A Journey into Hell

I don't think that "Sexy, Soulful Music and Dance" is what Dr. H. had in mind when he was talking about Nekyia, but it looked semi-interesting in a WTH is this sort of way. Upon further investigation, I found that the site explains that Nekyia is a ritual journey into darkness. Well, I thought. That sounds familiar.

"Nekyia's Pure Catnip" on the right is here for your entertainment.

Traveling around the internet, I happened on a book that should explain myth in simple linguistics: The Complete Idiot's Guide to World Mythology. Aha! A book that caters to my pea-sized mind.

Evans Lansing Smith and Nathan Robert Brown are eloquently simple in explaining Nekyia. The word is derived from the Greek word, necro, meaning dead.

"Nekia was a word used by the Greeks to refer to the eleventh book of Homer's Odyssey, in which Odysseus travels into Hades to consult the spirit of the blind prophet, Tiresia, so that he might find out how to get back home."

As we said in class, Odysseus isn't the only one to travel into the afterlife. Orpheus travels to the underworld to save his love Eurydice. In the near future, we'll discover Dante's journey through hell. Persephone is kidnapped by the god of the underworld, Hades, who tricks her into becoming his wife. However, the journey into hell for all the characters who dare venture there is always followed by a return to the land of the living.


So I learned a new Greek word, but that's not all. There's another word I picked up, necrotype. These fellows might have made it up because Merriam-Webster says a necrotype is "an extinct organism or group of organisms." But we're complete idiots after all.

Smith claims "universal structures and collective archetypes make up all heroic journeys/descents to the underworld. Necrotype is an integration of the Greek word necro (dead/death) with the word "archetype." this word refers to universal symbls of the human imagination catalyzed by the journey to the underworld (nekyia)."   

He has got to be making this up, but it sounds really good.