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First and Second Nekyia

First and Second Nekyia

The First Nekyia (Odyssey 11) and the Second Nekyia (Odyssey 24) are the Lineage’s earliest sustained images of the underworld. For the philology of psychē, they are also its earliest psychological laboratory.

In Book 11 the shades cannot speak meaningfully to Odysseus until they drink the blood he offers. Once nourished, a psychē “recalls relationships on earth,” is “filled with sorrow,” and “remembers” its kin (Sullivan 1995, p. 88). Tiresias alone retains his noos without blood; the rest must be fed. In Book 24 the shades already speak to one another without blood — a condition Sullivan reads as reflecting a later, different stratum in the epic’s composition.

The philological payoff is large. In the moment of blood-drinking, psychē temporarily regains the functions — memory, speech, feeling — that properly belonged to noos, phrēn, and thumos in the living person and that the other psychic entities did not carry into Hades. Sullivan sees in this temporary recovery “a clear foreshadowing of [psychē’s] later involvement in intellectual, emotional, and volitional activities.” The unburied shade of Patroclus, who appears to Achilles with intact memory and feeling, is another such foreshadowing.

The Nekyia is therefore not merely eschatology. It is the text in which psychē first begins to absorb the full psychological functions of the person — functions which, in classical and post-classical usage, it will eventually hold alone. The katabasis is, from its first appearance in the Lineage, a psychological passage.

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