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A vegetation deity is a nature deity whose disappearance and reappearance, or life, death and rebirth, embodies the growth cycle of plants. In nature worship, the deity can be a god or goddess with the ability to regenerate itself. A vegetation deity is often a fertility deity. The deity typically undergoes dismemberment (see sparagmos), scattering, and reintegration, as narrated in a myth or reenacted by a religious ritual. The cyclical pattern is given theological significance on themes such as immortality, resurrection, and reincarnation.Lorena Stookey, Thematic Guide to World Mythology (Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 99. Vegetation myths have structuralism resemblances to certain in which parts of a being's body generate aspects of the cosmology, such as the Norse mythology of Ymir.Stookey, Thematic Guide to World Mythology, p. 100.
In mythography of the 19th and early 20th century, as for example in The Golden Bough of J.G. Frazer, the figure is related to the " corn spirit", "corn" in this sense meaning grain in general. That triviality is giving the concept its tendency to turn into a meaningless generality, as Walter Friedrich Otto remarked of trying to use a "name as futile and yet pretentious as 'Vegetation deity'".Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult, translated by Robert B. Palmer (Indiana University Press, 1965), pp. 7–12.
In ancient Egyptian religion, the cultural achievements of Osiris among the peoples of the earth provokes the envy of his brother Set, who kills and dismembers him. Osiris's wife Isis makes a journey to gather his fourteen scattered body parts. In some versions, she buries each part where she finds it, causing the desert to put forth vegetation. In other versions, she reassembles his body and resurrects him, and he then becomes the ruler of the afterlife.
In European folklore, a woman's fertility has an influence on farming. Vegetation goddess figurines from the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture have a lozenge and dot pattern that represents a sown field and female fertility. The death of vegetation is also associated with the travel to the underworld of Ningishzida.
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