Goddess and the Underworld Lille

2016

Representations of Hades, the Underworld, and the afterlife in ancient Greek literature have traditionally been studied from a religious or mythological perspective. Scholars have often tried to extrapolate historical practices and eschatological beliefs about life after death from accounts of rituals and myths surrounding funerary practices, cult beliefs, necromantic encounters, and descents by heroes to the Underworld. As a result of this focus, scholars have generally overlooked the narrative function of Underworld scenes. In this project, I examine ancient Underworld scenes from Homer to Plato as a type of literary device containing unique rhetorical features and functions. I argue that Underworld scenes are embedded authorial commentaries, which allow communication between author and audience in an exercise of narrative self-reflection. Underworld scenes condense the actions and themes of the main story into an abbreviated space while also situating their parent narratives within a dynamic historical and literary tradition. Through these scenes, authors and artists create networks of texts by including iii allusions and story patterns, which can activate similar tales of ghostly encounter (nekuia), underworld journeys (katabaseis), punishment for sinners, and rewards for the "blessed." Underworld scenes "open up" dialogues between texts and characters across time and space so they could engage with each other and their tradition. Thus, Homer could imagine Odysseus talking to the ghosts of Achilles and Agamemnon in the Odyssey as a contemplation of heroism, and Plato could imagine Socrates anticipating afterlife conversations about justice with Homer, Ajax and Orpheus in the Apology. Chapter 1 presents the parameters of Underworld scenes and the methodologies that will be used in analyzing these scenes. Chapter 2 examines the structure of Underworld scenes in early Archaic poetry as well as the distinct language and image set which allowed communication between authors and audiences. Chapter 3 shows how Greek epinician and lyric poets used Underworld scenes to assimilate their patrons to heroes who achieved a "blessed" afterlife. Chapter 4 focuses on the use of Underworld scenes on the dramatic stage and in funerary contexts in Classical Athens to portray and offer solutions to contemporary political and social issues. Finally, Chapter 5 explores famous Underworld episodes in Plato's dialogues and examines how Socrates uses Underworld scenes to overwrite traditional sources and redefine the afterlife as a stage of life, like childhood and old age.

Among recent writers, few have achieved such acclaim for literary innovation as Jorge Luis Borges and his ephebe Julio Cortázar. Yet, in spite of their daring manipulations of narrative form, their work retains a structure informed in many cases by T.S. Eliot's seminal definition of the "mythical method" as "a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" with the result of "giving a shape and significance […] to the futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." This method yielded works by such writers as Joyce, Mann, Broch, and Proust which fuse the realistic details of daily life with and mythological symbolism. As I have shown elsewhere, the single most important myth for the modernists was the descent to the underworld. 1 In the wide range of modernist works in which the myth occurs, the central theme is the revelation of those fundamental ideas which give "shape and significance" to life and art, ideas for which the modernists developed a complex variety of terms. By discussing some of these terms and the works in which they are used, we can contextualize those works by Borges and Cortázar in which the ordinary details of daily life are enriched by symbolic allusions to the descent to the underworld.

Archiv fur Religionsgeschichte 14: 47-68

The Underworld Books provide a unique perspective on divine taxonomy, juxtaposing gods with large, formal cults with gods whose existence is predicated on their membership within constellations of other netherworldly divinities. Examination of the ontological status of deities within the “Catalog” of the Book of Amduat and the Great Litany of the Book of Adoring Re in the West (a.k.a. The Litany of Re), including their use in non-funerary contexts, reveals a new definition for daimones within Egyptian theology.

Many of the archetypes associated with the myths of the maze and the descent to the underworld in form close readings of Marguerite Yourcenar's collection of lyrical prose pieces, Fires, and Vladimir Nabokov's hybrid novel (part poem, part narrative commentary) Pale Fire. A traditional iconography, associated with the nekyia (Homeric term for the descent into Hades), is to be found in Fires in eight out of the nine pieces— an iconography which includes the motifs of the maze; doorways and divestiture; ocular, apian, and ornithological symbolism; and the night-sea journey. The use of the myth in these lyrical prose poems connects them to a wide range of modernist works, in which the myth confers shape and significance, and serves as a metaphor for the processes of poetic composition. 1 We might express this relationship in an equation: nekyia = poeisis. Nabokov's novel, Pale Fire, addresses similar concerns by repeating and combining the myths of the maze and the underworld no less than six times, in order to structure its narrative sections, and to confer that " shape and significance " upon the novel that T.S. Eliot associated with the " mythical method. " The transition, furthermore, from Yourcenar to Nabokov, suggests that postmodernism grew out of modernism in a manner that recalls the earlier evolutions of the Baroque out of the Renaissance, or Postimpressionism out of Impressionism. The " Preface " to Fires establishes the principle themes and outlines the stylistic techniques of the stories to follow. The style is to be a fusion of " ornate and tight manner 1 For a discussion of a great many of these, accompanied by detailed analyzes of the language and imagery of form associated with the myth of the maze and the descent to the underworld, see my articles and books listed in the Works Cited.

Plato’s literary conceptions of the Beyond of the human soul integrate the entire space of the cosmos and move the eschatological space of traditional Hades up to heaven. Astronomy is now combined in an idiosyncratic way with Platonic psychology, ethics, religion, and theology. Two strategies can be observed: the philosophical rationalization of ancient mythotopoi and a new religious conception of astronomy. Plato’s students in the Academy, such as the author of the Epinomis, Xenocrates, or Heraclides, place a much stronger emphasis on the religious aspects (astral gods) and undertake – and this is the reverse of Plato’s – a decidedly religious conception of Platonic philosophical concepts.

2012

This dissertation could have not seen its completion without the help, support, and advice of numerous individuals. First and foremost, I would like to thank my sponsor and advisor, Prof. Richard Brilliant, whose constant feedback and critical eye have pushed my thinking and writing in directions I could have not envisioned on my own. My second advisor, Prof. Natalie Kampen, has been a constant inspiration throughout my graduate studies. Not only she guided me in understanding Roman art in ways I could have not fathomed, but she also accompanied me, with her support and encouragement, in the difficult journey of becoming a better scholar without compromising my life as a wife and a mother. She left us all too soon; not defending my dissertation before her passing will always be my deepest regret. She will always be in my memories.

Classical World, 2011

History of European Ideas, 1989

2014

In the Middle English Breton lay, Sir Orfeo (c. 1340), the Underworld transforms from its classical prototype of an ominous realm of shadows into the marvellous Otherworld. In this paper, I examine the Orfeo poet’s rewriting of Greco-Roman Orpheus tradition with a focus on the poet’s reception of the classical Underworld so as to explicate how frequently the poet makes use of romance elements to relocate the Underworld / Otherworld in a context blended with Celtic folklore and chivalric conventions. I argue that the Orfeo poet refashions the classical Underworld and formulates a world full of natural and artistic spectacle. More importantly, far from being a world of mournful shadows and the symbol of forever loss, the Otherworld in Sir Orfeo is a domain of light and hope where mortals encounter adventures, undergo trials, and return to the corporeal world in bliss and good faith.