Hellish Names
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The interior of the globe is compartmentalised into a number of regions of eternal punishment, each belonging to an existing or now obsolete religion. (The fact that a religion has fallen out of fashion does not, of course, eliminate the places of eternal punishment for those who sinned against that religion.)
Each separate hell has a certain similarity to all the others. The principal differences between them are the types of punishment. Some hells are areas of ice as well as of fire (Frigido and Inferno) while others have regions of eternal darkness in which moaning sinners wander but never make contact with each other. The Underworld of Greece, ruled by Hades and Persephone, has a river of fire but it also has a dreary grey expanse in which wandering sinners must forever meditate upon their crimes.
The officiating demons within each hell wear different types of uniforms, carry a variety of instruments of torture, and appear in innumerable fearsome aspects, but on the whole they all have a strong family resemblance.
Variations between hells include the routes by which sinners enter them and the judges who assess their sins. The approach to some hells is simple and efficient. Most modern religions have streamlined the process so that a man's or woman's sins are computerised throughout a lifetime, and if a sinner exceeds a specific allowance then he or she will find himself abruptly translated from life into eternal torment with little chance of parole. Other methods, past and present, are a good deal more complex.
Some hells are much simpler than others. That of Fiji is occupied only by Rati-Mbati-Ndua, who deals expeditiously with sinners by crunching them up with his sharp single tooth. Other hells, such as that of New Zealand, are populated by a great hierarchy of demons and monsters who not only deal with dead sinners but also meddlers with the affairs of the living. The perpetual mystery is that sin still exists even though it is rewarded by such miserable destinies.
The Greeks believed that Hades - a kind of Greek Limbo - was just below the surface of the Earth. Hades was an undergound world for all of the dead, but good souls could eventually leave and go on to the Elysian Fields. Pluto ruled Hades, and he was known to devise tortures which fit sins committed during life. The Greeks also had a lower Hell called Tartarus. Tartarus was a bottomless pit ruled by Kronos, who had been banished there by his son Zeus. There was no way to leave Tartarus, and it was a rather unpleasant place of eternal torture.
After death, Egyptian sinners found themselves in the Duat. At death souls would be judged by Osiris and Anubis; their heart was weighed to determine if they were good or evil. Passing this test allowed one passage to the fields of peace. (The Greeks later borrowed this idea for their own version of Heaven, the Elysian Fields.) Those who failed Osiris and Anubis' test had to spend an eternity in the Duat, where they were hacked to death and burnt, only to be reconstituted and sent through the same torture again the following night. Unfortunately, this lasted forever.
Mictlantecuhtli and his wife Mictecaciuatl ruled Mictlan, a dark and gloomy place. The Aztecs buried their dead with many of their earthly possesions (a similar practice to the Egyptians') to protect them and bribe Mictlantecuhtli and Mictecaciuatl. The larger the bribe for these gods, the more comfortable one's afterlife would be. Mictlan was seen more as a place of rest than one of flames or intense hardship.
The Romans' conception of the afterlife was something of a modification of the Greeks'. After death one would enter the underworld through caves, to be judged by Eita and his wife Proserpine. Souls who were judged good would take the right path to the Fortune Isles (based on the Greek Elysian Fields); souls judged otherwise were sent down the left path to Hell. In the Roman conception of Hell, demons tortured souls by throwing them into lakes of boiling gold, freezing lead, and iron shards. The soul was then reshaped into the form it would take in its next life.
The original Jewish conception of Hell was known as Sheol, where the souls of the dead existed in a place of nothingness, without punishment. Over time Sheol became the place of fire, or Gehenna, where there is no devil, and the ruler is God. Punishment would be weighted by the seriousness of the sins committed during life; some might escape the hell-fire after one year, while others might, after serving their time, be destroyed. The worst sinners, however, would have to stay there for eternity.
The Christian version of Hell is a place of fire and brimstone. The ruler of Hell is Satan; originally an angel, he refused to serve God and was cast out of Heaven. There were many other angels exiled to Hell along with Satan. When God created humankind, Satan immediately began his career of tempting people to do evil; he was soon filling Hell with souls gone bad, and he continued to devise more and more creative temptations. Christian Hell is seen as a place where souls endure endless agony, and once a soul enters Hell there is no chance of escape.
The Apocalypse of Paul describes, in its own way, the sufferings of hell for the early Christians: He talks of enormous worms with two heads, three feet long, which gnaw at the entrails of the damned; of burning wheels which turn a thousand times in a day; of white hot razors; of a pestilential abyss where those who have not been baptized must rot. It is the fiery gehenna of which the Bible speaks, which will be the punishement for the wicked at the end of the world.
In Northern Europe, where cold is the worst thing, hell takes on this aspect; it is called gwern (swamp), or oer, oerfel or rhew (cold and icy).
In India the Isha Upanishad speaks of 'these worlds which are designated sunless, since they are completely in impenetrable darkness: those who have killed, their souls go there after death'. The Hindus imagined twenty-one hells where sinners suffer hunger and thirst, are devoured by wild beasts, roasted, sawn into pieces, boiled in oil and crushed to pulp. Buddha continues, 'they are harnessed to enormous carts and made to walk long distances through flames; others are forced to plunge their heads into a cauldron of boiling water; others are thrown into great fires'. Hell is only temporary for Buddhists, but it can last 576 million years. There are eight hells of heat and eight hells of cold, and each group is surrounded by sixteen lesser hells. It is here that the damned tear off each other's skin with metal claws, and iron elephants crush their victims and so on.
There are as many Buddhist views of Hell as there are branches of the religion. Many believe that life is Hell and one continually relives it through reincarnation; one can only escape this cycle by achieving enlightenment, or Nirvana. Other Buddhists believe that there are eight Hells where souls go between incarnations; each Hell requires that a soul spend a certain length of time there, to be determined by the type of sins committed. Certain Tibetan Buddhists believe that the souls of sinners are reincarnated as rodents, and that the life of a rodent is that soul's Hell. Others believe that between lives the soul goes through a forty-nine day Hell during which the soul is tested through torture by Yama-Raja (the Lord of Death) and his demons. Yama-Raja judges whether a soul goes to Heaven or Hell by counting its good and bad deeds. Hell, however, is not a place where one spends eternity; once a soul has repented or served its time in Hell it is reincarnated.
The eighteen levels of the old Chinese caste system were carried over into the Taoist 18-level Hell, whose master is known as Yan-Wang. Two Soul Messengers Yan-Wang and the god of Heaven come to fetch the soul of a dead person, but they first have to present their credentials to the Door Gods who ensure that their owner's time has come. The sinner then has to undergo interrogation by the God of Walls and Ditches, who may treat him quite kindly or administer a good beating. This ordeal is followed by appearances before a series of judges, each of whom executes a particular punishment before passing the sinner on to the next judge.