Descent to the Underworld

Summary

The descent to the underworld is the story of someone who enters the house of the dead while still alive: to bring back a dead person, to take something away, or to ask the dead what the living cannot know, and then to find a way out. Its oldest complete telling is the Sumerian poem Inanna's Descent.

Inanna sets her mind on "the great below". She abandons heaven, earth and her temples in Uruk and the other cities, takes the seven me in her hand, and puts on her headdress, her beads and the garment of ladyship. She instructs her minister Ninshubur: when I have reached the underworld, lament for me on the ruin mounds, beat the drum for me in the sanctuaries, and go round the houses of the gods to seek my rescue. At the gate she tells Neti, the chief doorman, that she has come for the funeral of Gugalanna, husband of her elder sister Ereshkigal. Ereshkigal orders the seven gates bolted and then each one opened separately, and something taken from Inanna at every gate: the headdress at the first, the garment of ladyship at the seventh. Each time she asks, she is told: be satisfied, Inanna, a rite of the underworld has been fulfilled. She enters naked, makes her sister rise from the throne and sits on it herself; the seven judges give her the look of death, and she becomes a corpse hung on a hook.

After three days and three nights Ninshubur does as she was told. Enlil and Nanna turn her away, but Enki takes the dirt from under his fingernails and makes two small beings, giving one the life-giving plant and the other the life-giving water. They slip through the door like flies and find Ereshkigal lying in pain, and they echo her groans: when she says "oh my heart", they say "you are troubled, our mistress, oh your heart". Pleased, she offers them a river with its water and a field with its grain; they refuse both and ask only for the corpse on the hook, sprinkle it with the plant and the water, and Inanna rises. But the judges hold her: who has ever come up from the underworld unscathed? If she is to go up, let her provide a substitute. Demons go up with her who know no food, no drink and no embrace of husband and wife. She refuses them those who mourned her, until she finds her husband Dumuzi under the great apple tree in the plain of Kulaba, seated on a throne in a magnificent garment; she gives him the look of death and hands him over. The broken ending divides the year: Dumuzi stays below for half of it and his sister Geshtinanna for the other half.

The story recurs across the mythologies. Ishtar goes down in the Akkadian poem; Nergal goes down to Ereshkigal herself; Baal enters the throat of Mot; Persephone is carried off to the house of Hades; Heracles goes down for the hound Cerberus; Odysseus digs a pit at the edge of the world and the dead come up to him; Izanagi follows his wife to Yomi; and Hermóðr rides to Hel to ask for his brother Baldr. The versions agree on three things. The house has a law binding whoever enters: something is taken at the gates, or eating is forbidden, or looking. Whoever eats its food or breaks its law stays there, wholly or in part. And leaving has a price: a substitute who goes down instead, a year divided between the two houses, or a return with empty hands. What the living most often bring back is knowledge: a prophecy for Odysseus, an answer for Odin, a teaching for Naciketas from Yama. The gods whose death and return became a season of the year belong to death and return. The idea the descent stories turn on is that the border between the living and the dead holds: the living cross it by leave or by trick, and come back only as far as the house allows.

The name reads in the Arabic tongue as follows. The Greeks called the journey κατάβασις, the way down, and called the calling up of the dead to question them νέκυια, the name also given to the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Arabic says nuzūl, and in Lane the root reaches further than going down: nazala bi-l-makān is to descend into a place, alight and stay there; anzalahu is to lodge someone as a guest; nazīl is a guest; nuzul is the food prepared for a guest. Whoever goes down to the underworld is a guest in another's house, and all these stories turn on that house's food: the pomegranate seed Persephone eats, the hearth of Yomi from which Izanami has eaten, the river and field of Ereshkigal that Enki's envoys refuse, and the mead brewed for Baldr in Hel's hall before he dies. In the Akkadian line that describes Ishtar's descent the Arabic words appear one after another: ištar ana erṣetim ūrid ul īlâ, "Ishtar went down to the earth and has not come up". Erṣetu is Arabic arḍ, earth; ūrid comes from the verb that the Hebrew dictionary sets beside Arabic warada; and īlâ answers Arabic ʿalā, to go up. In the Arabic tongue the line reads waradat al-arḍa wa-lam taʿlu, "she came down to the earth and did not rise", a reading proposed on the method. The sounds and witnesses are set out under Linguistic Root.

Linguistic Root

The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon sets yārad, to go down, beside Akkadian arādu and Arabic warada, noting that the Arabic word means to come to, arrive at, and also to descend. The initial w stays in Arabic, becomes y in Hebrew and Ugaritic as it does in walad and yeled, "child", and drops in Akkadian ūrid. Wikander notes that yrd is the ordinary verb in the Ugaritic texts for a descent into the land of the dead: it is used when Baal is told to go down into Mot's throat, and of the sun goddess Shapsh when she goes down to help Anat carry his body. Lane gives warada al-māʾa, he came to the water, whether he entered it or not, and the Qur'an uses the word of the Fire: "there is none of you but shall come to it", and "We shall drive the guilty to Hell as beasts are driven to water". The ṣ of erṣetu answers the ḍ of Arabic arḍ, and the t after it is the feminine ending. Akkadian loses ʿayn as it loses the other throat sounds, so ʿalā becomes elû; in Lane ʿulūw is ascending. Muhammad Rashid Nasser Zouk reads the name of the land in the poem's first line, erṣet lā târi, "the land of no return", in Arabic words: arṣat lā tarid. The consonants of the Akkadian verb, t, w and r, are those of Arabic tārah, "a time, a turn", and Lane gives tāwarahu as he returned to it time after time: the land with no second turn for whoever enters. Reading the whole line as waradat al-arḍa wa-lam taʿlu remains a reading proposed on the method, built on words that the Hebrew lexicon and Lane bring together; no one before us has read this particular line this way.

Attestations by Culture

Sumer: Geshtinanna and Enkidu

Inanna's descent is told in the summary. At its end Inanna divides her husband's absence between him and his sister Geshtinanna, so that each spends half the year below. Death and return treats this division and the yearly lament for Dumuzi.

In Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, Gilgamesh's ball and mallet fall into the underworld, and his friend Enkidu offers to go down and fetch them. Gilgamesh tells him the customs of the place: do not put on your clean garments, or they will know you are a stranger; do not anoint yourself with fine oil, or they will gather at its scent; wear no sandals, do not shout, do not kiss the wife you love or strike the one you are angry with, do not kiss your son or strike him. Enkidu does everything he was told not to, and the underworld seizes him. Namtar did not take him, nor disease, nor did he fall in battle: the place itself held him. Gilgamesh goes to Enlil, who does not help, then to Enki, who tells Utu to open a hole in the earth, and Enkidu's shade comes up through it. They embrace, and Gilgamesh asks him about the dead, one kind after another.

Ishtar in the Akkadian poem

Ishtar, daughter of Sîn, sets her mind on "the land of no return", the house none leaves who enters, where dust is their food and clay their bread, where they see no light and are clothed like birds in feathers. She tells the gatekeeper: open your gate so that I may enter; if you do not, I will smash the door and raise the dead to eat the living, until the dead outnumber the living. Ereshkigal orders her treated according to the ancient rites, and at the seven gates she is stripped of her great crown, her earrings, her beads, her breast pins, her girdle of birth stones, her bracelets and anklets and her loincloth. Then Ereshkigal sends her minister Namtar against her with sixty diseases. Above, mating stops: the bull does not mount the cow, the young man does not lie with the girl, each sleeps alone. Papsukkal, minister of the gods, weeps before Sîn and Ea, and Ea creates an envoy, Aṣûšu-namir, who pleases Ereshkigal and asks her for the waterskin. She curses him, then orders Namtar to sprinkle Ishtar with the water of life, and Ishtar comes out and recovers her things gate by gate. Muhammad Rashid Nasser Zouk reads her demand at the gate, petâ bābka-ma lūruba anāku, in Arabic: "open your gate for me.. I", where Arabic bābak, "your gate", and anā, "I", are plain, and the verb of opening is one the Hebrew lexicon sets beside Arabic fataḥa.

Nergal goes down to Ereshkigal

The queen of the dead cannot go up to the gods' banquet, so she sends her minister Namtar to fetch her share. All the gods rise before him except Nergal, and she demands him so that she may kill him. In the Amarna text Nergal weeps before his father Ea, who gives him fourteen helpers to station at the gates; he goes in, seizes Ereshkigal by the hair and drags her from the throne to cut off her head, and she says: do not kill me, my brother; be my husband and I will be your wife; I will give you kingship over the wide netherworld and put the tablet of wisdom in your hand. In the longer version Ea forbids him the chair, the bread, the meat, the beer and the footbath, and he refuses each when it is offered; then he stays six days with her and escapes to heaven. Ereshkigal threatens: if you do not send him back to me, I will raise the dead to eat the living. He goes down a second time, and the tablet breaks off before the end.

Baal in the throat of Mot

Mot tells Baal: you will go down into the throat of divine Mot, into the gullet of El's beloved hero. Before he goes down, Baal lies with a heifer in the open steppe; the messengers later find him dead in that same steppe, and Anat, with the sun Shapsh, carries his body away and buries it on Saphon. The story's place among gods who die and return is in death and return. Wikander, pp. 47, 84 and 169, on KTU 1.5.

Ra and Osiris in the Duat

Ra goes down every evening. The Amduat, "What is in the Netherworld", divides the night into twelve hours through which the sun's boat travels in the Duat; obstacles and demonic creatures try to stop it, and his enemies are cast into pits of fire. In the eleventh hour, the museum's description says, Osiris awaits Ra, who comes to him as a weary old man in need of renewal, and their union renews the world; in the twelfth hour he comes out as the scarab Khepri, the morning sun. Osiris does not descend in these texts: he is the king of the dead who waits, and every dead person buried takes his name, as the king in Unas's pyramid is called "Osiris Unas".

Persephone, Heracles, Orpheus and Odysseus

Hades carries off Persephone with Zeus's consent, and her mother Demeter keeps the seed in the ground until people nearly die of hunger, so Hermes is sent to bring her back. Before she leaves, Hades slips a pomegranate seed into her mouth, and her mother asks: did you taste anything below? If you did, you will go back for a third of every year, and when the spring flowers open you will come up out of the dark.

Heracles goes down in his last labour to fetch Cerberus, the three-headed hound. He is first purified and initiated at Eleusis, then descends through the opening at Taenarum in Laconia, and the souls flee from him. At the gates he finds Theseus and Pirithous bound; he raises Theseus by the hand, but when he tries to raise Pirithous the earth quakes and he lets go. Hades, called Pluto in this text, lets him take the hound if he can master it without weapons; he chokes it in his arms, brings it up through Troezen, shows it to Eurystheus, and takes it back to the dead. In the Odyssey Heracles tells Odysseus that Hermes and Athena were his guides.

A snake bites Orpheus's wife Eurydice and she dies. He goes down by the Taenarian gate to the Styx and sings to the king and queen of the dead until they allow her return, on condition that he not look back at her until he has left the valley. Near the edge he turns to see her, and she dies a second time.

Odysseus does not enter the house itself. He sails to the edge of the river Ocean, digs a pit and pours into it milk and honey, wine and water, then slaughters sheep so that the blood runs, and the dead come up to him. He holds them off the blood with his sword until the seer Teiresias has drunk and told him the way home. Then his mother drinks and knows him, and three times he tries to embrace her and three times she slips from his arms like a shadow. Achilles tells him he would rather be a hired labourer for a poor man on earth than king over all the dead. The project reads Odysseus's name as "the returner", and this is the farthest place he returns from.

Aeneas and Psyche among the Romans

Aeneas takes the golden bough and buries his companion Misenus, and the Sibyl of Cumae leads him among the dead, where Dido turns away from him and his father shows him the souls of his descendants, the future rulers of Rome.

In the story of Cupid, Venus sends Psyche to Proserpina to ask for a box of her beauty. A tower shows her the opening at Taenarum and tells her to carry two coins for the ferryman and two sops of bread for the dog, and, when the queen of the dead offers her a soft seat and a rich meal, to sit on the ground and ask for coarse bread. She does so and comes out with the box, then opens it on the way and is overcome by the sleep of the underworld until Cupid wakes her.

Yama and Naciketas

The funeral hymn of the Rigveda says that Yama, son of Vivasvat, was the first to find the road for people to where the earlier Fathers went, and so became a king who gathers people to himself. The singer tells the dead man: go along the ancient paths, pass the two four-eyed dogs, and meet Yama and the Fathers.

In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad the boy Naciketas reaches Yama's house while its master is away and waits three nights without food. When Yama returns he says: you have stayed in my house as a guest three nights without eating, so choose three boons. The boy asks that his father be reconciled to him, then for the fire sacrifice, then to know what becomes of a man after death, and he refuses wealth and long life offered in its place.

Izanagi in Yomi

Izanami dies giving birth to fire, and her husband Izanagi follows her to Yomi and says: the land we were making is not finished, come back. She answers: if only you had come sooner; I have eaten from the hearth of Yomi; but I will speak with the deity of this land, and do not look at me. The wait grows long, so he breaks a tooth from his comb, lights it and goes in, and sees maggots on her body and eight thunder deities upon it. He flees; she sends the hags of Yomi after him; he throws down his hair vine, which becomes grapes, and his comb teeth, which become bamboo shoots, and strikes the army of Yomi with three peaches at the border slope. Then she comes herself, and he closes the slope with a boulder it would take a thousand people to pull. She says: I will kill a thousand of your people every day; he answers: I will set up fifteen hundred birth huts every day. Back above, he washes off the pollution of Yomi, and from the washing come Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi and Susanoo; later Susanoo weeps, wanting to go to his dead mother's land.

Hermóðr and Odin on the road to Hel

Baldr is killed, and his brother Hermóðr rides Odin's horse Sleipnir nine nights through dark valleys until he reaches the bridge over the river Gjöll. Its guardian, Móðguðr, tells him that five troops of dead men crossed it the day before and it rang no louder than under him alone, and that he has not the colour of the dead. The horse leaps over the gate of Hel, he finds Baldr in the high seat, and Hel says that Baldr will return if everything in the world, living and lifeless, weeps for him. Baldr sends Odin's ring back with him, and his wife Nanna sends linen to Frigg. Everything weeps except a giantess in a cave, who says: let Hel keep what she has.

Before this, Odin rode Sleipnir down towards Niflhel. A hound with a bloodied breast met him; he came to Hel's high hall, raised a dead seeress by the eastern door with a spell for the dead, called himself Vegtamr and said: tell me from Hel, I will tell you from the world. She answered that clear mead stood brewed for Baldr under a shield, that Höðr would kill him and Váli avenge him.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Izanagi and Orpheus are closest: each goes down to bring back his wife, each is forbidden to look, each looks and loses her. The project's Japanese Semitic essay sets this comparison in its table and adds that in both traditions death entered the world through a fault of the first couple, as in the account of Adam and Eve. The endings part: Orpheus goes home alone in grief, while Izanagi stands at the boulder and makes births outnumber deaths.

Food gives the clearest law. Those who belong to the house eat, and those who mean to leave refuse: Persephone and Izanami eat and stay, while Enki's envoys refuse the river and the field, Nergal the bread and beer, Psyche the rich table, and they come out. In the Akkadian poem the underworld is the place where dust is food and clay is bread, so the living eat there only once they have become its people. Naciketas turns the law round: he does not eat in Yama's house, and his hunger becomes a debt the master of the house pays with three boons.

The house has messengers who come and go. Namtar goes up to heaven and back, Hermes guides Heracles and brings Persephone back, Hermóðr reaches Hel and returns with her condition. Where a rescue succeeds it is carried out by someone other than the one in need: Ninshubur asks, Enki makes, his creatures go down. Whoever goes down for their own sake, like Inanna or Enkidu, needs someone to bring them out or open a hole for them.

The price differs. In Sumer no one leaves without a substitute; among the Greeks a divided year suffices; in the North everything hangs on a consent that is never complete. The Hel page compares her law with Ereshkigal's, and the project's Norse Semitic essay compares Hel with Hades, Ereshkigal and Osiris.

Symbolic Reading

The project's essays read the descent through nature and livelihood. The Sumerian essay reads Inanna's Descent as the disappearance of the planet Venus: she dims as each thing is taken from her until she vanishes, then appears again as the morning star. It reads it a second time as a farming cycle in which plants vanish in the dry months and return, and a third time as a city in disaster losing its institutions one after another, authority, then knowledge, then safety, and rebuilt from nothing, saved only at a price, as Dumuzi went down in Inanna's place. The Babylonian essay reads Ishtar's descent as the halt of trade and farming in the Tigris flood season and her return as the water's retreat. The Greek essay reads Persephone as a seed buried and sprouting, Odysseus's descent as sailing beyond the Mediterranean, Cerberus as the dogs that guarded cemeteries, and Orpheus's descent as a journey into mines and deep caves. The Egyptian essay reads Ra's entry into the Duat as sunset and its twelve hours as the hours of night. The Canaanite essay reads Mot's house as an underground grain store which the grain enters and does not leave until the next season.

The texts themselves support some of these readings and are silent on others. The sun is explicit in Egypt: the Amduat names the hours and brings the sun out as a scarab at their end, and Wikander shows the sun of Ugarit going down to the land of the dead every day. Spring is explicit in the Hymn to Demeter: Persephone returns when the flowers open. Inanna's poem names gates, emblems and judges, but it does not count days of Venus's absence or name the dry months.

The stories also keep a precise picture of how people treated their dead. Ninshubur mourns Inanna with the drum, lacerates her face and dresses in a single garment like a pauper: these are the acts of a funeral. The customs of the house that Enkidu breaks are the acts of the living at home, clean clothes, oil, sandals, a kiss, and whoever brings them is known as a stranger. Odysseus's pit of milk and honey, wine, water and blood is an offering to the dead, and in the Rigveda Yama receives Soma and food. The guardian of the bridge knows Hermóðr by his colour and by the sound of his horse: the living are recognised in the house of the dead by the life in them. All of this is what the Arabic word nuzūl carries: whoever goes down is a guest, hospitality has its law, and the food of the house decides which people the one who eats it belongs to.