The History of Hell
Schooled by Catholic nuns and priests, I was fed the full-fat hellfire and damnation diet. Death seemed remote at the time, and damnation was not a worry as long as we observed the rituals of confession and absolution. Nobody suggested that we could ease any residual fears by simply embracing a different religion.
To be clear, and so you know where I am coming from here, I now belong to the church of ‘dead means dead’, and accept that my fate is to end up as worm food and reduced to my constituent atoms.
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| Dead is Dead |
The result was that it never occurred to young me that it was only some Christians who were into this fire and brimstone stuff. So, when I finished researching (yes, I do some) and writing up my posts on the landscapes of hell, I decided to explore both the origins of those ideas and what people thought happened to evil-doers before Christianity emerged. To my surprise, the answer was ‘not much’.
Trying to make sense of early British paganism is fraught with a lack of early British pagan interviewees, their dilatory note-taking, and failure to leave any helpful podcasts and videos. This doesn’t seem to bother the colourful modern pagans who, in the absence of evidence, are happy to invent it. They happily stuffed this yawning gap in our knowledge with druids, henges, underworlds, overworlds, fairy dells, and the general folkloric wallpaper of imagined pre-history.
The evidence we have is mostly from archaeology and Welsh and Irish legends, which were recorded around the 13th century. They left us books which have the fingerprints of the Monkish scribes all over them, like the Mabinogion and Taliesin from Wales, and several mythical histories of Ireland. In England, we have Geoffrey of Monmouth’s rather earlier history, which includes a genesis of the Arthurian legends amid loads of crazy stuff about Trojans and giants.
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| Geoff of Monmouth |
The conclusions drawn from it all are tentative, contested, and changeable. This is often now referred to as Celtic mythology, although that label would not have recognised by the natives at the time.
A bit more precisely, there were related cultures and languages in Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Scotland, and the rest of Britain. Odds on you didn’t have to change language crossing the river from Sedbury into Chepstow, but the differences between Kerry and Kent might understandably be pronounced. It seems that there was also some commonality in the basics of belief, but they often seem to have used different names for the same things and divinities. It is not at all clear how useful any of these labels are or what, if any, boundaries there were between them.
There is a rather good graphic showing the changing mix of languages over time here: Languages in Britain. Or you can expand this diagram of how this stood just after the Romans left.
What follows is an attempt to draw very general conclusions from the limited amount of evidential detritus available to us. Because the early evidence from what is now England is modest, maybe because of the later superimposition of Roman and Anglo-Saxon lore, I will rely more on the legendary history in the Welsh and Irish traditions and assume that, in the absence of any border, they had some relevant cultural similarities with people in the north and east.
Archaeology tells us that some people, presumably the wealthier, were dispatched into the afterlife with some of their precious kit: swords, tools, pots, and ornaments. That suggests that they imagined it as a continuation of the lived life. The legends suggest that, while your social standing in life might shape your subsequent experience, your murderous or criminal behaviour did not. In these lands, on dying, you didn’t face judgment, and punishment wasn’t on the menu.
Some went out in style, with earthly remains laid to rest in huge 'passage tombs'. The pic below is Newgrange in County Louth.
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| Newgrange |
It was carefully designed so that, at the winter solstice, the sun shines directly down the passage into what is otherwise the dark centre of the tomb.
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| The passage at Newgrange |
How did you get there? The transition between this world and the otherworld was fluid and designed on Swiss cheese principles, so a variety of portals were available. You might cross or sink beneath water, holes in the ground or fortuitously shaped rocks or mists. In ancient Greece, Aristophanes proposed that the road to hell was so well-trodden that it was lined with every comfort for the visitors from bars and bakeries to brothels. There were no police checks, and visas were not required.
Orpheus in the Underworld
An Australian Vision
In Ireland, Oisín was carried across the sea to Tir Na Nog on a magic horse c/o his fairy princess girlfriend. You might recall that King Arthur was carried westwards across the Lake of Avalon to Avalon itself, c/o the Lady of the Lake.
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| Glastonbury Tor. A portal to the afterlife. |
Less romantically, I wonder whether the practice on both sides of the Irish Sea, of depositing the so-called ‘bog bodies’ in ditches, was also aimed at shoving people through death’s turnstile to the afterlife. Some of them appear to have been executed.
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| Bog Body : Denmark |
What wasit like when you got there? The Welsh realm of Annwn and the Irish Tir na Nog sound like remote, sub-surface or offshore paradises; presumably sunny, temperate, verdant, and with zephyr winds and whatnot. There, you could enjoy a youthful eternity. They were not democratic or remotely egalitarian places, but the rulers were good chaps and wise to boot. Some appear to have been effectively psychopomps, guides to help rather than hinder you.
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| Tir Na Nog |
As sometimes described, it had all the charm of a care home lobby, which is odd because the overall picture of the hereafter was one of continuity with your former life, but in better health, with scars healed, muscles eased and in more untroubled and pleasing surroundings. Think of it as a first-class spa resort or as the difference between the brochure and reality of that care home.
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| Bull Roack/ Tech Duinn |
It is hard to make sense of all this. For instance, you know about the goblins, imps, elves and leprechauns, some of which were originally regarded as mischievous at best or evil at worst. Tolkien honoured that tradition, as did Enid Blyton in the Noddy books. People who are really into this stuff (the modern druids and the Glastonbury goddesses?) can no doubt spin many more tales of demons in darkness. Where do they all fit in? Are they part of a vision of hell? Perhaps they were solely creatures of the world of the living?
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| Leprachauns. Not sweet. |
More importantly, if death were simply a transition from one world to another, with no sorting of the good from the bad, then presumably your ancestors, in-laws, and foes were there too, still harbouring old hates and grudges. Were they all well-meaning and law-abiding friends now? What if they were not?
It would cast a pall over paradise. After all, you can’t execute people who are already dead! Perhaps they were simply cancelled? After all, if life is a vale of tears and the afterlife is lived in sunlit plains of bliss, terminating their eternal afterlife doesn’t seem much different from killing. The legends are silent on this.
In Northern Europe, there was some sifting and sorting. Valhalla seems to have been even more a destination for First Class ticket holders, mostly blokes with bloodied swords and unhealthy eating habits.
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| Valhalla |
But in contrast, the hoi polloi ended up in Hellheim, a dark, dank world under the roots of the tree Ygdarrassil, overseen by the Goddess Hell. I picture her as a cross between a kink club dominatrix from Weimar Berlin and a Blackpool landlady. The distinction wasn’t between the good and bad, but between the seasoned warriors who might help the Gods in their battle with the Giants at Ragnarok, and the rest, who were consigned to a fate that was a continuation of their life in a more peaceful but dank, dark and joyless northern junkyard of souls, for all time.
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| Hellheim |
So, where did the Christian ideas of hell and eternal damnation come from? You are probably aware that they didn’t start out with a blank sheet of paper, but borrowed liberally from earlier traditions.
The Old Testament provides some clues about that. For instance, in the early books of the bible, everyone ended up, at least initially, in Sheol, the colourless and tedious underworld of the dead. It sounds like the Greek Hades. In both cases, the administration of justice was left to the living.
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| Sheol - An underworld |
It changed later. In Greece, in his conclusion to ‘The Republic’, Plato had already mooted the idea of moral differentiation in the afterlife. Alongside a veritable menu of choices and consequences, he decorates his ‘Elysium’ with rainbows, plains and meadows, drifting souls, portals to subterranean and sky worlds. A veritable Shangri-La. In contrast, ‘Tartarus’ was a deep abyss, which served as a prison and where your treatment was guaged accorded to your wickedness.
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| Tartarus |
I have seen it suggested that similar ideas merged in Judaism after the return from exile in Babylon. So, for instance, the Book of Enoch, Noah’s great-grandad, talked of sinners being cast into a pit of fire. The point here is that ideas of judgment and punishment in the afterlife were circulating long before Christianity, but perhaps didn’t reach as far as our cold and wet northern backwater.
You can see the political attractions of the idea. Hell is the consequence for wrong decisions and behaviour. The Romans certainly weren’t averse to the idea, maybe because the threat of hellfire was a handy and economical way to reduce crime in an increasingly civilised and prosperous society. It’s a bit like David Cameron’s scare tactics in the referendums.
By the time of the New Testament, the issue of a 'nice' and 'naughty' queue for the hereafter was being actively discussed in the Talmud, with hot tips on how to get granny a place in the former. Jesus talks of sinners being destined for Gehenna, a pit outside Jerusalem used for burning rubbish. Ideas of heavenly heaven and fiery punishment were becoming embedded in the new religion.
As Christianity spread, and to ensure that no one was under any illusion, St Augustine gave it both barrels, stressing that hellfire was not metaphorical, but eternal and real. As a sop to the lack of nuance in this idea of divine justice, earlier ideas of an ‘in between’ state between good and bad were used to invent the possibility of a mind-numbingly boring ‘purgatory’.
Even the Japanese picked up on that idea. Their Buddhist ‘Purgatory’ is Mount Osore, Mount Fear in Japanese, and comes complete with a river crossing to the afterlife. It is described by Atlas Obscura as a cross between 'a nightmare and a scenic tourist attraction'. Thanks to sulfurous fumes from volcanic rock, visiting is a 'scratch and sniff' experience.
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| Mount Osore |
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| Osore |
These ideas eventually washed up on our shores, and we moved on from the old Celtic idea of a morally neutral afterlife. The tales from later centuries were borrowed from all the various and contradictory flavours of fate.
Meanwhile, the early Christian monkish influencers saw no harm in adding a few populist ideas to their sales package. (I love the idea of the Venerable Bede on TikTok.) The old entrances to the otherworld and afterlife became portals to hell, and pagan characters were repurposed. Hell is obvious, Odin reappears in the Wild Hunt, and Donn became a demon of damnation.
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| Donn. No more Mr Nice Guy |
The old underworld was sidelined, but not forgotten. You can still see it in the gargoyles and demons in Churches and the stories about places like Glastonbury and the druids at Stonehenge. I particularly like the ‘hellmouth’ images and a cave on Lough Derg in Tipperary, which was then a door to the underworld shown to St Patrick by God himself. (The cave has been closed for centuries, and the pretty island is occupied by a monastery.)
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| St Patrick's Purgatory |
This is the backdrop to the creations of Danté, Bosch, and Milton, which I have described in the other posts in this series. By Milton’s time, thinkers of the Enlightenment were already mocking the barbaric ideas as crazy. How do you burn a soul? Isn’t punishment by everlasting fire sometimes a tad excessive?
In Christendom, Ideas about heaven and hell became more nuanced. Early on, Danté made the punishment fit the crime. Later, in ‘Paradise Lost’, Milton’s Satan comes across as being less of a Monster and more just a loser. I like to compare the consultative and deliberative regime he was running in hell, with the totalitarian and exclusive paradise above, where presumably all traces of neurodiversity had been ironed out, beverages were non-alcoholic, and presumably even the bacon sandwiches were vegetarian.
In contrast, Mount Osore makes me wonder if Buddhism has regressed because Buddha taught that ideas like heaven and hell were the creations of ignorant minds. Perhaps, in Japan, it got mixed up with Shinto. I don't know.
Now, of course, only a few Catholic and Evangelical churches see hell as a physical reality. Most protestants (as far back as Luther) and, I believe, the Orthodox Churches, see the whole caboodle in more symbolic and metaphorical terms. Heaven and Hell become psychological states, and in doing so, their geography melts away while the stuff we were taught atschool is revealed as poison.
Now, it’s all in the mind, and hell isn’t where you will end up, but how you feel. It can still be gloomy. I like Elliott's morose musing or Sartre’s depressing notion that ‘hell is other people’, but a virtual hell in the subconscious has no landscape and is of no interest to me here.
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| 'Hell is Other People'. |
Maybe, if it survives at all, hell isn’t as a counterpoint to heaven, but a horror that awaits us. There have been many 'worst centuries to be alive' in our history. The 400s and 1300s often get star ratings; however, we now seem keen to add to the list of potential culprits, ranging from nuclear armageddon, climate catastrophes, asteroid strikes, pandemics and sentient technology.
Not only that, but the means of introduction to these apocalyptic scenarios of potential doom and damnation has gone far beyond the crazed pulpit lectures in the village church or, in the last century, the battlefield artists of the First World War. The graphic impact of cinema and television has been around for some time, but video media are now omnipresent.
We know (but often close our minds to) the hells that we have already created, in places like Gaza and Darfur. You can even shape the new hellscapes in games. We no longer need the preacher to scare us or introduce us to the horrors that might await us, and which seem far more plausible than the idea that we might be rescued by superheroes.
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| Gaza |
The pic above is of Gaza, but it could have been Fasher in Sudan, or any one of many other places that haven't commanded the same attention of Western media. In short, the notion of hell was an invention that moved from being a tangible realm of fiery retribution to a psychological condition, and has become an indiscriminate horror. It is the present in some places now and is the future in many others, and from which no good deeds or psychological balms can save us. I wonder how reincarnation and rebirth work in that scenario?.