Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Of or relating to the under world; subterranean.
- Springing from the earth.
Wiktionary
- adj. Pertaining to the underworld; being beneath the earth.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Designating, or pertaining to, gods or spirits of the underworld; esp., relating to the underworld gods of the Greeks, whose worship is widely considered as more primitive in form than that of the Olympian gods. The characteristics of chthonian worship are propitiatory and magical rites and generalized or euphemistic names of the deities, which are supposed to have been primarily ghosts.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. dwelling beneath the surface of the earth
Examples
“In early times the Greek worship was most earnestly directed to that set of deities who resided at the gloomy centre of the earth, and who were called the chthonian gods. 66 The hope of immortality first sprung up and was nourished in connection with this worship.”
The Destiny of the Soul A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life
“Perhaps the smell of blood, dark and chthonian, at the precise moment that the bird screamed, awakened something deep and intrinsic in what remained of Pan's consciousness.”
“Hall, Etruscan Italy 1996, p.70: "In the Near East, eggs were considered symbols of fertility, life-giving power, and, ultimately, resurrection; and the Etruscans' paintings and artifacts suggest that they, too, viewed the egg as a chthonian motif.”
“Theirs was not the Sol Glissant swimming-pool blue of Suzy's eyes, however, but a sapphire blue, almost an anthracite blue, as if hardened into being by millions of pounds of chthonian thrust.”
Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
“Conduit of lotus-scented waters, hard little harpoon for an empress's gastric leviathans, polished root from a chthonian garden, it has, when you hold it against the light, the distant dignity and grave passion of a pale green star.”
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
“The pneuma (see below) was a quasi-physical conceptualizing of divine possession, while Georges Roux (Delphes, pp. 110-117) has shown that some kind of symbolic chthonian hole may well have existed under the tripod in the adyton.”
“But even in Greece we must remember the gloomy chthonian rites, and the degradations of Orphism mentioned by Plato in the _Republic_.”
“It must be strange to die, surrounded by jackals at their chthonian litanies.”
“Thus at Delphi the stratification of cults~shows us, undermost, the prehistoric, chthonian worship of the pre-Achaeans: Gaia (followed by, or identical with, "Themis"?) and the impersonal nymphs are the earliest tenants of the famous chasm and the spring Kassotis.”
“Briefly, Nadja carve out great slabs of sound, throbbing and trudging to melodic resolution with incredible slowness, over an entire side of vinyl at a time; you want to say "tectonic" and "chthonian" but not "glacial" because the fuzz-bass is so warm, rising through your feet, and the layered drones are so disorienting.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘chthonian’.
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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Geology Words
The descriptive science described.
earth, lithosphere, mineral, convection, heat flow, ore, deep time, fossil, formation, rock, tectonics, extinction and 256 more...
ragnvaeig Pertaining to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth.
Origin: 1840–50; < Greek chthóni(os) (chthon-, s. of chthn earth + -ios adj. suffix) + -an Feb 2, 2009
mollusque You enter and are stunned by a conspiracy in which the sublime universe of heavenly ogives and the chthonian world of gas guzzlers are juxtaposed.
--Umberto Eco, 1988, Foucault's Pendulum, p. 7 Sep 29, 2008