Nekyia

Nekyia (νέκυια) is the technical Greek term for a rite of summoning and consulting the dead, and by extension the name of odyssey Book 11, in which Odysseus pours libations at the edge of the world so the shades of the dead may drink the blood and speak. The rite is the origin of the Western imagination’s conviction that the dead can be consulted — that what is buried below consciousness has knowledge the living require.

Jung took the nekyia as his operative figure for the analytic act. In a footnote to The Red Book, he writes: “like Odysseus, I have sought to allow this shade Miss Frank Miller to drink only as much so as to make it speak so it can give away some of the secrets of the underworld” (CW B, §57n, cited in Jung 2009). Walter Burkert’s gloss — “the dead drink the pourings and indeed the blood; as the libations seep into the earth, so the dead will send good things up above” — names the ritual logic: the conscious agent gives substance (blood, attention, libation) and receives in return the hidden knowledge the unconscious holds.

Nekyia is therefore the archaic name for active-imagination, the deliberate invocation of unconscious contents to speak. It is also the prototype of katabasis in its particular form: not merely descent, but descent-with-libation, descent-with-ritual-provision, the heroic act of making the dead articulate.

Relationships

• katabasis
• active-imagination
• odyssey
• psyche-breath-soul
• psychopompos
• hermes

Primary sources

• odyssey (Homer, Book 11)
• jung-red-book (Jung 2009)