Dante opens the Divine Comedy with these words:
Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.1
If sometimes the invisible world is closer than we think and it does not take a journey to get there, it is because all that is needed is to go astray. Losing one’s way is convoluted and easy, as easy as letting go in a dream. Finding it and coming back to the light is what’s truly difficult. Virgil, Dante’s guide in his katabasis, confirms this idea when he has the Cumaean Sybil warn Aeneas:
Sprung from blood of gods, son of Trojan Anchises, easy is the descent to Avernus: night and day the door of gloomy Dis [Pluto] stands open; but to recall one’s steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this the toil! Some few, whom kindly Jupiter has loved, or shining worth uplifted to heaven, sons of the gods, have availed.2
The somber valley that Dante describes in the first canto of the Divine Comedy has all the features of the locus terribilis: it is a descent into a rough, thick and wild forest that produces unspeakable dread. The unconscious nature of this intermediate state between wakefulness and unconsciousness is evident a few lines later:
I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.
But after I had reached a mountain’s foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,
Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders
Vested already with that planet’s rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.
Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart’s lake had endured throughout
The night, which I had passed so piteously.
And even as he, who, with distressful breath,
Forth issued from the sea upon the shore,
Turns to the water perilous and gazes;
So did my soul, that still was fleeing onward,
Turn itself back to re-behold the pass
Which never yet a living person left.3
In these lines we find the maritime nekyia represented in the metaphor of the man who survives the night journey and reaches the shore; his somnolent state upon reaching the valley confirms the unconscious nature of his going astray. The locus terribilis is the twilight that lies a few steps from our consciousness; beyond it there is a whole region populated with familiar characters. Erictho, the Thessalian witch who predicted the defeat of Pompey and the eventual murder of Julius Caesar (0.4), is in the circle of the heretics where she lies in a burning tomb. Under Christianity’s moralizing gaze, the necromancer has been reunited with the powers of hell.
Now, if our culture has settled indefinitely on the threshold between our world and the underworld, in the locus terribilis, we should ask ourselves: how could one get out of a place that is not such, a locus that is a twilight, a threshold to which one cannot really “enter” and in which, therefore, one can not “stay”?
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