Myths and an interesting quote

Rabbit tracking led to The Death of Zeus Kretagenes:

For an allusion to the manner of Zeus' death it is necessary to turn to Isho'dad, a follower of Nestorius, in his Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, who claimed as his source Theodore of Mopsuestia; in his note on Acts 17.28 Isho'dad reports:

The Cretans said about Zeus, as if it were true, that he was a prince, and was lacerated by a wild boar, and was buried; and behold! his grave is known amongst us; so Minos, the son of Zeus, made a panegyric over his father, and in it he said

"The Cretans have fashioned a tomb for thee, O Holy and High!
Liars, evil beasts, idle bellies;
For thou diest not; for ever thou livest and standest;
For in thee we live and move and have our being,"

An earthquake interrupted a sacrifice in a temple on Crete (or so I conclude from among the various arguments), and the interpretation of that in the paper linked above included the myth of the annual death of Zeus. I include his conclusion as an example of such conclusions (perhaps unfairly):

The case argued here is cumulative: that the worship of Zeus in Crete as a god who died, and was reborn, annually, was derived from the Minoan cult of a god of vegetation who similarly died and was reborn; that the (albeit limited) evidence, that Zeus died by being tom by a boar, associates him as dying god with other vegetation gods, such as Adonis and Attis, who also were killed by a boar, that the death and burial of Zeus were associated with Mt. Iouktas because its profile represented the dead god reclining in death, and that the mountain thus took the name 'sacred mountain of Zeus'. It may thus be far from coincidental that it is on this same mountain that the remains were discovered of what has been termed by the excavators a human sacrifice, during the ritual of which the young male victim had been done to death with a blade bearing the representation of a boar. ...

that the earthquake interrupted the very ritual of the vegetation god's annual death, gored by the wild boar. I suggest that, during the time of the Mycenaeans' presence in Crete, the name of their supreme god, the IndoEuropean sky-god Zeus, came to be associated, quite inappropriately, with this ritual of the Minoans' dying god of vegetation; and that consequently there arose in Crete alone the tradition of the dying Zeus, for which the inhabitants of the island were subsequently condemned as liars by all other Greeks.