The Katabasis

Katabasis is the Greek word for the hero’s descent, and Odysseus’s is the model the rest of literature has been chasing for three thousand years. Circe sends him. He has to consult Tiresias to learn how to get home, and Tiresias is dead, so Odysseus has to go where the dead are. The crew weeps when he tells them. This is not another monster. This is death itself, and he is asking them to sail straight in. They sail north until the sky closes and the wind dies and the bow drives into black mud at the world’s edge. He digs the offering pit. He pours the libations in the order Circe taught him, honey, milk, wine, barley, then the throats of the black ram and the white ewe, and the blood fills the hole. The dead come. Maidens, soldiers, infants in their mothers’ arms, all of them with hungry blackened eyes, pressing toward the warm blood. He has to hold them back with a sword while he waits for the prophet. He meets Elpenor, unburied. He meets his mother. He meets Achilles and Ajax and Agamemnon. He learns more in those hours than in ten years of war. And he learns the thing every living person who goes to the dead learns, which is that the dead can teach you, but they cannot follow you back. He runs when he hears the cry of something worse coming. The living are not allowed to stay.