Death and fertility are mythologically bound in a single ambivalent figure

Evidence

But once again ambivalence is at work here: while germination is always associated with death, death is also associated with fertility. Detested death is like a new birth, and so it is blessed. The dead hero like Osiris is resurrected every springtime, and he is regenerated by a new birth. Man’s supreme hope, says Jung, “is that the dark waters of death become the waters of life, that death and its cold embrace are the mother’s lap, just as the sea, while engulfing the sun, re-births in the depths.” The theme of the burial of the sun god within the sea and its dazzling reemergence is common to many mythologies. And man wants to live, but he also hopes for rest, sleep, for nothingness. He does not wish for immortality for himself, and thus he can learn to love death. “Inorganic matter is the mother’s breast,” Nietzsche wrote. “Being delivered from life means becoming real again, completing oneself. Anyone who understands that would consider returning to unfeeling dust as a holiday.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 328

Categorization

• XREF: Nietzsche’s ‘return to dust as a holiday’ resonates with the death-as-relief theme in A Very Minor Prophet and White Noise; also shores up Beauvoir’s dialectic of immanence/transcendence. — connects to: Woman’s alliance with death is the inverted mirror of her fertility. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 355; The moon and snake symbolize ambivalent fertility tied to womanhood