Should we not distinguish between the invocation of the dead, performed at the gate of their kingdom, and the descent into the world of the dead? Odysseus performs the first feat, Nekyia, and Aeneas performs the second, Katabasis. O achieves his invocation by offering reviving blood, but leaves when he thinks that he might be stretching the patience of Persephone, Queen of the Dead, and that she might send out a Gorgon's head against him. A's ability to avoid antagonising Persephone/Proserpina depends on his possession of the Golden Bough.
Frazer, in his enormous work on the Golden Bough, cites the Katabasis of Ishtar, the great and fearsome Sumerian/Babylonian goddess who goes in search of her lover Tammuz/Adonis. There must be connections from here to the Orpheus story and to that of Demeter and Persephone: the search motivated by love and the search which distracts the goddess of fertility and threatens the survival of the crops. (I've never read the Golden Bough all through, I may say.) As to Egyptian precedents - here my knowledge gets even more sketchy and anecdotal. I visited an exhibition in the Washington National Gallery of Art which gave some details of the Katabasis of the Sun, who seems to be linked in imagery both with the Egyptian monarch and with Everyman. I did wonder if one could detect any influence on V; does V have, hidden beneath the surface of the narrative, any reflection of the 12-hour structure of the Egyptian myth? I couldn't persuade myself that he does, though it's difficult to believe that he had no knowledge of Egyptian ideas on the subject. The final passage of the Georgics makes reference to Egyptian rituals and recounts the Katabasis of Orpheus. - Martin Hughes On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Patrick Roper wrote: > > I was delighted to discover that Virgil had preceeded Dante's "Hell". > Did Virgil invent this genre? > > In addition to the comments of others, the Epic of Gilgamesh starts: > > "Fame haunts the man who visits Hell, > who lives to tell my entire tale identically." > > Patrick Roper > > > > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply. Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message "unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
