A Short History of Hell and the Crabby Old God Who Sends You There

by Herbie Brennan

We discovered Hell 6,000 years ago. At that time it was called kur-nu-gi-a, the Land of No Return, but it was Hell all right. The dead lived in darkness, fed on clay, and were "clothed like birds with wings"—presumably that means feathers—according to the ancient histories of the world's first civilization (Budge).

The world's first civilization sprang up in what's now southern Iraq, an area of the Middle East often referred to as the Fertile Crescent. It was a pleasant place to live: sunny, warm, and (since we'd now invented farming) with enough food for everyone. Dying was a change for the worse that left most people bitter. Those who managed to get out of Hell—fortunately very few by all accounts—expressed their resentment by eating the living.

Once it occurs to you, Hell is one of those ideas that's very hard to shift. Certainly it hadn't shifted much by the time the Greek civilization arose. By then we'd decided Hell was a gloomy underworld populated by insubstantial shades with nothing much to do except pine for the good old days. Essentially the same idea was prevalent in Ancient Rome: Hell was a gloomy shadow-land reached by a one-way crossing of the River Styx.

The old Norsemen were the first to call this miserable realm Hell—or, more accurately, Hel, after its miserable ruler. Same old place (a gloomy, subterranean hall inhabited by shivering, shadowy Specters), but by now we were adding some of the more interesting details. The roof of the hall was made from snakes, which dripped poison on those wading through rivers of blood below. If the poison and the wading made them thirsty, all they got to drink was goat's piss.

But it served them right—the only people condemned to Hel were oath-breakers and those wimps who died of disease or old age. Heroes ended up in Valhalla with the gods, fighting happily amongst themselves by day before enjoying a communal feast of pork and mead by night.

You'll notice descriptions of Hell were fairly consistent up to this point. It was subterranean, gloomy, and chill (much as Philip Pullman described it in the last book of his trilogy, in fact, all dingy mist and listless, shivering dead; we'll come back to Philip Pullman later). But all that was about to change. The people who changed it were the Jews.

Officially, early Judaism didn't seem to have a Hell, or any afterlife at all for that matter. Scripture (specifically Ecclesiastes 9:5) says bluntly, "The dead know nothing and they have no more reward." But whatever the scriptural position, the people themselves clearly believed in survival. King Saul banned necromancy—raising the dead by magic—a piece of legislation that suggests a) necromancy must have been widely practiced and b) if you were calling up the dead, there had to be somewhere they could be called up from.

The place where the Judaic dead existed at that time seems to have been Sheol, a realm of shades much like the other underworlds we've been examining. You wandered listlessly down there, cold and bored, with nothing to look forward to except the outside possibility some necromancer might take a fancy to you. (Sounds a lot like Pullman's version, actually—except the best his dead had to look forward to for most of history was, if they were lucky, a lost philosopher with a few missing fingers and a knife.)

But Sheol didn't stay that way. As Jewish guilt began to take hold, the idea of judgment crept in and the place was divided into three compartments in order to house, respectively, the good, the bad, and the irredeemably mediocre. The place that housed the bad was called Gehenna.

How Gehenna got its name is interesting. Back here on Earth, the Valley of Hinnom (Ge Honnom in Hebrew) had a particularly gruesome history. In the bad old days, it had been a favorite spot for child sacrifice to a singularly unpleasant deity called Moloch. Oddly enough, Jerusalem was established quite close by. As the settlement turned into a thriving town, the rubbish had to be burned somewhere. The authorities decided Ge Hennom would do very nicely.

So the valley became a wasteland of perpetual smoke, flame, and stench, an ideal model for Gehenna, where it suddenly seemed fitting for the wicked to be tortured endlessly by fire. For the first time in human history, Hell started to warm up.

Copyright © 2007 by Herbie Brennan. All rights reserved.