If the em>locus amoenus (0.2) is a secluded place that one never wants to leave—the beloved and the idyll—the terrible place is that from which one can rarely flee. The closed character of the paradeisos becomes in the locus terribilis a terrible thickness and darkness that prevents any attempt of escape. This topos is a place of loneliness and anxiety, full of unsuspected dangers and terrors. It is usually represented as a field after a battle, an abandoned island or one populated with monsters, a grotto, a cemetery or a desolate valley. However, more than a remote or enclosed place, arriving at the terrible place implies embarking on a downward journey, an emotional and geographical descent. The Isle of the Dead and the Isle of Life by symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin (fig. 1 & 2) may be the clearest pictorial representations of the locus terribilis and the locus amoenus.

The Isle of the Dead and the Isle of Life by symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin (figs. 1 & 2) may be the clearest pictorial representations of the locus terribilis and locus amoenus.

fig 1. Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead: third version, 1883.  (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany)

fig 2. Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of Life, 1888. (Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland)

In book VI of Pharsalia, Lucan narrates how Sextus, son of Pompey the Great, enters a dark forest of Thessaly in search of Erictho, the most powerful witch in the region. He wants the strega to predict the fate of the war between the forces of his father and those of Julius Caesar. For this task, Erictho takes the corpse of a recently deceased soldier which she drags into a cavernous mountain. Temporarily revived, the soldier’s body will serve as a bridge to the underworld.

There the ground fell in a sheer descent, sinking almost to the depth of the invisible caverns of Pluto. A dim wood with forward-bending trees borders it, and yew-trees shade it — yew-trees that the sun cannot penetrate, and that turn no tops towards the sky. In the caves within dank darkness reigns, and the colourless mould caused by unbroken night ; the only light there is due to magic. Even in the gorge of Taenarus the air is less dead and stagnant; it is the gloomy boundary between the unseen world and ours; and the Rulers of Tartarus would not fear to let the dead [manes] travel thus far.¹

That Lucan mentions the manes, the dead, in his fragment is significant since these chthonic daemons, which represented the souls of the loved ones, were part of an even larger category of deities, the di inferi (gods below) that inhabited the inferior world, the inferno. It should be noted that the nekyia, the ancient necromancy practiced by Erictho, did not always amount to a literal descent to the underworld (katabasis), but to the chance to establish a conversation with its powers. One of the most recurrent transformations of the nekyia is the night journey, which often happens by sea (Odysseus, Jonah and the whale, Ahab and Moby Dick), by river (Marlow and Willard in search of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now) or takes the form of a cosmic flight (Elijah, Ezekiel, Ben Abuyah, Muhammad).²

Sometimes the invisible world is closer than we think and it does not take a journey to reach it. Understood as the “gloomy boundary between the unseen world and ours,” the locus terribilis is inevitably adjacent to our reality. In this sense, more than a place, it is a threshold, an area of indistinction between two states, specifically between the conscious and the unconscious. Thus, the locus terribilis is the threshold between this world and the underworld. Living in it means living in the twilight of our psyche.

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1. Lucan, Pharsalia. VI, 643-650. ↩︎
2. It was C.G. Jung who associated nekyia with other journeys, such as the night journey by sea, which he understood as an “introversion of the conscious mind into the deepest layers of the unconscious psyche” (Jung, Analytical Psychology, 41) and which he used in a practically interchangeable way. Post-Jungian psychologists such as James Hillman preferred to make a distinction between these concepts: "the descent into the underworld can be distinguished from the hero's night voyage by sea in many ways... the hero returns from the night voyage by sea better equipped for the tasks of life, while nekyia takes the soul to such depths that there is no ‘return’. The night voyage by sea is also marked by the building up of inner heat (tapas), while the nekyia goes beneath that pressured containment, that tempering in the fires of passion, to a zone of absolute coldness" (Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, 88). In order to highlight the threshold nature of our terrible place, I adhere to Jung's indistinctness of these mythologems. ↩︎