Abstract
This chapter explores the mythologies of the Egyptian Books of the Dead, Navajo Sand Paintings, and C.G. Jung’s Red Book, with a focus on the journey to the otherworld. Such texts form the archetypal ground for the emergence of graphic media such as comic books, animated film, and video games.
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Notes
- 1.
Technically speaking, nekyia refers to the necromantic invocation of the shades of the dead (as in Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey), while the word katabasis refers specifically to the descent. In common usage, however, the term nekyia is used to refer to both the descent to and return from the underworld.
- 2.
For a comprehensive overview and graphic summary of the images, see my Myth of the Descent to the Underworld in Postmodern Literature, “Chapter 1: A Brief Genealogy of the Necrotypes.”
- 3.
For examples see, among many others, Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1999), and Hornung & Abt’s Knowledge for the Afterlife: The Egyptian Duat (Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag, 2003), and of course, the much older Ur-Text by E.A. Budge, The Book of the Am-Tuat (1905).
- 4.
The inversion of the genders of the solar lioness and the lunar moon bull was a frequent motif in Joseph Campbell’s lectures, during which he would often point out that German retains the distinction in the gender of its articles: die Sonne, and der Mond, as opposed to the French, le soleil and la lune. He also writes about the associated mythologies of death and rebirth in the ancient world in the chapter called “The Consort of the Bull” in Occidental Mythology (1964, 54f.). Curiously enough, we also find the lioness as a goddess of death and rebirth in a marvelous little Russian folktale called “Two Ivans, Soldier’s Sons.”
- 5.
Campbell (1974) provides numerous amplifications of the motif, including the role played by the boar in the stories of Odysseus and Adonis, and in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which involved sacrificial pigs (450-81).
- 6.
Edited by Leland Wyman in the Bollingen Series (1957).
- 7.
On the serpent as a necrotype, shedding its skin to be reborn, and a plethora of images and texts, I would recommend “The Serpent Guide” in The Mythic Image (Campbell 1974, 281-303), “The Serpent’s Bride” in Occidental Mythology (1964, 9-41), “Threshold Figures” in The Inner Reaches (1985, 69-92), and the extraordinary pages devoted to the Raimondi Stela in The Way of the Seeded Earth (1989, 2.3.377-79).
- 8.
“An Indian Temple: The Kundarya Mahadeo,” Parabola III.1 (1978), and relevant essays in The Door and the Sky. Ed. Rama P. Coomaraswamy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
- 9.
On the union of the sun and the moon—including the kundalini system, in which the two nerves (Ida and Pingala) are solar and lunar, converging at the position of the crown chakra—see Campbell’s Inner Reaches (1985, 70-73), Occidental Mythology (1964, 162-64).
References
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Campbell, Joseph. 1983. The Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The Way of the Animal Powers. New York: Alfred van der Marck Editions.
———. 1985. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. New York: Alfred van der Marck Editions.
———. 1974. The Mythic Image. Bollingen Series C. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1943/1963. Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navaho War Ceremonial. Given by Jeff King, Text and Paintings Recorded by Maud Oakes, Commentary by Joseph Campbell. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Goelet, Ogden. 1994. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of the Coming Forth by Day. Trans. Raymond Faulkner. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.
———. The Red Book: Liber Novus. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani. Philemon Series. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.
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———. 1989. Creation Myths. Boston: Shambhala.
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Smith, E.L. (2023). Graphic Mythologies. In: Odorisio, D.M. (eds) A New Gnosis. Contemporary Religion and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20127-1_6
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