Talk:Katabasis (disambiguation)

Old removed text

This was a hidden content in the article; I am lazy to search for editor who did the hiding.

P.S. This demonstrates that hidden comments are often bad idea

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Material taken from the old Katabasis article - not convinced this is salvageable though, psychology use seems to just be "some psychologists wrote books that used the term" which just means the word is used, not that there's an article-worthy meaning there. Same with arts use.

A trip to the coast

The term catabasis can refer to a trip from the interior of a country down to the coast (for example, following a river), in contrast to the term "anabasis", which refers to an expedition from a coastline up into the interior of a country.

The main meaning given for catabasis by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) describes "A going down; a military retreat, in allusion to that of the ten thousand Greeks under Xenophon, related by him in his Anabasis:

1837 DE QUINCEY Revolt Tartars Wks. 1862 IV. 112 The Russian anabasis and catabasis of Napoleon. 1899 Westm. Gaz. 17 May 4/1 Little space is devoted to the Anabasis; it is, as in the story of Xenophon, the Catabasis which fills the larger part.

— Oxford English Dictionary - catabasis

In the opening of Plato's Republic, Socrates recounts "going down" to the port city of Piraeus, located south of his native Athens. Several scholars, including Allan Bloom, have read this first word, κατέβην ("I went down") as an allusion to Odysseus' journey into the Underworld.

Arts

In poetry and rhetoric, the term katabasis refers to a "gradual descending" of emphasis on a theme within a sentence or paragraph, while anabasis refers to a gradual ascending in emphasis. John Freccero notes, "In the ancient world, [the] descent in search of understanding was known as katabasis", thus endowing mythic and poetic accounts of katabasis with a symbolic significance.

Modern psychology

In modern psychology, the term katabasis is sometimes used to describe the depression some young men experience. Robert Bly, an influential figure in the mythopoetic men's movement, attributes a lack of Western initiation rites and strong father figures and role models for a "catabasis phenomenon".

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It's a very short edit history - I shouldn't have been that hard to find! Anyway, I've sometimes salvaged content by putting it on the talk page, but I don't really think this content is particularly salvageable and would rather just delete it. I wasn't the one who came up with "March to the Sea", that was from the older Katabasis page, for what it's worth. Anyway, most of this stuff isn't really usable and seems fringe or made-up. If restored, it'd need much stronger sourcing and relevance. SnowFire (talk) 23:06, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Correct, but it is a hint for search, maybe sometime someone salvages something. - Altenmann >talk 23:25, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

References