Katabasis — Chapter no 5

Chapter Five

Alice awoke to Peter’s arm slung over her chest.

She registered this and, before throwing it off, lay there for a moment, considering. It did not feel terrible. Hell got very cold at night, and the warmth Peter emanated—she’d forgotten how hot he could get; really, he was a proper furnace—was rather nice. She shifted slightly, just to work out a kink in her neck, and decided she may as well lie there a bit longer. She was really quite comfortable. The sun wasn’t up yet. A sleeping, silent Peter was less annoying than a waking, talking Peter. And it was the first morning in a long while that she hadn’t woken up to dry-heave from stress. The enormity of the problem, the mess of conflicting reports, the piles of scrolls left to decipher, the sense of a clock ticking down. That was done. The research bore fruit, it had all worked, she’d made it to Hell. Now all she had

to do was survive it.

Something hard dug against her thigh.

“Jesus!”

She scrambled away, yanking the blanket off them both. Peter awoke with a panicked, “What? What?” Then he glanced down at his lap and yelped. “Fuck—I am so sorry—”

“It’s fine.” Alice’s cheeks burned. She wanted to fan herself, but that would only make her look like a panicked Victorian lady, so instead she pressed her palms against her cheeks. A dizzying wave passed through her temples. Peter sat with both hands covering his crotch, and this only made things worse, because it drew attention to the thing and now they couldn’t not talk about it. “It’s fine, just please—”

“We don’t have control over it,” said Peter. “I mean—men. It just happens sometimes, when we’re asleep—I didn’t meant to—I mean, I’m so sorry, I really—”

Alice dragged her palms down her face. If only she could melt the flesh off her skull. “Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s not you,” said Peter. “Really—it’s not even sexual—I mean, it’s just an instinct—”

Instincts are often sexual, whispered the part of Alice’s brain that had sat through all those seminars on Freud, but she shut this down. “Yes, I’m aware.”

“I don’t think about you like that, truly. I haven’t ever—”

“I’m sure.” She had a terrible urge to punch him, accompanied by an even more terrible urge to wail as loud as she could. Neither seemed appropriate, so she settled for a muted, keening sound into her palms. “I know how male anatomy works, Murdoch. Please. It’s fine.”

“I would never disrespect you on purpose.” Peter seemed about to cry.

“Never, ever—”

“Stop,” she gasped. “Please, can we just—can we eat some breakfast.”

“Yes. Breakfast.” Peter reached for his foil of Lembas Bread, grabbed it by the wrong end, and spilled food all over the gray sand. He stared at it in dismay.

“It’s fine,” Alice choked. “Have some of mine.”

They sat opposite one another and chewed, blinking very much and saying nothing. There was nothing to look at on the monotonous desert plane, so Alice could only stare into space if she wanted to avoid Peter’s eye, which she could not do without being very obvious about it. Instead she concentrated on her Lembas Bread. Cardboard. Mm.

It was an excruciating morning.

Somehow Alice had not given much thought to the daily indignities of the journey, and she had not accounted for daily hygiene, let alone daily functions in the presence of another. They packed their things and freshened up in silence. Peter had to pee, and Alice had to do the other thing, which she piled sand over like an embarrassed cat. She reflected on the horrors of embodiment. In many ways, she thought, the Shades had it much better.

Finally Peter broke the silence. “Maybe—maybe we should think about

charting the rest of our way.”

“Hm?”

“Through Hell, that is.”

“Oh—yes, all right.”

He pulled a notebook out of his rucksack and began fumbling through the pages. “Honestly, I didn’t expect to get this far. I really hoped he’d be in the fields.”

“I did too.” Alice brushed the crumbs off her lap and then reached into her rucksack for her own notes. “But I’ve got some maps drawn up . . .”

“Me too.” Peter turned his notebook around to show her. “Suppose we

head for the Court of Desire first?”

“Desire’s the Second Court.”

“Yes, but I think we can skip over the first, don’t you?”

“I’ve no idea how we would do that.” Alice peered down at his notes, frowning. Peter’s map of Hell looked bizarrely like a pizza. An anus, really.

He’d circled in red a dot at the center, with courts branching off all around and arrows pointing in all directions. “What map is that based on?”

“The Orpheus map,” said Peter. “Penhaligon’s reprint. Find the center, where all the courts converge . . . which means we’re looking for something like a mountain, something elevated. The Sumeru Throne, as it were. And then we can simply make for the court we need, instead of wasting our time

going in order.”

“Oh, Murdoch, that map is trash.”

“How do you mean? Everyone cites Orpheus.”

“Orpheus was mad with loss,” said Alice. “He was driven solely by longing for Eurydice.”

“So?”

“So he didn’t care about anything around him. From his perspective of course it was a straight line to wherever Eurydice ended up because that’s how it went in his mind’s eye. That map is worthless. It’s a fantasy of grief.”

Peter lowered his notebook, deflated. But this was a virtue of Peter’s— he wasn’t an asshole when proven wrong. “How do you figure, then?”

“I subscribe to the accumulative theory.” Alice flipped to her own maps to demonstrate. “That is, the courts proceed in order of karmic severity.

First Pride, then Desire, then Greed, et cetera and onward. Now, there’s some disagreement over whether one sin really entails all the lesser ones.

For instance, if you’re guilty of wrath, do you necessarily need to be punished for pride? Does greed entail desire? Is it all a nesting doll of wrongdoing, or can you skip over some courts? It’s not clear to me how the judges handle that. But it does seem that you’ve at least got to travel in

order. And when you’ve passed, you get to cross the Lethe over to Lord Yama’s throne.”

Alice tapped a black line running round the edge of the courts. “The river Lethe runs perpendicular to all eight courts and marks the boundary of reincarnation. So Hell looks less like a pizza anus—”

“Excuse me?”

“And more like,” she continued without clarification, “I don’t know, a Möbius strip. The Lethe bounds all. You’re trapped on this plane until you’re done. And then you go somewhere beyond. Makes sense?”

Peter rubbed his chin. “May I see?”

“Go on.”

He hummed as he flipped through her notes. “Where did you find all

this?”

“The Dunhuang cave texts.”

“I couldn’t find any translations of the Dunhuang cave texts.”

“There aren’t any. You just don’t have any Asian languages.”

“Fair enough.” Peter read a while longer, tracing his finger over each page. It made Alice oddly nostalgic to see him bobbing his head as he went along, making sense of her furious scrawls. They used to do this in the lab —show each other their wildest ideas, and offer each other proof they weren’t insane. She had missed Peter’s mind. It was like wearing a parachute—she could trust that he’d catch any mistakes she’d made.

At last he said, “I think this checks out.”

“Thank you.”

“But that’s consistent with my map,” Peter continued. “That is—it’s just an oversimplified version of my map, if we take Hell as non-Euclidean.”

Alice had only been to one lecture about non-Euclidean geometries, and what she remembered was a lot of diagrams of potato chips and coral reefs.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Suppose it’s less like a . . . what’d you say, a pizza anus? Less like that, and more of—well, a spiral.” He drew a diagram below hers to demonstrate.

“Suppose we’re in hyperbolic space,” he said. “Take the parallel postulate out of Euclidean geometry, and assume we are dealing with negative curvature. Then we might visualize the courts as a twisted pseudosphere, bounded on the outside, but infinite on the inside—”

“But we’re not in hyperbolic space,” said Alice. She did not know much about hyperbolic space, but this at least seemed obvious. “We’d know, we’d see all sorts of—of freaky coral patterns around us, we wouldn’t be walking on this flat plane—”

“Actually no,” said Peter. “That’s the point. When you’re inside it, of course it’s going to look like a flat plane. We see the freaky coral because we’re three-dimensional beings visualizing two-dimensional hyperbolic space. But we’re not four-dimensional beings, so we can’t actually see the wonkiness of three-dimensional hyperbolic space. Curved lines appear straight to us.”

“Oh, stop it.” As always, mathematics induced in Alice the acute urge to weep. “What’s the point?”

“The point is that we could just head to this peak here.” Peter tapped the top of the spiral. “The center of Hell, the point that oversees the rest of the Eight Courts.

“Sure,” said Alice. “If that point exists. If this is hyperbolic space.

Which we don’t know.”

“I think we probably do, though,” said Peter. “I mean, how else to make sense of that weird view from above?”

“But that wasn’t a pseudosphere, that was just chthonic flux.”

“I don’t think so, Law. I interpret that as Hell signaling its geometry.”

Alice was unconvinced. “I interpret that as Hell screwing with us. It’s just as likely.”

They stared at the notebooks. This was an impasse. Two maps, and no good reason to prefer one over the other.

“I wish I could measure the speed of light here,” Peter said unhappily.

“And also the size of the known chthonic universe.”

“Very helpful,” said Alice. It was clear to her now they would have to decide on pragmatics. If she let Peter go on, then he’d while away the day speculating about geometry. “I think we should go in order.”

Peter groaned. “But that’s such a waste of time.”

“So is hiking to a mythical peak whose existence is uncertain!”

“The peak is a shortcut. The peak keeps us from turning up every stone in the lower rocks—it lets us see everything at once, and then just—I don’t

know, jump there—”

“Fine,” said Alice. “Say your peak exists. Where would you jump to?

What sins do you think he’s committed?”

A silence. For once Peter had no easy rejoinder. They were both thinking, then, of undergraduates burned to a crisp, and whether that counted as murder, or just as lying. They were thinking of Olivia Kincaid and Elspeth Bayes and all the students who never graduated. They were thinking of everything Professor Grimes had done over his storied career and everything they didn’t know about. And Alice, for one, was thinking of cold laughter, fingers digging into her shoulder, hot breath on her face, a burning in her skin.

“Well,” Peter said lightly. “That’s just the question.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. They did not want to answer that question. They did not even want to crack it open. To do so would involve a great number of admissions. And Alice, at least, was not ready to make those admissions.

“I think we should search them all.” Alice hugged her arms against her chest. “Let’s—let’s just be thorough.”

Peter looked as though he wanted to say something else. But a moment passed, and he deflated. “Fine.” He closed the notebooks. “We’ll have to move fast, then. We only have seven days. That’s fewer than one for each court.”

“How do you figure seven days? I have twice that.”

“Well, Hecate’s scrolls—”

“Hecate’s scrolls imply that mortals can only last in Hell for seven days before they expire due to bodily needs,” said Alice. “I interpret that as concerns about food and water, and not a strict limit.”

“Interesting.” Peter frowned. “I translated it as the limitation of the soul.”

“If she meant the limitation of the soul, she would have said so,” said Alice. “It’s a distinct term in the Greek. There’s textual evidence from books eight, ten, and twelve—”

“Okay, okay.” Peter held up his hands. “You’re right.”

“Anyhow, since Hecate could not have predicted the innovations of Lembas Bread or Perpetual Flasks, we know we can survive for far longer than she supposed,” said Alice. “You shouldn’t take seriously anyone who’s expressed an opinion on food before the twentieth century.”

“No, you’re right.” Peter nodded thoughtfully. “I’ve never thought

about texts like this before.”

“What, in terms of close reading?”

“I just mean—I don’t know, taking into account when they were written, and the author’s social context, and such.”

“Historicization, Murdoch. That’s what we call it. What, do you just take everything you read at face value?”

“I mean, if the math checks out.”

“Unbelievable,” said Alice. “This is why everyone hates logicians.”

“It’s a compliment, Law. I am showing you some disciplinary respect.”

“Well, don’t bother,” she said, though she did feel a stupid flutter in her chest. Lab work used to be like this, she thought. Peter’s jabs, her rebuttals; two different methodologies clashing until, always, they settled on some compromise that was closer to the truth. Oh, but this hurt—she had not realized how much she had missed this. “It’s condescending.”

In short order they packed up camp and shoved everything into their rucksacks. Alice stretched and winced as she stood. She’d forgotten how much climbing could ravage one’s muscles. She hurt all over, and her knees buckled when she stepped. She’d really mistreated her body these last few months; she’d hardly slept, she’d barely eaten, she certainly hadn’t exercised. She hoped the remaining trials of Hell would be more metaphysical than physical. She ought to have done a push-up at least.

Peter cleared his throat. “By the way, Law?”

She noticed with alarm that his face had turned the shade of moss. He looked like he was trying to swallow his own tongue.

“I just . . . want you to know that I respect you very much.”

Alice wished the ground would swallow them both up. “Oh, don’t do this.”

“As well as your bodily integrity. And I am very sorry to do anything

that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

“My God, Murdoch, please—”

“Therefore, I feel—I mean, I think it is best that we do not share the blanket anymore. I will simply bear the cold. I shall not mind the chill, if I am asleep. I think anything is tolerable when one is asleep. And if there is anything I can do to make you feel safer—I mean, that is, more comfortable around me—”

“Murdoch.” She pressed her hands against her face. How unfair this was, she thought. As if she had never seen him asleep. As if she had not curled in next to him many times, their breathing deep in matching rhythm, both of them murmuring about stars and numbers until their conjectures bled over into dreams. It used to be so easy. Yet here they were, negotiating space like strangers. “Shut. Up.”

He did not. “We can even sleep in shifts, if you like. Take turns.

Whatever makes you—oh, God.” His eyes went wide. He pointed. “The wall.”

Alice turned. The mass of bones was growing translucent before her eyes. She reached out, panicked, and her fingers went right through bone, as if the wall were nothing more than a shimmering mirage. It lingered several seconds more and then faded away completely, so that they were once again surrounded on all sides by endless, gray silt.

“There is no way out,” Alice murmured. This was the opening epigraph to Penhaligon’s treatise. She had skimmed over it during her first read- through, figuring this was just another one of Penhaligon’s attempts at poetry. But it turned out this was literally just how Hell worked. “No way out but through.”

This made sense, in theory. Souls that had passed bureaucratic clearance should not get to wander willy-nilly back into the Fields of Asphodel. It would throw the accounting all out of joint. You couldn’t just decide you didn’t like being punished and nope back out into Limbo. Alice should have anticipated this, but still it frightened her, the fact that their paths were erasing themselves behind them. It made the stakes permanent. Either they succeeded, or they died.

Yet even as the wall disappeared, gray tendrils of mist poured out of the ground and swirled inquisitively around them—darting around their forms as if sentient, as if listening to their thoughts and feelings to get a sense of who they were and what they had come for. Then the tendrils swirled back into the fold, where they coalesced and spiraled, shuddering as if to a magician’s drumbeat before his great reveal, before dispersing to the sides like curtains swinging open. Here, said Hell. Have a look at this.

“Is that . . . ?” Peter tilted his head up, following a bell tower into the orange sky. “That’s impossible.”

“But Hell adapts to us,” Alice murmured. Penhaligon’s scattered appendix on Hell and temporality had not been clear to her until now. “Hell

is a mirror.”

The Eight Courts of Hell reflected the world of the living. Nearly all the ancient mythologies converged on this principle. So many ancient rituals were conducted as if in Hell, all the patterns of life continued on. Mourners put coins under the tongues of their dead so as to pay their passage; they buried them with favorite pets and treasures. The recently deceased soul was disoriented by his tearing from life. Hell had to resemble the familiar, otherwise he could never move on.

This theory, though not universally accepted, did explain why Dante’s Hell involved all the poets and artists and politicians he was personally familiar with over his lifetime. And why paintings of the Buddhist hells displayed all the ritual trappings of Chinese palaces: gardens and pools and harems of concubines. And why both Greek and Mesopotamian visions of the afterlife involved neat, orderly systems of justices, gatekeepers, and accountants armed with records and scales, processing lines of the dead the same way passport offices process citizens. At the end of the day, human beings preferred the predictable order of their known bureaucracies. One’s sins took on meaning in the context of their moral universe, comprised of their loved ones, their idols, their rivals, their victims. Dante saw philosophers and politicians. Aeneas saw ghosts of warriors past. One was hurt most by what one knew. If Alice had to guess, Professor Grimes’s moral universe—the full accounting of things that delighted him, the things that brought him pain, and the people by whom he could do wrong—did not stretch beyond the Cambridge station.

So perhaps they should have expected, then, for Hell to take on a most familiar landscape: Gothic towers, courtyard walls, and winding between them, a single paved path—just wide enough for pedestrians and cyclists, not wide enough for cars. You always knew, stepping into such places, what they were for. You knew precisely where you were from the uniformity of design; the same shades of brick and stone across buildings. You knew from the lack of wide streets and shop signs; from the quiet absence of children.

You knew from the arched gates that marked the boundary. Fairy gates, signaling departure. The mundane world ended here. These were not places of leisure or business. These were places to be still, to think, and to step out of time.

“Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”

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On Reincarnation

The one thing on which all Tartarologists can agree is that Hell prepares souls for reincarnation.

The Eight Courts of Hell are not arenas of eternal punishment. For one thing, this would be wildly unjust. No sins, no matter how heinous, deserve an eternity of punishment. That would be disproportionate; the math does not check out. For another, the universe needs balance. As Socrates put it, “If the living were to be born from the other world, and the living were dying all the time, what would there be to prevent everything being used up in death?” When it comes to death, the Christians are right about the immortality of the soul but wrong about everything else. Here the Pythagoreans, the Platonists, the Buddhists and Daoists, the Manichaeans, the Jains and Sikhs and Hindus, have a better grasp of things. Living and dying are two sides of the same coin. It makes more sense to conceptualize souls as continuously flowing from one world to another than to think everything that ever lived is forever accruing in an underworld tomb.

In the 1960s, the philosopher Michael Huemer argued for the plausibility of reincarnation on probabilistic grounds that most scholars have now come to accept. According to Huemer, we have reason to believe that time stretches infinitely into the past and into the future. If time is infinite, the probability that our singular lifetime happens at this very moment, at this very speck on the line, vanishes toward zero. So either time is finite, or we live more lives than one. Huemer argues it is at least plausible that the past is not finite, so we have decent evidence to believe in eternal recurrence. Theologists and religious studies folks do not like this

argument for the same reasons they don’t like Pascal’s Wager, which is that it seems to mathematically cheat to conclusions that religions have taken

thousands of years to articulate.

Magicians love it.

Theories of reincarnation overlap nicely with theories of eternal recurrence, an idea championed by both Friedrich Nietzsche and the Pythagoreans. Broadly understood, eternal recurrence argues that the events of the universe are fated—or doomed—to repeat themselves over and over again, for there is a finite amount of energy and material in an infinite universe, over an infinite amount of time, and the combinations with which they can interact are finite as well. The eternal hourglass of existence, so to speak, turns over time and time again. We are reborn to flow with the sand.

Unfortunately, scholarly consensus only goes this far. Tartarologists disagree wildly over how reincarnation works. How long must one wait before rebirth? Is rebirth familial—does your dead grandmother become your daughter? Do karmic goodness and badness accrue over time, so that the virtuous live better and better lives? Can one ever escape the cycle of reincarnation, as the Buddhists hope? Can human souls be reborn into animal bodies? For that matter, do animals have souls at all? We know memories are washed clean between lives, for there is no record of anyone credibly remembering a past life. We know very little else for certain.

Most baffling of all is the question of punishment. What purpose does it serve? Is it rehabilitative—must we only suffer until we’ve learned our lessons? Is it retributive—must we balance the karmic scales, lose an eye for an eye, and suffer as much as the suffering we wrought? How many hours in pits of boiling water balance out a murder? Is punishment a form of contrapasso, as Dante describes, wherein punishments arise from the nature of the sin itself and represent wrongdoing’s poetic opposite? Does punishment entail the universalization of broken maxims, as Kant theorized? Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?

The only thing we know for certain is that souls in the Underworld eventually travel, in some shape or form, to the domain of Lord Yama—that is, Hades, Anubis, King of the Dead, Lord of the Underworld, Judge of Life and Death, or however else one wishes to perceive him. As with many concepts in magick, Lord Yama is defined more by absence of proof than proof itself. He is a concept that stands in for what we do not know. He

could be a rational agent, fair and just, a philosopher-king of the chthonic realm. He could be a demon, volatile and capricious. He could be imperceivable divinity, which in these circles is code for “no one’s published on this.”

For all our theories and stories and myths, Lord Yama’s design remains an utter mystery. No one knows for certain what precisely happens in those courts, or why; least of all the Shades within them. If it is a test, no one knows how to pass. If it is mere torture, no one knows how long it will go on for. One cannot anticipate, cheat, or find a shortcut through redemption. We cross the Lethe and reincarnate whenever Hell deems us ready. It happens when it happens. Until then, we get what’s coming.

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