Fertility rite

Fertility rites or fertility cult are religious rituals that are intended to stimulate reproduction in humans or in the natural world. Such rites may involve the sacrifice of "a primal animal, which must be sacrificed in the cause of fertility or even creation". "Fertility rites may occur in calendric cycles, as rites of passage within the life cycle, or as ad hoc rituals....Commonly fertility rituals are embedded within larger-order religions or other social institutions." As with cave pictures "[that] show animals at the point of mating...[and] served magic fertility rites", such rites are "...a form of sympathetic magic" in which the forces of nature are to be influenced by the example acted out in the ritual. At times, "ceremonies intended to assure the fecundity of the earth or of a group of women...involve some form of phallic worship". Central to fertility rites in classical Greece was "Demeter, goddess of fertility... Her rites celebrated the procession of the seasons, the mystery of the plants and the fruits in their annual cycle of coming to be and passing away." But most "women's festivals... related in some way to woman's proper function as a fertile being (which allowed her to promote the fertility of crops too, by sympathy)". Because of his link to the grape harvest, however, "it is not surprising to see Dionysus associated with Demeter and Kore in the Eleusinian Mysteries. For he, too, represented one of the great life-bringing forces of the world." Ancient Phoenicia saw "a special sacrifice at the season of the harvest, to reawaken the spirit of the vine"; while the winter fertility rite to restore "the spirit of the withering vine" included as sacrifice "cooking a kid in the milk of its mother, a Canaanite custom which Mosaic law condemned and formally forbade". The death of Adonis – "a vegetation spirit who...was manifest in the seed of corn" – was marked by "the most beautiful of Phoenician festivals...celebrated immediately after the harvest".

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Related concepts (3)

Fertility rite

Phallus

A phallus (: phalli or phalluses) is a penis (especially when erect), an object that resembles a penis, or a mimetic image of an erect penis. In art history a figure with an erect penis is described as ithyphallic. Any object that symbolically—or, more precisely, iconically—resembles a penis may also be referred to as a phallus; however, such objects are more often referred to as being phallic (as in "phallic symbol"). Such symbols often represent fertility and cultural implications that are associated with the male sexual organ, as well as the male orgasm.

Dionysus

In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus (daɪ.əˈnaɪsəs; Διόνυσος Dionysos) is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus (ˈbækəs or ˈbɑːkəs; Βάκχος Bacchos) by the Greeks (a name later adopted by the Romans) for a frenzy he is said to induce called baccheia. As Dionysus Eleutherios ("the liberator"), his wine, music, and ecstatic dance free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful.