My Journeys to Hell & Back -- Katabasis
the mythical method and a writing prompt
There’s a dark staircase in my childhood, leading down to a neighbor’s basement. The grubby string hanging down from the overhead lightbulb was too high to reach. A pungent odor wafted up from below mingling freshly laid cement and cat pee. Nothing bad ever happened to me there but the mere idea of going down those stairs filled me with terror. At an early age I became acquainted with the unsettling power of katabasis – the Greek narrative structure recounting a descent into hell.
Aside from personal experiences of grief, despair, and separation, I have come to realize that all my fiction, since the publication of my short story, The Marble Foot, (a surreal tale of a woman’s wild plunge into underground Rome when an elevator crashes) has focused in very different ways on the theme of descent.
The Etruscan, for example, begins with a classic fall, when Harriet, intrepid photographer, slips while exploring an Etruscan tomb. The man who rescues her will unravel her life in an obsessive love affair unfolding against the backdrop of Etruscan myths.
In Katherine’s Wish, dealing with the life of Katherine Mansfield, I focus on her descent into illness and her frenzied search for a cure, a new home, a new life which ended at the Prieuré in Fontainebleau. In Signatures in Stone: A Bomarzo Mystery, Daphne, the heroine, must puzzle out the meaning of the sculptures in the Park of Monsters, who point out a pathway from hell to rebirth — while solving a murder case, in which she is the prime suspect.In the prologue of Loving Modigliani, we see the heroine Jeanne Hébuterne searching through the underworld for her beloved husband and god, Amedeo Modigliani. In my new book, Melusine and the Watery Mind, Daphne encounters hell underwater.
Having recently discovered that an essay I published on Katabasis years ago in The Writer has resurfaced in some online courses by creative writing teachers, I thought it might be time to revise the essay — complete with a writing prompt at the end appropriate for writers of all genres.
CRAFT EPIC QUESTS WITH THE POWER OF KATABASIS -the “mythical method” & writing prompts
The Mythical Method
Once upon a time, we made sense of ourselves and our world by telling a story, conjuring an archetype or creating a symbol. The myths, symbols and stories that sprang from our imagination in those distant days are some of the most enduring creations of civilization. The old myths still move us, reverberating in our unconscious, in our dreams and in the stories we keep telling and retelling. Our contemporary culture is steeped in myth from Star Wars to Harry Potter, Tolkien and his myriad imitators to the Handmaid’s Tale and Game of Thrones.
In his famous essay, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” T.S. Eliot praises James Joyce for his use of myth in Ulysses and explains why recourse to what he called “the mythical method” was vital for the writers of his time: “It was simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” For Eliot, the old belief systems of western civilization had crumbled after World War I, but the ancient myths on which they had been built remained intact, breathing beneath a heap of shards.
Whether we agree with Eliot’s pessimistic vision or see the universe as a whirling mosaic of particles in constant change, myth is an extraordinary instrument for organizing experiences into patterns guaranteed to trigger deep responses in readers.
The word “myth” is very hard to define. In colloquial usage, “myth” refers to something that is untrue, imaginary or fictitious: beliefs or ideas that dissolve if subjected to rational enquiry. Or it may refer to strange old stories clothed in archaic language about the intervention of supernatural beings in human life, with disturbing undertones of sexuality and transformation. Something artsy, highbrow, folkloric, and in any case remote from contemporary experience.
The Roman philosopher Sallust claimed that myths “are things that never happened but always are.” For the great pioneers of psychoanalysis and their heirs, myths are keys to understanding our inner world.
Joseph Campbell, one of the greatest 20th century explorers of myth, said that myths are collective dreams, and dreams are personal myths. Myths can unlock our creativity by opening a doorway to the psyche where dreams and archetypes mingle, and our most private, immediate experiences merge with the timeless and universal. Drawing on myth as inspiration can help writers break free from the purely personal, uncover new material, and see their own experiences through a deeper, more universal lens.
The Monomyth
Campbell dedicated his life to studying the myth of the hero in cultures all over the globe —in mythology, legend, folklore, fairy tales and religious narratives from Osiris and Prometheus to Buddha and Christ, charting a story of quest and initiation. From this immense body of material, he extracted a single formula that he defined as the monomyth.
In his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he sums up the monomyth: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
He then identified three phases in the hero’s journey: the call to adventure, the road of trials, the goal or boon. These three phases may also be described as separation/departure, initiation, and return, and are in turn divided into several minor phases (or we might say, plot variations). The study of this formula and its application in analyzing or constructing the plots of fictional or nonfictional narratives offers endless possibilities to the creative writer.
Screenwriter Christopher Vogler repackaged Campbell’s ideas in his exhaustive work, The Writer’s Journey, applying the formula of the hero’s journey to narrative plot structure in cinema and fiction. He also draws heavily on figures from Greek mythology and on Vladimir Propp’s analysis of fairy tale structure and characters in order to show how ancient archetypal patterns pulse beneath our everyday experience.
One of the earliest phases in the formula is Katabasis – descent to the underworld.
KATABASIS
According to Campbell, in myths, fairy tales and fictional narratives of mythic resonance, the hero’s or heroine’s descent to the underworld is often preceded by a “call to initiation” and separation from family and home environment. This going down into, or “katabasis” in Greek, entails journeying into the deeps of the earth or into the depths of oneself.
It is a time of solitude and doubt, mourning and danger, anguish, fear, alienation, often estrangement from what we hold most dear: our sense of who we are. Thus do the mythic characters of Cybele, Gilgamesh, Aeneas and Ulysses enter the gates of the underworld; thus does Dante trudge through the freezing circles of hell in The Inferno.
In the great myths and epics of antiquity, descent to the underworld signified a journey to the realm of the dead or the gods, a world whose realistic geography and landscape mirror that which lies above -- with whirlpools, deserts, giant boulders, rivers, massive trees, fiery lakes, marshes and mud. As we make our way across that murky terrain, we will have to rely on hearing, smell, intuition. Very often we require a guide, a map, precise instructions, to get us out again. In this shadowy subterranean realm, the protagonist undergoes capture or imprisonment. Often, like Orpheus, we will meet dead loved ones whom we are powerless to rescue or who have important messages to deliver.
During the journey, the hero/heroine will encounter allies and enemies, lose a possession or receive a gift, find a treasure, discover their true origins, acquire knowledge, and/or achieve liberation before returning to the light of day, transformed and ready for a new stage in the journey to selfhood. It is easy to see how this formula underpins many fictional narratives. It also appears disguised in many memoirs in which quest, conflict, resolution, and transformation shape the core of the narrative.
The Shadow
Psychologists tell us that these journeys to the underworld are explorations of the individual/collective unconscious in which we may encounter repressed and buried instincts, desires, emotions, secrets and unacknowledged needs. This is the realm of chaos and the irrational, and yet a source of creative and vital power. It is home to what depth psychologist C.G. Jung called the shadow – the dark side of the self that we cannot easily recognize because it contains repressed, negative and unfavorable aspects of ourselves that Jung believed must be integrated into our greater self to achieve full realization of our true nature.
In many spiritual traditions, the underworld may be entered through caves, tunnels, tombs, and caverns situated in our so-called real world. In some cultures, however, the inner realm of danger, penitence or treasures need not necessarily be “under the ground” – it may be beneath or across the sea, in a desert or forest, enclosed in a mountain such as the Chinese hell, Feng- Du, which the Chinese imagined to be a series of efficiently run prisons.
The underworld is, however, just outside the realm of immediate perception, hostile to human life and often accessed by a magic entry existing within the ordinary world. In Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus’ film based on the Greek myth, it is found in the basement beneath the Bureau of Missing Persons in modern day Brazil. As Rene Daumal writes in his allegorical novel Mont Analogue, the door to the invisible must be visible.
The journey to the underworld requires preparation: instructions on what to do or not do, on when to be silent or to speak, and things to bring along: coins to pay the ferryman or oat cakes to throw to the ferocious three-headed dog Cerberus so that you won’t be torn to pieces. Sometimes a magic device is needed to find your way back again like the Ariadne’s thread, Hansel’s scattered pebbles, or Dorothy’s ruby slippers.
Before penetrating the other realm, there is usually a boundary to overcome (a river to cross, for example), and a gatekeeper to be dealt with through cunning, negotiation or combat. Once we get past the guardian, the journey may progress in stages. In the Mesopotamian myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld, the goddess was required to shed her veils and garments at each successive gateway until she reached the bottom stark naked, symbolizing that she had attained essential truth.
Once we are all the way down, we discover a world operating under its own laws. The place may be extraordinarily beautiful but somehow uncanny, or horrible and life-threatening with extreme temperatures or a menacing landscape. It may contain an uncontrolled proliferation of natural forms relating to death, disease and fertility as in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, or it may be strewn with treasures. It may be desolate or teeming with creatures human or otherwise, crowded with dead people and objects vanished long ago. Or it may take the form of an absolute deprivation, containing absolutely nothing. Time also may be suspended. A 24-hour journey may seem like a lifetime, as happens to Dante.
As we maneuver this terrifying environment, a helper will appear to prepare us for the confrontation with the reigning entity: the shadow. In classical literature, the shadow was the Minotaur, Pluto or other inhabitants of the underworld. But it may also be a person, an animal, a form of addiction, a self-destructive tendency, a fear, disease, an unpleasant side of ourselves, an evil twin.
Whatever or whoever the shadow may be, it must be dealt with before we can go up again. Confrontation with the shadow is a dangerous undertaking that marks the hero’s or heroine’s initiation. At the resolution of this confrontation, we will receive a boon: power or knowledge to take back up again to the world we have left behind and to which we will return transformed.
PROMPT: YOUR JOURNEY TO HELL – WRITE YOUR OWN MYTH OF KATABASIS
Using elements in your immediate environment, write a narrative of descent based on the patterns presented here. Vary, transgress, elaborate or reduce as you wish.
1. Create a character and the circumstances through which he or she finds himself alone, separated from family or community. Give them a goal to reach, a quest to fulfill, a problem to solve.
2. Imagine the portal to your underworld. Situate it within something ordinary – a bus stop, office building, manhole
3. The portal may be guarded by someone or something so that it is not immediately visible or perhaps not easily accessible. Identify and describe the guardian and give your seeker a means with which to deal with it.
4. Narrate the journey further down (or across or through), describing the passage across the threshold of the underworld. What sense perceptions or landmarks signal entry into the other realm? What concrete details might convey his or her emotions?
5. Describe the landscape of the underworld.
6. Create an encounter with a helper or guide in any form.
7. Meet the shadow. Describe his or her physical appearance. What makes him or her so fearsome?
8. Narrate the conflict, and find a resolution. What gift or boon is given or withheld?
9. Bring your character back into the light of day. Focus on the moment when they exit the underworld. What does he or she find at the moment of transition? How does he or she look at the world with different eyes?
For more information, writing prompts, and inspiration see my book The Soul of Place — Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci.
Linda, this is brilliant. Thank you. Contemplating your stairway, I thought of the young Virginia Woolf paralyzed by a plant in the garden, and a mirror inside. I've just re-read At the Bay and The Garden Party and am gobsmacked anew by the many eerie, lovely similarities between Katherine and Virginia. At times, it feels like they're composing out of one body--a condition I know Virginia recognized.