Katabasis in Myth and Film

The peer reviewed article that I read was written by Johan Goldberg and entitled A Movie For All Time. The article was about the movie Groundhog Day and how the movie has almost two different natures. It starts by taking about the basic story which is the hilarious adventure of a weather man living the same day over and over. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a Pittsburg weatherman who travels to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to report on the annual Groundhog Day festivities. Here Phil gets caught up in a time warp in which he is forced to live February 2^nd for an unknown number of days (we see 34 of them). Phil is egotistical and rude in the beginning of the movie thinking he is was too good for this small town and its people who he refers to as “hicks”. He repeatedly tries to bed his new producer Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, to no avail. Phil plays with the idea of no consequences by driving recklessly and getting but in jail, only to wake up the next morning in his bed. The second part of this article is entitled “The Metamorphosis” and I think this title is really fitting. The reason I choose to write a paper on this movie was because of the fact that Phil succeeds in his own kind of katabasis. He journeys to hell and back in this movie and he truly does experience a metamorphosis. This part of the article talks about what Phil had to achieve to perform his anabasis including the shedding of his selfish ways and the listening to his own inner voices. In the end of the story Phil ends up with everything he ever wanted, he just had to get it in a roundabout way. The article explains the movie to be “funny first and philosophical second” which I think is definitely the truth. I really like this movie for its humor and for the katabasis and transformation undergone by the main character Phil.

The Gates of Sleep in Aeneid 6
Nicholas Reed
The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Nov., 1973), pp. 311-315

Article

In this article Nicholas Reed seeks to refute two theories proposed by W. Everett and Brooks Otis about why Aeneas and the Sibyl depart through the gate of ivory, which is the gate for false dreams, instead of the gate of horn, the door for true “umbrae”. Everett had proposed that the reason they went through the ivory gate is because they left for Hades before midnight and a common belief back then, was that true dreams only occur after midnight. Reed counters this theory by citing another author who chose to refute this claim as well. Since Virgil never mentions the nature of dreams in such a way throughout the Aeneid and since it is unlikely that such a belief was held by everyone at the time, the claim holds little weight. Reed goes on to provide evidence that Aeneas probably didn’t descend to the underworld before midnight anyway. The second theory was that the departure through the gate of false dreams was symbolic as to the nature of Anchises’ prophecies. That is to say, Virgil didn’t believe that such prophecies would come true. This is shown to be ridiculous in the fact that, at the time the Aeneid was written, all except one of the prophecies had come to pass. If Virgil meant to say that the last prophecy was false, the gate wouldn’t be called the gate of false dreams in the plural as that would be implying that all the prophecies were false. Nicholas Reed identifies a third theory that proposes that all Aeneis had been experiencing in Hades was just a dream and the difference between the true and false dreams is that true dreams have a standing in reality where false dreams are misleading. This has the same problem as theory before this one in that it implies that Anchises’ prophecies aren’t true. A fourth theory states that they can’t pass through the gate of true shades, because they aren’t shades. This is a strange interpretation, since Aeneas and the Syble aren’t false dreams either. He proposes that the gate of horn is primarily used by true spirits of the dead who appear in dreams or are reborn on earth. He states that the other gate is used by the “dream-beings” that crowd around the elm tree at the entrance to the underworld. Although he doesn’t completely agree with this last theory, Nicholar Reed expands on it to create his own. Reed points out that although the “dream-beings” may be false dreams, they are still true shades just like anything else in Hades. Reed gives his own theory that all shades pass through the horn gate and “false dreams” or “false shades” pass through the ivory one. Simple. Aeneas and the Sibyl are shades in that they are traversing the world of shades, but are false ones, since it repeatedly mentioned in the chapter that the two are very tangible compared to the residents of this world. This journal article was useful to me since I am in need of description of how the underworlds looks and works and this detailed description of the doors leading out of Hades will be invaluable to me for my project.

-Erin Wuepper