Hell
Hell, in many religious traditions, the abode, usually beneath the earth, of the unredeemed dead or the spirits of the damned. In its archaic sense, the term hell refers to the underworld, a deep pit or distant land of shadows where the dead are gathered. From the underworld come dreams, ghosts, and demons, and in its most terrible precincts sinners pay some say eternally the penalty for their crimes. The underworld is often imagined as a place of punishment rather than merely of darkness and decomposition because of the widespread belief that a moral universe requires judgment and retribution crime must not pay. More broadly, hell figures in religious cosmologies as the opposite of heaven, the nadir of the cosmos, and the land where God is not. In world literature the journey to hell is a perennial motif of hero legends and quest stories, and hell itself is the preeminent symbol of evil, alienation, and despair.
The Old English hel belongs to a family of Germanic words meaning “to cover” or “to conceal.” Hel is also the name, in Old Norse, of the Scandinavian queen of the underworld. Many English translations of the Bible use hell as an English equivalent of the Hebrew terms Sheʾōl (or Sheol) and Gehinnom, or Gehenna (Hebrew: gê-hinnōm). The term Hell is also used for the Greek Hades and Tartarus, which have markedly different connotations. As this confusion of terms suggests, the idea of hell has a complex history, reflecting changing attitudes toward death and judgment, sin and salvation, and crime and punishment.
Mesopotamian civilizations from the 3rd to the 1st millennium BCE produced a rich literature dealing with death and hell, much of it designed to impress upon the hearer the vast gulf separating the living from the dead and the fragility of the cosmic order on which vitality and fertility depend. In Mesopotamian traditions, hell is described as a distant land of no return, a house of dust where the dead dwell without distinction of rank or merit, and a sealed fortress, typically of seven gates, barred against invasion or escape.
In a cycle of Sumerian and Akkadian poems, the god-king Gilgamesh, despairing over the death of his companion Enkidu, travels to the world’s end, crosses the ocean of death, and endures great trials only to learn that mortality is an incurable condition. Hell, according to the Gilgamesh epic, is a house of darkness where the dead “drink dirt and eat stone.” More details of this grim realm emerge in the poems about the Sumerian shepherd and fertility god Tammuz (Akkadian: Dumuzi) and his consort Inanna (Akkadian: Ishtar), who in her various aspects is the mistress of date clusters and granaries, the patroness of prostitutes and alehouses, a goddess associated with the planet Venus and spring thunderstorms, and a deity of fertility, sexual love, and war. Inanna is also the sister of Ereshkigal, queen of the dead. An impulsive goddess, Inanna, according to some versions of the myth, is said to have threatened, in a fit of pique, to crush the gates of hell and let the dead overrun the earth. In the poem Descent of Inanna, she sets forth to visit Ereshkigal’s kingdom in splendid dress, only to be compelled, at each of the seven gates, to shed a piece of her regalia. Finally, Inanna falls naked and powerless before Ereshkigal, who hangs her up like so much meat upon a drying hook. Drought descends upon the earth as a result, but the gods help revive Inanna, who escapes by offering her husband as a replacement. This ransom secures the fecundity of the earth and the integrity of the grain stores by reinforcing the boundary between hell and earth. It is the better part of wisdom, the tradition suggests, for mortals to make the most of earthly life before they are carried off into death’s long exile.
The tombs, pyramids, and necropolises of ancient Egypt attest to an extraordinary concern for the state of the dead, who, in sharp contrast to Mesopotamian belief, are described as living on in a multiplicity of forms and locations suitable to their rank and worth—in or near the grave, in the desert regions of the west, in the fertile fields of Earu, in the heavens with the midday sun and circumpolar stars, or under the earth, where the sun travels by night. As the mortuary cult of Osiris developed and the prerogative of surviving death extended from royalty to common people, greater attention focused on the underworld. Texts such as the Book of the Dead, the Book of Amduat, and the Book of Gates exhaustively describe the perilous journey through the 12 zones of the underworld (corresponding to the 12 hours of night) and the harrowing judgment over which Osiris presides.
The deceased needed both magical and moral power to be acquitted of offenses when appearing before Osiris. Elaborate ritual provisions were made, therefore, to translate the deceased from a mortal to an immortal condition; they included mummifying the body, adorning the tomb with prayers and offerings, and equipping the deceased with spells, amulets, and formulaic affidavits of innocence to win safe passage and ensure success at the divine tribunal. Those who succeeded won immortality by identification with Osiris or with the sun. Those who failed were devoured by a crocodile-headed monster, tormented by demons, or worse; yet rarely is there the suggestion of eternal condemnation. The tomb remained a place where the dead could be comforted or appeased by the living, and the mortuary texts were a constant reminder of the need to prepare for the final passage.
Greece And Rome
In Archaic Greece (c. 650–480 BCE), Hades is an underworld god, a chthonic personification of death whose realm, divided from the land of the living by a terrible river, resembles the Mesopotamian land of the dead. The house of Hades is a labyrinth of dark, cold, and joyless halls, surrounded by locked gates and guarded by the hellhound Cerberus. Hell’s queen, Persephone, resides there a prisoner. This somber picture is confirmed in Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus visits Hades to consult the seer Tiresias in Book 11, he finds its inhabitants sunk into a witless oblivion, incapable of communicating with him until they drink from his libation of ram’s blood. The untimely dead and the improperly buried suffer more than do common shades, and notorious sinners such as Tantalus and Sisyphus are tormented for their crimes; nonetheless, the Homeric Hades is, generally speaking, indifferently unpleasant for all.
In the late Archaic period, however, Greek traditions began to envision a greater divergence of paths in the afterlife. The mysteries of Demeter at Eleusis, among other esoteric cults, claimed that adherents would enjoy a heavenly immortality, while those outside the cult would sink into the gloom of Hades. The cult of Dionysus represented Hades as a place of torment from which only initiates could escape; there, according to some ancient traditions, Persephone punished humankind for the death of her son, Dionysus. The Orphic movement (so called for its association with the hero Orpheus, who ventured into Hades and returned to earth) spun vivid accounts of judgment, retribution, and metempsychosis. Adherents were taught that life on the “sorrowful, weary wheel” of recurring birth and death itself was a kind of hell. Gold tablets found buried in graves throughout Greece and southern Italy, dating back to the 4th century BCE, offer an Orphic account of the geography of the otherworld, warning the deceased to shun the waters of forgetfulness and to recite the passwords that admit one to the company of the blessed. Philosophers and moralists such as Plato and Cicero found in these myths and mysteries rich material for reflection on the nature of justice and the value of disciplined detachment from the material world.
Throughout the Classical (c. 500–323 BCE) and Hellenistic (323–30 BCE) periods and during the long span of the Roman Empire, Mediterranean societies played host to a profusion of eschatological teachings in which the underworld was increasingly “infernalized,” its hellish dimensions explored, and its moral implications exploited. While Odysseus travels no farther than the entrance to the underworld, Virgil, the Roman author of the Aeneid, sends Aeneas through Sibyl’s cave by the shores of the foul-smelling Lake of Averno, across the River Styx on Charon’s ferry, past the three-headed dog Cerberus, and from there down the labyrinthine path as it forks right to the torture fields of Tartarus and left to the Elysian fields of the blessed. Virgil’s hell includes special compartments for infants and suicides and specific punishments for specific crimes, but the ordinary dead, who merit neither a hero’s reward nor a scoundrel’s punishment, remain unaccounted for. Further attention to the structure of hell came during the first centuries of the Common Era, as a rising tide of eschatological thinking, fed by currents of thought from western Asia, swept through the Roman world.
Iranian And Zoroastrian Eschatology
Among the Aryan peoples who migrated to the Iranian plateau in the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, a priestly sacrificial religion arose which held that the world is the field of incessant struggle between the ahuras (gods of light, purity, and order) and the daevas (demons of darkness, pollution, and disorder). This dualist cosmology provided the foundation for Zoroastrianism, the prophetic religion of Zoroaster (before the 6th century BCE), which proclaimed the coming triumph of Ahura Mazdā (“Wise Lord”) and his angelic retinue over Ahriman (“Destructive Spirit”), prince of the powers of evil. Zoroastrian end-time accounts describe the coming of one or more cosmic saviours, the resurrection of the dead, a final passage through purgatorial rivers of molten metal, and a resounding defeat of all the demonic powers. The Zoroastrian hell is presided over by Yima, the first victim of death, and is home to all that is evil, dark, corrupt, cold, and hostile to life. The demons who dwell there take delight in torturing sinners; but since evil is destined to be utterly vanquished, hell itself will be destroyed with the restoration of Ahura Mazdā’s good creation.
During the interval between death and resurrection, there is a preliminary judgment in which the dead have their deeds weighed in a balance. At the time of judgment, the dead confront their conscience in personified form on a symbolic bridge, from which they fall into hell to be tortured, pass to heaven for blissful reward, or enter the limbolike realm of the “mixed,” which is reserved for those of neutral merit. In the influential 9th-century apocalypse, Ardā Wirāz Nāmag, an Iranian priest takes a visionary tour of these otherworldly realms and returns with a harrowing report; the torments of hell, even if not eternal, are dreadful enough to have a powerful deterrent effect.
Judaism
In the Hebrew Bible, Sheol (Sheʾōl) is a place of darkness, silence, and dust to which the spirit, or vital principle, descends at death. It is likened to a vast house whose entrance is guarded, like family burial sites, by gates and iron bolts; to a prison in which the dead are held captive by strong cords; to an insatiable beast with spreading jaws; and also to a watery abyss. Once in Sheol, the dead are cut off from their living kin and from cultic relationship to God. Yet God retains his sovereignty over Sheol, searching out the evildoers who hide in its depths, preserving or delivering the just from Sheol’s grasp, and, ultimately, as later apocalyptic and rabbinic texts make explicit, restoring the dead to life.
At least in the postexilic portions of the Hebrew Bible (those written after the Babylonian captivity), death does not hold the same fate for all. The unjust, the improperly buried, and the untimely dead endure the misery of Sheol, but, for those who die in God’s favour, the natural bitterness of death is mitigated by reunion with their ancestors. Late prophetic books, concerned with the vindication of God’s justice, warn of a coming “Day of the Lord” in which the wicked will be burned up like stubble (Malachi 4:1), the corpses of God’s enemies will suffer endless corruption (Isaiah 66:24), and evildoers who have died will be resurrected to “shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2) while the just enjoy the fulfillment of God’s promises. In some postbiblical Jewish writings, Gehenna, the incineration ground where children had once been sacrificed to the god Moloch, emerges as a realm of postmortem punishment more like hell than Sheol. In Gehenna the unjust dead would suffer a fiery torment of duration and severity proportionate to their crimes.
During the period from the Maccabee wars (168–164 BCE) to the compilation of the Mishnah (early 3rd century CE), writers increasingly speculated about the afterlife, producing apocalypses that featured dramatic visionary journeys through heaven and hell. The First Book of Enoch, an important collection of pseudepigraphic revelations, describes in vivid detail both the eternal abyss of fire where fallen angels will be imprisoned after the final battle and the “plague and pain” to be visited upon wretched souls. At the same time, Jewish philosophers and mystics emphasized the spiritual character of the future life, interpreting Gehenna as a redemptive fire which burns away the soul’s impurities in order to restore its original perfection. A spiritualized conception of the soul’s journey after death flourished alongside the rabbinic doctrine of resurrection and judgment at the end of time, and the two models were often combined. The focus of traditional Jewish eschatology, now as in the past, is on the messianic age, when the world will be remade into a dwelling place fit for the Divine Presence. To forfeit one’s share in the world to come is the greatest of all calamities, to which hellfire, whether physical or spiritual, pales in comparison.
Christianity
The early Christians proclaimed that Christ had conquered death, opening the door to resurrection and heavenly immortality. The defeat of death does not necessarily mean the immediate abolition of hell, however. Gehenna appears in the New Testament 12 times, where its terrors for the wicked, as a place “where the worm never dies, and their fire is never quenched” (Mark 9:48, quoting Isaiah 66:24), are stressed. In the great eschatological discourse of Matthew 25, Jesus announces that the Son of Man will come in glory to judge the nations, to separate the sheep from the goats, and to consign sinners to everlasting fire. This separation is stark, with no explicit provision made for fine gradations of merit or guilt. While the poor man Lazarus enjoys a blissful repose in the bosom of Abraham, the rich man who failed to help him in life is tormented in eternal fire without hope of respite, the two realms being separated by a great chasm (Luke 16:26). The standard of judgment is right relationship to Christ, as expressed by deeds of mercy. Jesus himself set this standard when he declares:
Anastasis (Christ ascending from hell), apse fresco, 1320; in the Church of the Holy Saviour at the Monastery of the Chora (now the Kariye Museum), Istanbul.Dumbarton Oaks/Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.
Ambiguities in the New Testament passages on hell, however, have led to significant disagreement among Christians. Are sinners and fallen angels tortured forever or only for a fixed term? Are the pains of hell reserved for the Last Judgment, or do they supervene immediately upon dying? To what extent has Satan been left in charge of his kingdom and free to work his woe? Theological reflection on hell is intimately connected to conceptions of the nature and moral psychology of human beings, in particular their status as free beings created in the image and likeness of God, the extent of their corruption by the Fall (the fall of humanity from innocence to sinfulness as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve), the particular weight attached to specific sins and evil dispositions, and the efficacy of the various means of reconciliation to God
The physical location of hell is similarly ambiguous. Some ancient and medieval Christian texts describe places of postmortem torment and demonic mischief in the upper atmosphere, while others locate hell in the centre of the earth, finding entrances in caves, moors, bogs, and volcanic fissures. Such entrances to hell appear frequently in folk traditions, along with lore about the fairy underworlds in which the unwary may be trapped. Virgil’s Lake of Averno and the infernal rivers Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, Lethe, and Phlegethon, among other Classical features, recur in Christian literary treatments. Drawing on diverse biblical, Classical, and folkloric sources, a great variety of cautionary tracts and tales, often cast in the form of firsthand visions, further developed the imagery of hell, mapping its flaming lakes, perilous bridges, demon-infested pits, and stinking cesspools and enlarging its catalogue of torments while at the same time providing milder sufferings for penitents. In the 2nd-century Apocalypse of Peter, for example, blasphemers hang by their tongues over a lake of flaming mire, murderers are tortured in the sight of their victims, and slanderers have their eyes burned out by hot irons. Hope remains, however, that some sinners can be saved through the prayers of the righteous. Anticipating the doctrine of purgatory, the postbiblical apocalypses suggest that penitents may be purified by the same fires of hell in which the reprobate sink to their doom.
In his Dialogues, Pope Gregory I (590–604), writing in a time of pestilence and invasions, included return-from-the-dead accounts from a hermit, a merchant, and a soldier who witnessed the terrors of hell and the joys of the blessed before being sent back to warn the living of what lies in store. Tales of this kind proliferated throughout the Middle Ages, receiving consummate literary expression in Dante’s The Divine Comedy and providing matter for allegories such as Guillaume de Deguileville’s The Pilgrimage of the Soul (1358) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Dante’s hell, with its nine levels leading to Satan frozen in a lake of ice, is a parodistic inversion of the sublime order of heaven; even here, justice prevails in the precise conformity of punishment to crime.
The older biblical conception of Hades-Sheol as the gathering place of the dead retained its importance for the Christian tradition, however, as Christians reflected on the redemptive significance of Holy Saturday, the day between Christ’s Crucifixion and his Resurrection. According to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and patristic writings from as early as the 2nd century, Christ invaded Hades during the interval in which he lay dead in the tomb and “made a proclamation to the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:19), freeing the just who sat in exile awaiting their Redeemer. Hell, in this sense, is a waiting place for the righteous before the coming of Christ, and Christ’s descent into hell is understood to be a rescue mission. In support of this teaching, Eastern Christian icons of the Resurrection depict Christ breaking the jaws of hell, entering in triumph, and drawing Adam upwards by the wrist.
An article of the Apostles’ Creed, the statement of faith used by most Christian churches and a favourite subject of medieval mystery plays, the theme of Christ’s descent into hell has persisted in theological discussion as a focal point for debates on the scope of universal salvation. Among Christian theologians, Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 254)is the preeminent advocate of a doctrine of universal salvation (apocatastasis). Origen believed that after passing through hell, as through a refining fire, all souls—including the fallen angels—would be restored. Although Origen’s influence on Christian biblical and spiritual theology remained profound, he was condemned for this teaching on universal salvation by the Council of Constantinople in 553. The major branches of Christianity have traditionally affirmed that the moral order of the universe and the justice of God require a certain symmetry between eternal reward for the blessed and eternal punishment for the damned, with the degree and kinds of suffering in hell being proportionate to the sins. Hell is the dwelling place of those who reject God irrevocably, whose alienation from God is a permanent expression of their own ill-used freedom, and whose suffering is at once physical (burning by fire) and spiritual (deprivation of God). While modern religious writers tend to interpret the pains of hell metaphorically, a great many artistic masterpieces derive their compelling power from their graphic and dramatic depictions of these torments.
Islam
According to Islamic thought, the existence of hell (Jahannam) bears witness to God’s sovereignty, justice, and mercy and also stands as a warning to individuals and nations of the definitive choice to be made between fidelity and infidelity, righteousness and iniquity, and life and death. The major Islamic schools agree that it is essential to one’s identity as a Muslim to believe in and look forward to the day—or, more pointedly, the hour—when God will bring his creation to an end, raise the dead, reunite them with their souls, judge them one by one, and commit each individual, as he deserves, to the joys of the garden (paradise) or the terrors of the fire (hell). Symbols reminiscent of Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian judgment scenes recur in Islamic accounts, in particular the record of deeds, the weighing of the soul, and the test-bridge, which widens for the righteous but narrows to a knife-edge for sinners, who lose their footing and plunge into the flames below. According to Islamic teaching, God exercises complete authority over the course of events. He has predetermined human destiny yet justly holds individuals accountable for their choices in life. Immune to special pleading, God, in his mercy, reserves the power to save those whom he wills and to look favourably upon those for whom the Prophet Muhammad intercedes. He created hell, with its seven ordered gates, for a deep purpose but has fixed a limit to the suffering of believers who have sinned. For unbelievers, who refuse to acknowledge their Creator, there is no hope of final redemption from the fire.
The Qurʾān has little to say about the interval (barzakh) between death and resurrection, but later Islamic literature makes the deathbed and the grave the setting of a preliminary judgment. The soul of the pious Muslim, it is held, will experience an easy death and a pleasant sojourn in the grave. The infidel’s soul, violently torn from the body and failing interrogation by the angels Munkar and Nakīr, will suffer torment in the grave until the day when it will take up its place in hell, there to dine on bitter fruit and pus and to be roasted and boiled with all the usual infernal devices for as long as God sees fit. Like the joys of heaven, the pains of hell are profoundly physical and spiritual. The worst of all torments is the estrangement from God.
Hinduism
In the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE, Indo-European peoples migrated into northwestern India, bringing with them a religion influenced by that of ancient Iran. According to the great texts of this tradition, the Vedas (c. 1500–1200 BCE), the proper performance of sacrifices establishes right relations with the cosmos, enabling one to prosper in life and to join one’s ancestors in the sky in death. The ritually unprepared, and in later accounts the ignorant and morally unworthy, face the grim prospect of near-extinction or descent into a dark, cold underworld.
In the esoteric teachings recorded in the foundational philosophical texts of classical Hinduism, the Brahmanas and Upanishads, hope for a joyful immortality depends upon finding within oneself, and harnessing through spiritual discipline, the mysterious power brahman, which pervades the universe and dwells hidden in the sounds and gestures of ritual sacrifice. Those who die unprepared must be reborn (samsara) to live out the consequences of their past deeds (karma). Grave sins incur a miserable rebirth in hell or an interval in hell en route to rebirth on a low plane of existence. The goal of Hindu practice is to be freed from all forms of birth and to be restored to a state of perfect consciousness and imperishable bliss in communion with the divine.
As Hindu mythology evolved, Yama, at first a celestial god and judge of the dead, became associated with death in its most fearsome aspect, and the underworld hells became as numerous and varied as the heavens. The Puranas, encyclopaedic collections of Hindu myths and legends, supplied vivid details on the modalities of dismemberment, piercing, burning, and putrefaction assigned to each hell and specific to each crime. In the devotional forms of Hinduism that began to flower in the 12th and 13th centuries and continue to predominate today, the wish to avoid rebirth in hell is a powerful incentive to offer worship and perform selfless acts. Hindu philosophers and mystics, however, have continued to concentrate on the ultimate goal of transcending rebirth completely through spiritual discipline.
Buddhism
A philosophical salvation movement arising in the same ascetic milieu that produced the Upanishads, Buddhism stresses the impermanence of all states of samsara and offers a variety of spiritual practices for attaining liberation. So long as one is driven by ignorance and desire and is encumbered by the residue of past deeds, death brings no cessation to repeated rebirth. One may be reborn as a god (deva), demigod (asura), human being, animal, hungry ghost, or hell being. Early Buddhist texts speak of multiple hot hells beneath the earth, but Mahayana traditions locate hells throughout the millions of universes in which sentient beings suffer and compassionate buddhas teach. Although all these realms are deemed ultimately illusory, the suffering of hell beings and hungry ghosts (who are tortured by unceasing hunger and thirst) is excruciating, and its vivid depiction in Buddhist literature and art heightens the sense of urgency to perform good deeds, to transfer the merit thus gained to those in need, and to take refuge in the protection of buddhas and bodhisattvas (those who vow to become a buddha and dedicate themselves to helping others achieve enlightenment). Mahayana Buddhism extols the compassion of great bodhisattvas who use their magical power to descend to the lowest hells in order to preach the saving dharma (the universal truth taught by the Buddha) and to share their merit with the wretched. The compassionate presence in hell of the bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara (often portrayed as a beautiful young female and known as Guanyin in China and as Kannon in Japan), Kshitigarbha (known as Dizang in China and as Jizō in Japan), and the heroic monk Mulian (who interceded with the Buddha and won his mother’s release from torment in hell) are, therefore, important examples of this Mahayana teaching.
In China the confluence of Buddhist, Daoist, and folk traditions produced an elaborate ceremonial system for relieving the suffering of hungry ghosts and hell beings and exorcising their negative influence on the living. Hell, with its 10 fearsome courts, is a bureaucracy where judges are amenable to bribes and souls undergo trials and endure judicial tortures. The deceased are supported by their living kin, who remember them with honour, performing good deeds, sponsoring rituals in their name, and burning or decorating the grave with paper effigies of money, food, clothing, cars, and other essentials. Esoteric rites for opening the gates of hell and feeding the hungry ghosts and hell beings extend this filial compassion from the family to the whole population of suffering beings. Purgatorial in nature, Chinese hells are not beyond the reach of human intervention, and the shared obligation to succour the beings who suffer there has been a powerful force for social cohesion.
Modern Attitudes
In the modern world, especially in the West, cultural shifts caused by the Enlightenment, 19th-century liberalism, and the psychotherapeutic culture of the late 20th century have contributed to a decline in the belief in an everlasting hell. Defenders of the belief regard this as a lamentable loss of nerve, of faith, and of moral seriousness. Hell may not be wished away, in their view, but must be conquered—by the merciful saviour who liberates the spirits from bondage, by the overpowering force of divine forgiveness, or by a final battle, the ultimate outcome of which, some hope, will be hell emptied, hell despoiled.
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