ABSTRACT
The ancient Greeks called it nekyia, the rite for persuading the dead to speak. Yulia Ustinova, in her Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind, believes that such “incubations” functioned as a form of sensory deprivation, where the human being is secluded from the external stimuli or “noise” of life. The modern conceptual paradigm is built on the foundation of ancient Greek and Arab theories of phantasia, a word which is often translated as “mental representation” or “image”. The ancient Arab thinkers follow in the footsteps of the Greeks and continue thinking through such theories. The sort of lexical reincarnation can be found at the dawn of the Greek language with the advent of the word sema. And so, philology can be thought of as a kind of thanatology; an ever so patient attempt to disinter the ancient meanings and associations from their contemporary lexical moorings.
