted" into a new family.

"Gender differentiation and role models in the worship of Dionysos" by Christopher A. Faraone in Redefining Dionysos(Walter de Gruyter, 2013):

In the standard analysis the entire descent into the sea is thought to depict Theseus in some kind of ‘rite of passage’ into adulthood, because it is in essence a ‘hero’s quest’ that involves a ritual death or near death experience. Such an approach, however, ignores the fact that Bacchylides’ version of Theseus’ dive, like Homer’s story of the dive of Dionysos into the bosom of Thetis, stresses the role of the matron sea-nymph in saving the young man’s life and in the process confirming his divine heritage... Theseus’ miraculous return to the ship, moreover, reads like a paeanic theophany of Apollo or Asclepius (117–119): ‘he appeared beside the slender sterned-ship … a marvel to all and the gods’ gifts shone on his limbs; and the splendid-throned maidens cried out with new founded joy and the sea rang out!’ Amphitrite’s gifts point in a similar direction: initiates were often crowned with garlands and wore special robes, sometimes of linen, as seems to be the case with the purple robe that she wraps around Theseus... I suggest, then, that the initiatory motifs in Theseus’ underwater encounter point not to his age-grade initiation into manhood, but rather to his entry into a mystery cult that promises both salvation in this world as well as some kind of immortality in the next.

Lucius' initiation into the mysteries of Isis is described very similar to a royal coronation ceremony. He seems to perform a very similar ritual that is performed during the pharaoh's coronation and the Egyptian mortuary ritual.

Apuleius' The Metamorphoses: The Golden Ass, Book XI:

Oh, I shall speak, since your desire to hear may be a matter of deep religious longing, and I would not torment you with further anguish, but I shall speak only of what can be revealed to the minds of the uninitiated without need for subsequent atonement, things which though you have heard them, you may well not understand. So listen, and believe in what is true. I reached the very gates of death and, treading Proserpine’s threshold, yet passed through all the elements and returned. I have seen the sun at midnight shining brightly. I have entered the presence of the gods below and the presence of the gods above, and I have paid due reverence before them. When dawn came and the ceremony was complete, I emerged wearing twelve robes as a sign of consecration, sacred dress indeed though nothing stops me from speaking of it, since a host of people were there and saw me... The precious outer cloak hung from shoulder to ankle... The priests call this garment the Olympian Stole... and my head was gracefully garlanded with a wreath of gleaming palm leaves projecting outwards like rays of light. Adorned thus in the likeness of the Sun.

Lucius is crowned just like Osiris after he is resurrected, just like the sun god when he rises out of the underworld, and just like the pharaoh at his coronation.

The Isis-Book (Metamorphoses, Book XI) (Brill, 1975), J. Gwyn Griffiths:

While the palm crown is here solar in form , it probably derives from the Osirian ‘crown of justification or victory ’... Drexler, (‘Isis’, 464), cites gems on which the Osiris mummy bears a radiate crown... There are clearly signs that in the Graeco-Roman era solar symbolism became popular in Osirian contexts... In this cult the initiate can be identified with none other than Osiris, but here, after a ceremony which depicts the visit of the sun-god to the Osirian realm of the dead, the triumph over death is fittingly symbolized by an Osiris-figure with solar attributes. An identification with the god is therefore present... The identity of the mystes and his god could not be more clearly expressed. In Egyptian funerary texts the identity is proclaimed simply by prefixing Osiris to the name of the deceased. As we have seen above, the concept was pushed further in Graeco-Roman times.

The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 1999), Erik Hornung:

The lower register is concerned with crowns as symbols of power that are to be worn [by the sun god] while leaving the netherworld.

"Death and Initiation in the Funerary Religion of Ancient Egypt", Jan Assmann in Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, Yale Egyptological Studies 3, 1989:

In the initiation of Lucius, the voyage through the underworld stands for a symbolic death, followed on the next morning by his resurrection as the sun-god: adorned with a palm wreath ad instar solis, he appears to the cheering crowd, just as the justified deceased at the judgement of the dead... No one doubts that the initiation rites of the Isis-mysteries, as Apuleius ventures to describe them, are deeply rooted in the uniquely elaborated rituals and conceptions of Egyptian funerary religion. The same holds true for other initiation rituals.

Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (Cornell University Press, 2005), Jan Assmann:

With his public vindication against his enemy—that is, death as assassin—Osiris regains both rulership and life, for in this image of death, these two things are closely related. The crown that Osiris regains symbolizes eternal life and ultimate salvation from death.

"Death and Initiation in the Funerary Religion of Ancient Egypt", Jan Assmann in Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, Yale Egyptological Studies 3, 1989:

In accordance with the principle of "transfiguration," as the correlation of this world's symbolic objects and actions with yonder world of values and realities, the coffin becomes the body of the sky- and mother-goddess, thus enabling the "placing of the body in the coffin" to be transfigured into the ascent of the deceased to the heavens and the return to the mother-goddess. The sky-goddess is the Egyptian manifestation of the Great Mother. A central aspect of this belief is the fact that the Egyptians imagined the deceased as being the children of this Mother-of-all-Beings... The texts underline the indissolubility of this bond, or more precisely of the embrace into which the deceased, when laid in his coffin, enters with the sky- the mother goddess, the goddess of the dead. The concept of rebirth, however, still plays an important role. "I shall bear thee anew, rejuvenated," exclaims the sky-goddess to the deceased in one of many such texts inscribed on or in nearly every coffin and tomb. "I have spread myself over thee, I have born thee again as a god." Through this rebirth, the deceased becomes a star-god, a member of the AKH-sphere, a new entity. This rebirth, however, does not imply a de-livery, a separation, but takes place inside the mother's womb, inside the coffin and sky... The deceased, now reborn through the sky-goddess as a god himself, is subsequently breast-fed by divine nurses and elevated to the heavens...

We can therefore hardly go wrong in assuming that the rites explained as the "nursing of the child-god" originated in the royal coronation ritual. Seen under these aspects, the famous cycle of representations known as "the myth of the divine birth," which, in some New Kingdom temples, depicts the announcement, begettal, birth, nursing and circumcision of the royal child, appear, in a different light. Until now, it had always been interpreted as an elevation of the actual birth of the king to a mythical sphere. It seems to me, however, that a reference to the coronation or, better yet, to an initiation to kingship preceding the coronation in the sense of a "naissance mystique" would be much nearer to the mark. It is admittedly not the sky-goddess, but the actual earthly mother of the child-king who appears as protagonist in the cycle of divine begettal and birth. In the nursing scene, however, the action is taken over by the cow-shaped manifestations of the sky-goddess.

"Making Mysteries. From the Untergang der Mysterien to Imperial Mysteries – Social Discourse in Religion and the Study of Religion", Gerhard van den Heever in Religion & Theology 12/3–4 (2005):

In the abundance of beneficences and the enthusiastic promotion of the honorand the dividing lines between divine and human had become blurred. However, this construction of the persona of the emperor was not an abstract discourse, but was enacted in mystery-like spectacle, not only in the mysteries of the imperial cult, but also in the interweaving of mystery myths and spectacle as well as processions as grand-scale performances, that were mythic constructions themselves... If the mystery deities were constructed in the processional enactment of mystery narratives, so was the deity of the emperor. Compare, for instance, the justification of the apotheosis of the emperor in the emerging imperial myths and the similarity between the self-promotion of Augustus’s Res Gestae and the Hellenistic doctrine of apotheosis. The myth of the eastern triumphs of Dionysos was a creation of Alexander, triumphs which he surpassed in the conquest of India, and which caused him to be hailed as even more successful as Herakles and Dionysos, and which justified his recognition as divine. The theme was developed by Hellenistic writers such as Megasthenes (Dionysos as the fons et origo of Indian civilization and kingship) and Hecataeus of Abdera (who elevated Osiris as the Egyptian counterpart of Dionysos into a world conqueror, of Arabia, India, and Greece), and demonstrated in the famous pageant of Ptolemy Philadelphus – testimony to the attraction of the newly created legend for rulers and subjects.

Callixeinos’s description of this procession with its visual construction of the return of Dionysos, complete with an eighteen foot statue of the god, elephants, and varied triumphal train, was as spectacle, a truly overwhelming marvel itself. In Virgil’s description of Augustus’s triumphal march across the East he matches the ascendant imperator with the Greek god, but has him surpass the achievements of both Alexander and the god by letting him reach the natural limits of the world, and transcend them... Greater than Alexander, greater than the conqueror-deities Herakles, Dionysos, and Osiris, and surpassing their labours for the benefit of humankind, Augustus became a god himself... Adoption, ‘the juridical category of kinship recruitment,’ provided the model for rites of initiation into the mysteries. And since adoption was represented as rebirth from the womb of the new mother, initiations into mystery groups were portrayed as rebirths. If, in a context of imperialising religious mentality, an initiate is re-socialised into a new, fictive kinship or brotherhood under the tutelage of an imperialising deity (Isis, Mithras, Dionysos, Cybele/Magna Mater, and so on), in which the beneficences pertaining to the Saturnalian age are announced in the advent of the emperor and celebrated in the mystery cult group, then the mysteries replicated, in miniature, just so many imperial societies.

Defining Orphism: The Beliefs, the teletae and the Writings(Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, Apr 20, 2020), Anthi Chrysanthou:

A katabatic mystery would not only serve as ‘practice’ for the actual afterlife journey but also symbolise the initiate’s death and rebirth as a purified member of the holy thiasos. The katabasis would eventually lead to an epiphany (through the mystic light) which would lead to an ascent to an open meadow. According to Plutarch fr.178, quoted above, after the journey into the darkness the initiate would be crowned with a garland, join in the revel of dance and music with the other initiates and converse with ‘pure and holy men’. This is parallel to the communal perception of the afterlife in the gold tablets where the initiate asks to be sent to the thiasoi of the blessed. It is not hard to imagine an initiation such as the one described in Plutarch being performed by the gold tablets’ owners... This progression from "intensity to reassurance constitutes the dynamics or the implicit drama of the represented event". Such dynamics were characteristic of mystery-rites such as the Eleusinian. In general, mystery cults usually have three components: 1) the existence of mystai, 2) a death-like or suffering experience for the mystai and 3) a promise of a happy afterlife and present prosperity.

Instructions for the Netherworld: The Orphic Gold Tablets (Brill, 2008), Alberto Bernabé Pajares, Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal::

Moreover, we know from a Rhodian inscription that associations of thiasoi offered crowns as a prize or reward during life, which continued to be recognized after death. The philosopher Theo of Smyrna describes the stages of an initiatory ritual that consists first in purification, followed by the performance of a ritual, contemplation, and the initiate’s coronation, all of which produced a state of happiness in him. Once again, the initiatory ritual, the world of death and the soul’s destiny are implicated in the metaphor of the crown, simultaneously mystical, triumphal and symposiacal, a rich combination of aspects, woven together like the leaves and owners that compose it. The parody of initiation in the Clouds can also be remembered, where Socrates gives the initiand a crown and explains to him the procedure followed by all the initiates. There follows a new expression, which is difficult to interpret: "I plunged beneath the lap of my lady, the subterranean queen."

There can be no doubt that the lady in question is Persephone, and that the initiate establishes a special relation with her. After liberating himself from the cycle of births, and surging forth to obtain the crown, thanks to this intimate relation with the goddess, the initiate achieves his goal absolutely, is transformed, and reappears, happy, deified and compared to a kid fallen into the milk. The subject of debate is in what such a special relation consists concretely...

In the light of these texts, the initiate takes refuge in the protective lap of the goddess. However, although this connotation is acceptable, it still remains insuf cient for understanding why the transformation takes place. It therefore seems necessary to have recourse to an interpretation that goes further. Here, too, a starting point is Dieterich, who sees in the formula an allusion to a kind of second birth from the divine mother after death. Burkert, who comes out in favor of this line of interpretation, relates the phrase to a passage from the end of Plato’s Republic (621a), where the souls, once they have chosen their destiny, must “pass beneath the throne of Necessity”. Burkert considers that the phrase we are studying and the Platonic one are illustrations of the same ritual sphere: we have clearly to do with a ritual of birth, which, in myth, leads to rebirth. He even presents as a parallel the Lady of Baza, a seated statue of an Iberian goddess with a hollow beneath her lap, in which the ashes of a dead person were deposited. In a similar light, a series of female idols from Anatolia, the Cyclades, and Asia Minor, have been studied as goddesses of life and death. Likewise an Etruscan gure, rather late, which represents Gorgo, the mistress of animals, with her legs open, may be mentioned. Still more interesting, since they are closer in space and time, are a series of votive terracotta gurines, dated between the 4th and 2nd centuries B.C., and found in temples in South Etruria and Latium. They represent goddesses with a child, half of whose body appears beneath her clothing, sometimes accompanied by a bird. Such images have been interpreted as a symbol of the initiate’s penetration within the goddess’ bosom in order to be born again.

Other similar figures show the goddess suckling a child. In the light of these figures, it is appropriate to interpret that when the initiate says ‘I plunged beneath the lap’, it means that he penetrates inside the goddess’ womb in order to be born again, converted into a god. His falling into the milk would imply that he is transformed into a nursling of the goddess’ milk (cf. the sarcophagus of Tarquinia, discussed in App. II n. 9). This belief has been compared with various Oriental myths and rituals in which the dead person returns to the uterus of the mother, particularly a myth involving Enki, the Mesopotamian god of fresh water, and Ninhursag. Although we lack sufficient data to conform that we are dealing with a rite, and even if neither the Oriental nor specic philosophical explanations are accepted, the fact is that we seem to have reasons to suppose that the Orphic initiate, re-creating very ancient beliefs of the Mediterranean world, believed that after having been born from his mother’s womb, he is received at his death by the womb of Mother Earth, from which he is reborn, but to a new, higher, and divine life. Let us recall, in this respect, that the ancient Great Mother of the Aegean was later adored by the Greeks in the figures of Aphrodite, Demeter, and Persephone, and also that death, for the Orphic initiate, is the beginning of eternal life, and that both, life and death, are not always antithetical, as is demonstrated by the Olbian expressions "life/death/life". In sum, the womb of Persephone is simultaneously the womb of the earth, also used as a reference to the innermost part of the underworld regions, the protective womb of the mother or nursemaid in which the child takes refuge, and the maternal womb from which the initiate hopes to be reborn, transfigured and divinized...

However, Egyptian and Near Eastern sources exist from much earlier with this motif of the divine nursemaid, as is the case of Nephthys and Isis suckling the divine child Horus or the pharaoh in the afterlife. In the Italian examples, it is sometimes not a child but an adult who nurses or sleeps in the female’s lap. On other occasions, the child is represented as inert and lifeless beneath the goddess’ nourishing breast. Britt Marie Friedh-Haneson has suggested the following interpretation for some of these examples: the suckling personage—whether adult or child—would represent the deceased as adopted by the goddess of the afterlife, who offers him the milk of immortality. In sanctuaries and tombs, the offerings of these terracottas suggest the initiate’s adoption of a new life through divine maternity: he is reborn, and through this rite of transition he changes his condition and status.

Friedh-Haneson associates these images with Orphic religion, which could have incorporated various in uences from the Mediterranean, including those from Egypt. She takes up the enigmatic expression of the tablets from Thurii “like a kid I fell into the milk”, which she associates with the suckling of Dionysus—and of the initiate as Dionysus—by the goddess Persephone. Likewise, she alludes to tablet L 9 from Thurii, in which we nd the expression “I plunged beneath the lap of my lady, the subterranean queen”, which we can relate to those images in which the goddess’ mantle receives the initiate. We also reproduce here the drawing of an Etruscan mirror from Perugia, currently in the National Library at Paris, studied by FriedhHaneson. Some authors interpret the scene engraved on this mirror as the adoption of Heracles by Hera, as the adult hero’s entry into his new, divine condition. The mythic episode takes place on a decorated bed, beneath the protective mantle of Hera and the offering of her bare breast. The image represents the hero’s symbolic second birth. The figure standing next to the bed, who observes the reclining couple attentively, could be Athena, the Etruscan MENRVA or Minerva... Indirectly, the mirror associates the theme of the terracottas with the motifs indicated in the tablets, but it warns us about the fact that we may have to do with various adoptive goddesses in the images of suckling, of whom Persephone is only one.

Many Egyptian images, in relief or wall paintings, in papyri of the Book of the Dead, in sarcophagi, or in ushebtis boxes, show a representation of goddesses in the form of a tree that suckles the deceased or gives him a pause along the road to the afterlife. The trees most often represented are, in the rst place, the sycamore, whose thick, whitish sap resembles milk and, secondly, the palm tree, with its sweet fruit the date. Both species, but especially the sycamore, give good shade and shelter for those walking in the desert. Water is found near to it. In a consolatory way, the image of life is transferred to the landscape of death. In the representations of these metamorphic trees, we see hands, breasts, and feminine arms sprouting, as if the plant were endowed with a force or power similar to that of humans. We are in the presence of a goddess who manifests herself as a sycamore, assuming its qualities and power. The texts that accompany these images often allow us to identify the goddess transformed into a tree (cf. § 1.5.). They are usually Nut, the goddess of the sky, or Isis, or Hathor... Since the beginning of the 20th century, historians of religion have compared the refrigerium in the Beyond of some Orphic tablets with this eschatological development of ancient Egypt. The suckling by which the deceased is initiated into the Orphic-Dionysiac rituals may also have vague parallels in the funerary images of Egypt

“My Beloved Son, Come and Rest in Me”: Job’s Return to His Mother’s Womb (Job 1:21a) in Light of Egyptian Mythology, Christopher B. Hays:

Job’s return to his mother’s womb has consistently attracted special attention from interpreters of the book; it has been seen as a “bump” in the text requiring smoothing. Fifty years ago, Giuseppe Ricciotti argued with elegant brevity that the archaeological remains of ancient Near Eastern burials could shed light on this problem; the fetal positioning of many such burials could explain the image of “returning naked to [the mother’s womb].” “If this womb was not materially identical to that of the mother,” Ricciotti wrote, “it was so symbolically.” A number of significant commentaries have followed Ricciotti in treating the imagery as a poetic reference to burial, but as far as I can see, no one has pointed out that there are very clear Egyptian precedents for such imagery, in which the sarcophagus and/or tomb are described as the womb of the goddess in which the deceased undergoes a rebirth into the blessed afterlife. The fact that Job is already acknowledged as demonstrating awareness of Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife such as the judgment of the dead supports the idea of Egyptian influence in 1:21. In Egyptian funerary texts, there is “an astonishing consistency” to the imagery of death as a return to a goddess’ womb, from the Old Kingdom through the Hellenistic period. The image of the goddess Nut as the one who gives birth to the deceased king as her son—causing him to “revive and live”—is pervasive in the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts. A few examples will suffice. Nut calls the king her son in Teti’s Spell 5a: “Teti is my son, whom I caused to be born and who parted my belly; he is the one I have desired and with whom I have become content.” The connection between this image of birth and the restoration of the body via the resurrection to the afterlife is well expressed by Pepi I’s Spell 337, which commands: “Nut, give your arm toward Pepi with life and authority, join together his bones, assemble his limbs, join his bones to his [head] and join his head to his bones, and he will not decay, he will not rot, he will not be ended, he will have no outflow, and no scent of his will come out.”...

The idea of preservation also includes protection; this is expressed in a different way in Pepi’s I spell 41a: “Osiris Pepi, your mother Nut has spread herself over you that she may conceal you from everything bad. Nut has joined you away from everything bad: you are the eldest of her children.” The comforting aspect of these texts is quite clear in such examples; and again, the entrance into the sarcophagus (and perhaps also into the tomb itself) is viewed as an entrance into the mother goddess, who then births the deceased into the afterlife... Assmann calls this an “entirely typical” image, “that of a mother goddess who embodies the coffin and welcomes the deceased, as he enters her, as her son.” A text from nearly a thousand years later echoes some of the same images: "My beloved son, Osiris PN, come and rest in me! I am your mother who protects you daily. I protect your body from all evil, I guard your body from all evil."... Job 1:21a makes better sense when understood in light of the Egyptian idea of death as a return to the womb of the mother goddess; that mythology provides a much more likely context than the idea of “Mother Earth,” which is attested only in texts that are (or are likely to be) quite late.

John 3:

Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” 4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You[c] must be born from above.’

I think there's a connection between the mourning women and their protection and care of the deceased's body, and the idea of death as rebirth from a goddess in the stories of the mystery cult deities and in the Gospels. The tomb Jesus is placed in is also a womb where he is reborn/resurrected and transfigured into a divine being after his ritual initiation/coronation (represented by his baptism, transfiguration, and crucifixion).

Notice in the above quote it says: "Nut calls the king her son in Teti’s Spell 5a: 'Teti is my son, whom I caused to be born and who parted my belly; he is the one I have desired and with whom I have become content.'" So when the king/deceased enters the netherworld as a transfigured divine being through his rebirth from the goddess the goddess says "This is my son... whom I have become content". This is comparable to Yahweh saying "this is my son... with you I am well pleased" during the baptism and transfiguration of Jesus.

Mark 1:

And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him. 11 And a voice came from the heavens,“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Matthew 17:

And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became bright as light. Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him... suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”

So the coronation of the king, the initiation rituals of the mystery cults, the Egyptian mortuary ritual, and Christian baptism involve a rebirth, adoption, and transfiguration into a divine being (whether it's during the ritual or after death). The initiation/coronation is a spiritual birth. In the Gospels Jesus also goes through a royal coronation and initiation and is reborn/resurrected and transfigured into a divine being.