Nekyia

While they both afford the opportunity to converse with the dead, only a katabasis is the actual, physical journey to the underworld undertaken by several heroes in Greek and Roman myth.

[3] There he consults the soul of the priest and prophet Tiresias about the means to return home to Ithaca, in a setting of "ghosts and dark blood and eerie noises, like a canvas of Hieronymous Bosch".

Lucian of Samosata is the author of a satirical dialogue titled Μένιππος ἢ Νεκυομαντεία, dating from 161–162 CE, which, as German classical philologist Rudolf Helm (1872–1966) argues,[8] may be an epitome of the lost Nekyia of cynic philosopher Menippus.

In Lucian's dialogue, Menippus, perplexed by the conflicting accounts of the afterlife put forward by Homer, Hesiod, the philosophers, and the tragic poets, decides to discover the truth for himself.

Mithrobarzanes performs a necromantic ritual, and the two descend to Hades, where they see Pyriphlegethon, Cerberus, the palace of Pluto, Charon, and the rest of the mythological machinery of the Greek underworld.

The night sea-journey is further marked by building interior heat (tapas), whereas the nekyia goes below that pressured containment, that tempering in the fires of passion, to a zone of utter coldness ...

The devil image still haunts in our fears of the unconscious and the latent psychosis that supposedly lurks there, and we still turn to methods of Christianism – moralizing, kind feelings, communal sharing, and childlike naivete – as propitiations against our fear, instead of classical descent into it, the nekyia into imagination… (Only) after his nekyia, Freud, like Aeneas (who carried his father on his back), could finally enter "Rome".