page_title: Nekyia
hierarchical_section_title: Nekyia
context_page_description: In ancient Greek cult-practice and literature, a nekyia or nekya is a "rite by which ghosts were called up and questioned about the future," i.e., necromancy. A nekyia is not necessarily the same thing as a katabasis. 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.
  In common parlance, however, the term "nekyia" is often used to subsume both types of event, so that by Late Antiquity for example "Olympiodorus ... claimed that three [Platonic] myths were classified as nekyia".
context_section_description: In ancient Greek cult-practice and literature, a nekyia or nekya (Ancient Greek: νέκυια ἡ νέκυα) is a "rite by which ghosts were called up and questioned about the future," i.e., necromancy. A nekyia is not necessarily the same thing as a katabasis. 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.
  In common parlance, however, the term "nekyia" is often used to subsume both types of event, so that by Late Antiquity for example "Olympiodorus ... claimed that three [Platonic] myths were classified as nekyia (an underworld story, as in Homer's Odyssey book 11)".
caption: The Shade of Tiresias Appearing to Odysseus during the Sacrifice (c. 1780-85), painting by Johann Heinrich Füssli, showing a scene from Book Eleven of the Odyssey
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