Definition of "katabasis"
katabasis
noun
countable and uncountable, plural katabases
(mythology, literature) A mytheme or trope in which the hero embarks on a journey to the underworld.
Quotations
The ancient Greeks and the peoples of remote antiquity already knew of journeys of the soul, but these were often journeys to the infernal regions, descents into hell, catabases, with obstacles, such as encounters with various monsters, menaces of all sorts, the crossing of the bridge of the dead or the passage of mysterious rivers on foot or on horseback.
1923, Georges Berguer, translated by E. S. Brooks and Van Wyck Brooks, Some aspects of the life of Jesus from the psychological and psycho-analytic point of view, page 58
Willy, the concentration camp survivor who has experienced more evil than any other character, places no value on catabasis. When asked (in connection with Aeneid VI) 'Do you think everyone ought to descend to the underworld?', he replies briskly, 'Certainly not! It's very dark and stuffy and one is more likely to feel frightened than to learn anything. […] '
2010, P. Martin, Anne Rowe, Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life, page 84
Therefore, Erling Holtsmark's point that literary-mythic katabasis captures “the imagined physical orientation of the other world relative to this one” (25), is superseded in a post-mythic, ostensibly secular worldview by a journey that takes place within an underworld that is an exteriorized 'projection' of a protagonist's putative interior world, the domain especially of the unconscious, memory and dream.
2013, Russell J.A. Kilbourn, “Introduction”, in Cinema, Memory, Modernity:The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema, page 31
(by extension, humorous) Any journey downwards or fall.
Quotations
How did the man in the moon come down? The distance between the earth and moon is by no means inconsiderable, and other obstacles “too tedious to mention,” lie in the way of this famous Catabasis, which his lunar majesty is declared to have performed.
1842 February, “The Man in the Moon”, in Yale Literary Magazine, volume 7, number 4, page 205
“Unconscious of the danger she descended, When the defendant's negligent conductor,Ere her catabasis was fully ended, Started the car,—the nail held fast and chucked herHeels over head and calling on her gods,On the hard road, and yanked her several rods.
1896, Benjamin F. Burnham, “§ 772. Dana on the Crinoline Case”, in Leading in Law and Curious in Court, page 621
The depths of his drinking were achieved after Jane left him, but the bathysphere was well on its way down while she was still there. The low point of his catabasis took time to reach, but the steadily descending trajectory is hard to miss.
2009, Clive James, “Kingsley and the Women”, in The revolt of the pendulum: essays, 2005-2008, page 42
A retreat, especially a military one.
Quotations
Mr. Elton had, like the king celebrated in nursery tale, only gone up-hill to come back again. He had travelled over seven hundred miles by straight road to within seven of Monterey, only to turn round and retrace his steps! The most amusing part of the Katabasis was that the townspeople, knowing that the occupation of the French was drawing to a close, no longer showed them any civility.
1868, J. P. Elton, “With the French in Mexico”, in New Monthly Magazine, volume 142, page 123
[We] took the evening train for Abelmans. This was the beginning of the katabasis of our party. In the morning we continued it, and by short stages to various points, and in various ways, we gladly made our way homeward, better friends than ever to old Beloit.
1878 December, “Collegiana”, in The Beloit College Monthly, volume 20, number 3, page 90
A journey from the interior of a country to the coast.
Quotations
As the French Tenth Army shattered like the porcelain shell of a Faberge egg, British and Polish expeditionary forces that had supported the French hastily withdrew toward the Channel coast—technically it was a katabasis, the opposite of the ancient military term anabasis, which meant a march to the interior.
2008, The Building: A Biography of the Pentagon, page 56
So the core of the work is really a katabasis, detailing the heroic slog through the cold and snows of upper Iraq, Kurdistan, and Armenia to the safety of the Black Sea, ending with a parabasis, along the southern coast of the sea back toward Byzantium and Europe.
2010, Victor Davis Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern, page 65
These transitions reflect the deep narrative or rite of passage that structures The Songs of Mihyar as a whole: the katabasis away from Damascus, a national space inhabited by an identifiable collective, toward the coast of international exile.
2019, Robyn Creswell, City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut, page 112
(rare) The presence of downward (drainage or katabatic) winds.
Quotations
In the forward part of the cyclone, drainage katabasis is checked; but its highest intensity is observed in the rear part of the cyclone.
1960, N. P. Rusin, “The Radiation Balance of the Snow Surface of Antarctica”, in OG Krichak, editor, Scientific Conference on Problems of Meteorology of the Antarctic (Abstracts of Reports)(USSR)., page 29
Creating a wind model based on the new maps, Parish determined that the topographical conditions for katabasis applied most dramatically on the Adélie Coast where, like loose strands of a rope knotted together, a string of ice ridges converged, by geological happenstance, on a single, narrow, […]
2021, Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice, page 196