Nekyia (Translated) (Annotated) - The Apocalypse of Peter and the Greek roots of hell #1013353

This edition includes:
• New English translation
• Critical introduction
• 446 editor's notes

Hell as the West pictures it, with its mud and fire and its torments fitted to each kind of sin, was inherited rather than invented. That is the case Albrecht Dieterich argues in Nekyia, and he argues it from one of the strangest finds ever to come out of the Egyptian sand: a small parchment codex buried in a grave at Akhmim, holding an apocalyptic fragment in which Christ leads Peter up a mountain and shows him the dwelling of the blessed and the place of the damned.

What Peter sees is unforgettable: figures whiter than snow and redder than rose, an earth blooming with unfading flowers, and then a lake of seething mud where sinners hang by the tongue, by the hair, by the feet. Dieterich asks the question his predecessors had not asked: where do these images come from? Following a single motif across authors and centuries, he traces them back to the Elysian plain of Homer, to the garden of the gods, the Hesperides and the palace of Helios, and further still to the Orphic-Pythagorean books of the dead and the gold tablets buried with initiates at Thurii and in Crete. Out of that scattered evidence he reconstructs a lost Greek descent into the underworld and shows how its heaven and hell passed into Christian hands, along a line that runs unbroken to the Heaven and Hell of Dante's Comedy.

This edition brings the book into English as a literary translation, made to be read now: natural and alive in the language of the reader, faithful to the substance of the argument and to the movement of Dieterich's voice, his tone and his images. He writes like a man discovering something rather than proving a case, quoting at length, weighing possibilities aloud, and the English keeps that clarity and that momentum. A critical introduction opens the volume, before Dieterich's text, setting the Akhmim parchment, the scholar and the question he opened for everyone who has since asked where hell came from.

Add it to your library, and watch an old map of the afterlife redrawn in front of you.