Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Hell
religion
Table of Contents
Introduction
Mesopotamia
Egypt
Greece and Rome
Iranian and Zoroastrian eschatology
Judaism
Christianity
Islam
Hinduism
Buddhism
Modern attitudes
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 Condemned in Hell, fresco by Luca Signorelli, 1500–02; in the Chapel of San Brizio in the cathedral at Orvieto, Italy.SCALA/Art Resource, New York
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. Mesopotamia
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. Egypt
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.
Hades and Persephone in the underworld, interior of a red-figure cup, Greek, from Vulci, a town of the ancient Etruscans, c. 430 bce; in the British Museum.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum
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.