A god dies each year, and each year climbs out of the grave. The fullest witness on this shelf is The Golden Bough (published 1922), which tells of Attis, a Phrygian god whose "supposed death and resurrection" struck deep roots into the worship of western Asia. He was "a god of vegetation", "a fair young shepherd or herdsman beloved by Cybele", the Mother of the Gods; after his death he was "changed into a pine-tree", and a pine swathed like a corpse was carried into her sanctuary each spring. On the Day of Blood his priests mourned and gashed themselves; then, when night fell, the sorrow turned: "a light shone in the darkness", the tomb opened, "the god had risen from the dead", and a priest touched the mourners' lips and whispered to them "the glad tidings of salvation". This was "the death and resurrection of Attis in spring" — a grief rehearsed until it broke into a festival of joy.

The address's own citation points elsewhere, to the Chinese record, and there the note is far barer: Myths & Legends of China (published 1922) says only, in passing, that the gods themselves "are resurrected, or die and are transformed, or die finally" — the pattern named in a single clause rather than staged in a rite. The Chinese witness states the possibility; the Phrygian one lets us watch it happen, down to the whispered salvation over an opened tomb.

If a god's rising must be wept for before it can be rejoiced over, is the resurrection the point of the story, or is the mourning?