A liminal deity is a god or goddess in mythology who presides over thresholds, gates, or doorways; "a crosser of boundaries".
[1] These gods are believed to oversee a state of transition of some kind; such as, the old to the new, the unconscious to the conscious state, the familiar to the unknown.
[2] Types of liminal deities include dying-and-rising deities, various agricultural deities, psychopomps and those who descend into the underworld: crossing the threshold between life and death.
Vegetation deities mimic the annual dying and returning of plant life, making them seasonally cyclical liminal deities in contrast to the one-time journey typical of the dying-and-rising myth.
[3] Liminality is a term given currency in the twentieth century by British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner.