Descent into Hell
Terms for Descent to the Underworld: nekyia, katabasis (both Greek); descensus ad inferos (Latin )
The major classical heroes and heroines who undergo the descent to the underworld are: Aeneas, Daedalus and his son Icarus, Dionysus, Heracles, Hermes, Oedipus (figurative descent), Orpheus, Odysseus, Persephone, Prometheus, Tiresias.
Biblical accounts:
Isaiah 14, 45 Satan is described wandering the earth, footloose and fancy-free. Source for Defoe
Job 1 Job descends into the 'hell' of religious doubt, but he also suffers 'hell on earth'
Lot, Lot's wife who (like Orpheus) looks back on Sodom, and turns into a pillar of salt.
David A Christian Hercules,
Revelations Describes Christ's Harrowing of Hell
This morning the ROKU television set fell from it’s perch and no broken screen but now somewhat defunct. A replacement picked up today with taxation and two cab rides is under or about $200. I am not the watcher of the boob tube. The brain deadening device targets my wife. She reluctantly will use the home computer instead, but with grumbling and malcontent. TV is content and content is framed by well TV. TV is a gateway drug. Accept no substitutes. And TV is 8 feet off the floor perched on a stable credenza facing the area where we sleep where bright sunlight streams in and image settings cannot be super fine tuned to have Apple display fidelity. I would vote to make do with the Imac. $200 clams is a chunk of change and she has with insurance $2,000 in dental expenses coming soon. The internet is no replacement for TV of course, heroin is heroin, crack cocaine is crack cocaine, so we will buy a TV. We will not wait for the repair and perhaps pay 50% less. The object must be bought post haste. Urgency crackles in the atmosphere and not yet is it 11:00 AM. We have gardening to do this morning, rose trees to plant, loafing in the green and gamboling in the warm February light but I sense no, no we will go to Target first, come home trophy in hand, replace the dead box, pray before the new one, and then go to garden as the sun grows wan and pale and tendrils of fog wrap around the remains of the day.
Tomorrow is St. Valentine’s Day. A truly pointless day matched only by Superbowl Sunday or Cyber Monday or President’s Day or Election Day. In this supermarket in California every day is the same day. Day in and day out. The triumph of the ersatz. The pious celebration of folly.
From Confessions of A Fool.
Consider the lilies in the field,' " said the abbé, ' how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like any one of these ! Consider the ravens : for they neither sow nor reap ; which neither have store-houses nor barn ; and God feedeth them : how much more are ye better than the fowls ! ' "
"How much more are we better than the fowls! "sighed the old man.
" But rather seek ye the Kingdom of God," concluded the abbé, "and all else will be added to you."
"All else," sighed the old man, "all else! First the Kingdom of God, and then all else."
Leaning against a pillar in the side aisle, the wealthy man, holding a Baedeker in his hand, tried to solve the problem of the essence and origin of life by means of a careful study of the architecture of the past. He did not believe in the Kingdom of God, but he brooded over the purpose of life, and could not understand why a man should go to so much trouble to kill time until he was seventy or at the most eighty years old. Had it not been against all conventions, he would have gone to the old man and said to him who had already passed his allotted time —
"Give me your solution of the problem of life! "
And the old man, unless he had been too exhausted with hunger and thirst, would have answered —
"The problem of life, as I understood it, is the maintenance of one's own life."
" Is that all? " the wealthy man would have answered, astonished.
"All ? Isn't it enough ? All ? ' '
" We do not understand one another."
" No, we do not understand one another ; we have never understood one another."
" Because you are a selfish old man, who has lived but for himself. But humanity. ..."
" Sir, I too have lived for humanity, for I have brought up and educated four children, a problem which was more difficult perhaps to solve than yours, the solution of which you can buy at any bookseller's. Yes, go, sell all you have and give it to the poor, then you will see whether there is room in life for anything else ! "
But the wealthy man preferred to leave the problem unsolved and keep his gold ; therefore he continued to study his Baedeker, and did not ask the poor coster for his opinion.