It is a given that finding a satisfying balance between research and popularization poses a significant challenge due to the intrinsic differences between the two endeavors. Academic research is characterized by its systematic approach, aimed at generating new knowledge or, at least, validating existing theories. Researchers on ancient history analyze primary sources of significantly different nature, requiring different specialized approaches (ranging from epigraphy to numismatics, philology to archaeology, etc.), delve into specifics, explore and problematize nuances, and address their peers with methodological rigor and technical language. In contrast, popularization aims to make scientific knowledge intriguing and engaging to the general public. In addition to “make History”, popularization requires the ability to “tell a story”, which often necessitates simplifying concepts, omitting technical details, and focusing on the broader implications or more sensational aspects of the study. Scholars engaged in popularization strive to maintain the integrity and accuracy of their findings while making them comprehensible and interesting to non-experts.
Catábasis. El viaje infernal en la Antigüedad is a volume that sets precisely this kind of extremely difficult goal. Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui makes an entire decade of personal research available to a general audience in the compact format of a pocket-book (503 pages, 12 x 18 cm). As explained in the short “Prefacio”, nearly half of the fifteen chapters included in this book are based on academic articles previously published in languages other than Spanish. Their translation and simplification, along with the addition of eight chapters created specifically for this occasion, offer an outstanding and comprehensive perspective on the poetics of the journey to the Underworld from the archaic period to the 5th century CE.
The journey is not only the theme of the volume (the descensus ad inferos), but also a metaphor (whether terrestrial or, especially in the first pages of the volume, maritime) for a long narrative path through a millennium of different literary outcomes, which must necessarily begin with the arrangement of some “preparations” (“Preparativos”), a sort of methodological introduction.
The second chapter (“Donde viven los muertos”) provides a diachronic overview of three ancient post-mortem beliefs: the cult of the dead as influential beings impacting the living through epiphanies and dreams, the eternal glory achieved by heroes, and the eschatological concept of death as a voyage. Within this context, it shortly examines the interplay between myth and ritual, especially in relationship with initiations attested either by sources related with the Eleusinian mysteries or by the so-called “Orphic gold tablets” and “Greek magical papyri”.
The next two sections (“El héroe caído” and “El anciano valeroso”) concentrate on Homer’s Iliad, and in particular on para-catabatic and para-initiatory experiences. They highlight exemplary episodes such as the hero’s fall and temporary redemption from death through divine intervention (that is, Hector and Zeus), and the dangerous quest of a father determined to recover his deceased son’s body from the camp of the enemy (namely Priam and Achilles).
The following chapter (“La voz de los difuntos”) is dedicated to one of the best-known examples of catabatic literature, the Nekyia in the Odyssey, where the Homeric hero travels to the Underworld following Circe’s instructions. As the author aptly points out, this is not a catabatic journey in the strict sense, since Odysseus and his companions do not visit Hades but rather gain the ability to summon and dialogue with the souls of the dead through a necromantic ritual.
This is followed by a description (“La épica del alma”) of the contents of a set of tablets (known as “Orphic gold tablets”) mostly inscribed in hexameters, dating from the 5th century BCE to the 3rd century CE, and found in central and southern Italy, Thessaly, and Crete. These tablets, which are a particularly valuable source of ritual information on ancient initiatory experiences, are compared in this chapter with the scene of Odysseus’ arrival in Scheria and his dialogue with the Phaeacian sovereigns, Arete and Alcinous.
The concepts of pathos (emotional experience) and mathos (intellectual learning) in relation to the catabatic journey are at the center of the following four chapters. The interaction of these two concepts is first analyzed (“Experiencias y doctrinas”) from the diachronic perspective of different sources ranging from Homer to the Christian Synesius of Cyrene (5th century CE), including the historical texts of Herodotus and Xenophon, the scripts of Aeschylus and Sotades, the philosophical works of Gorgias and Aristotle, etc.
Thus, the study specifically focuses on the elaboration of the catabatic experience in ancient Greece from the perspective of poetics (Pindar, “Orpheus”, Parmenides, Empedocles: “El viaje de los poetas”), philosophy (Plato: “Mitos platónicos”), tragedy (particularly Euripides’ Alcestis: “La esposa rescatada”), and comedy (particularly Aristophanes’ The Frogs: “Bromas y veras”). This latter topic of ironic distancing from the catabatic tradition is further developed in all its possible nuances: from the soft irony that sometimes peeks through already in Homer’s epic, in choral lyric poetry, in tragedy, and in Plato’s philosophy, to the parody in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and the satire of Horace, Seneca, and especially Lucian of Samosata.
Starting from the observation that “the capacity of Hades to emanate knowledge by means of the authority of revelation, or to place various characters from the past in a position to dialogue and be judged, makes the catabatic genre an irresistible megaphone for affirming political visions and proposals” (p. 338, my own translation in the following examples), the next chapter deals with political (mainly monarchic and aristocratic) imagery in Greek eschatology (“Políticas del Hades”).
After a section monographically dedicated to the Aeneid (“Recuerda, romano”), which analyzes the sources used by Virgil, the spatio-temporal dimension of the catabatic experience, and the role played in the text by the concepts of identity and memory, the study moves to a chapter (“Pasos en la sombra”) where the metaphor of narration as a journey is explicitly addressed. This is realized from the perspective of the different bodily attitudes assumed by the traveler visiting the Underworld and by the souls residing in Hades: the determination, firmness, and urgency of the steps taken by the former are contrasted with the disordered, wavering, and indecisive nature of the latter.
The fifteenth and final chapter (“Infiernos desde el cielo”) extends into the late Imperial age, examining the innovations represented, in contrast to the Greco-Roman tradition, by the eschatological salvation (sōtēria) of Hellenistic Judaism and later Christianity: the resurrection of Christ’s body and Hell as a place of condemnation contrasted with Heaven as a place of salvation. Particularly interesting is the analysis of some “minor” sources, rarely cited by scholarship, that recount Christ’s descent into the Underworld and his victory over Death.
A limited selection of Notes, Bibliography and Indexes concludes the volume.
The overall reading of Catábasis. El viaje infernal en la Antigüedad can evoke mixed feelings. It is undoubtedly an enjoyable book that deeply enriches the reader, who is guided by Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui (a modern-day Virgil of Dante’s Divine Comedy) in exploring infernal landscapes as varied as the socio-cultural contexts of their creators: “individual freedom to shape traditional ideas conveyed through myths and rituals led to an immense variety of personal speculations, as the lack of institutional doctrines resulted in creative proposals from poets, philosophers, and writers, which, in turn, influenced personal cults and beliefs” (p. 47).
In this regard, one of the three fundamental concepts proposed by the author in the first chapter of the book (pp. 21-22) should be underlined. Indeed, the author rightly argues that “there are those who approach every ancient literary text as exact replicas of the beliefs of its authors and audience, beliefs which are also assumed to be coherent and systematized, or myths fixed in an original and pristine version that poets then express in their works” (p. 21). Certainly, any attempt to “normalize” a field as little institutionalized in the ancient world as the Afterlife, which allowed for vast personal creativity, must be rejected. However, suggesting focusing on literary sources rather than reconstructing ancient practices or beliefs (p. 18) makes sense only if it implies precisely a utopic attempt of “systematization” of such reconstruction. It is true that in some contexts (such as Homer’s: see p. 79) it is impossible to verify whether there were funerary or initiatory rites associated with poems on the Underworld, but, in many other cases, epigraphy and archaeology assist philology: the “Orphic gold tablets” are a striking example. As one would expect from a professor of Greek philology, the perspective adopted in this book is fundamentally philological and primarily focused on the Greek world. Nonetheless, it would have been productive to try to broaden the field of study to include other historical disciplines. The risk is indeed losing an emic view of the individual process of constructing the Afterlife. For example, on p. 323, a Latin epitaph is cited that seemingly denies the existence of the Underworld, Charon, Aeacus, and Cerberus, and this is explained as a theological denial, whereas, in this and in many other similar cases, it is simply an emotional denial meant to emphasize the hope (of the relatives) for a kind of semi-deification of the deceased. Equally debatable is the idea that the cult of the dead has a primarily collective and public dimension, while the concept of death as a journey is fundamentally individualistic (p. 39). It is clear that “the catabatic poetics is neither a dispensable ornament nor a mechanical reflection of an initiatory ritual” (p. 238), but the risk is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, that is, eroding the ritual-initiatory substrate in favor of intellectual, literary, and mythological elaboration, and attributing an “institutionalized” character to the former and personal originality solely to the latter.
This directly brings us to a second fundamental concept proposed by the author: it is evident, as suggested by Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, that literary sources (when appropriately filtered) are a valuable source of knowledge about ancient religion that we cannot ignore or consider “an ornamental and propagandistic version (…) that the scholar of religion must transcend to reach the core of the experience found in everyday practice” (p. 21), but asserting this does not imply that we must deny that papyrological and epigraphic sources often offer more decipherable and “speaking” insights into lived religion.
The author’s third and last methodological caution is to avoid a genealogical or teleological analysis that seeks the origins of the theme of catabasis or aims to reach its final results, and instead focus on individual sources as standalone entities. In this regard, I believe that the intention to “analyze each source by itself, not as precedents of others, nor as the final result of previous ones” (pp. 20-21) is not completely fulfilled here. Yet, it should not be. Of course, a linear and simplified phylogenetical reconstruction of a tradition would represent a historically inaccurate model for understanding the mentioned variety of personal speculations about the Underworld in antiquity. However, this does not mean that we should analyze each source aseptically and independently of the continuous references built upon previous sources. The failure of such an attempt is demonstrated, for example, by the high number of references in this book to the possible (but unattested) existence, before Homer, of narrative traditions of post mortem experiences about Herakles’ labors, the siege of Thebes and the expedition of the Argonauts (see, e.g., pp. 74-82). It is highly likely that Homeric epic is not the sole formal root of this eschatological poetry (p. 162). Even though this is only a hypothesis, analyzing Homer without considering this possibility would deprive us of an important tool for understanding the origins of such a literary tradition.
This series of considerations alone makes evident the amount of thematic output generated by Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui’s book. This is however a book that requires careful reading. Some aspects of it could be improved. Certain chapters may be still too dense for the general audience, which risks being overwhelmed by academic terminology, an extensive number of sources, and a narrative thread that is not always linear but rather somewhat disjointed. One undoubtedly improvable aspect is the formal one. Unfortunately, there are also numerous editorial imperfections, evidently the result of a hasty revision: such inaccuracies often include the improper (sometimes systematic) use or absence of italics, the omission of spaces or entire words, and a few grammatical and stylistic errors. Nevertheless, without any doubt this is currently the best Spanish-language text capable of offering a holistic view of the ancient poetics of the journey to the Underworld. And for this, we must be very grateful to the author and we strongly suggest considering an English version of his book in the future.