apotheoses (See apotheosis)

1 model of excellence or perfection of a kind; one having no equal [syn: ideal, paragon, nonpareil, saint, nonesuch, nonsuch]

2 the elevation of a person (as to the status of a god) [syn: deification, exaltation] [also: apotheoses (pl)]

English

Noun

apotheoses

1. Plural of apotheosis

see Divinization for disambiguation.

Apotheosis (from Greek ἀποθεόω "to deify"), deification or divinization is the glorification of an individual to a divine level.

Antiquity

Prior to the Hellenistic period, imperial cults were known in Ancient Egypt (pharaohs) and Mesopotamia (since Naram-Sin). From the New Kingdom, all deceased were deified as Osiris.

Hellenistic Greece

In the Greek and Hellenistic world, state leaders might be raised to the gods before (e.g., Alexander the Great) or after (e.g., the Ptolemaic dynasty) death. It was also an honour given to a few revered artists, such as Homer.

Greek hero-cults were primarily civic rather than familial, in that none of the worshipers traced their descent back to the hero. The cults were distinct on the other hand from the Roman cult of dead emperors, because the hero was not thought of as having ascended to Olympus or become a god: he was beneath the earth, and his power purely local. For this reason hero cults were chthonic in nature, and their rituals more closely resembled those for Hecate and Persephone than those for Zeus and Apollo. Two exceptions were Heracles and Asclepius, who might be honored as either gods or heroes.

Ancient Rome

Apotheosis in ancient Rome was a process whereby a deceased ruler was recognized to be divine by his successor, usually also by a decree of the Senate or popular consent. In addition to showing respect, often the successor deified his popular predecessor to legitimize himself. The upper-class, in fact, did not always take part in the cult and some secretly ridiculed the apotheosis of inept and feeble emperors.

At the height of imperial cult worship during the Roman Empire, sometimes the emperor's deceased loved ones--heirs, empresses, or lovers--were deified as well. Deified people were awarded posthumously with the prefix Divus (Diva if women) to their names to signify their divinity. Temples and columns were sometimes erected to provide a space for worship.

Christology

Trinitarian Christianity asserts that Jesus Christ is the Son or Word of God, and as such is God Himself revealed. It explicitly rejects the idea that Jesus became divine, and teaches instead that God became man (that is, he obtained human nature and united it to himself, not that he was changed into a man). The mystical theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church teaches theosis, the doctrine that men enter into the life of the Holy Trinity through Jesus Christ, to be healed of sinfulness, by participation in the love that exists eternally between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: and in this sense "men may become God". This is regarded in Orthodox theology, and all Trinitarianism, to be antithetical to apotheosis.

Modern

• Amaterasu
• Cult of personality
• self-deification
• Euhemerus
• Frazer, James, The Golden Bough
• Graves, Robert, The White Goddess
• Imperial cult
• Hirohito
• Roman emperor
• Roman religion
• Sacred king
• Theosis
• Tylor, E.B.

External links

• Seneca's Apocolocyntosis at Project Gutenberg

commons Apotheosis