The Go-To-Hell Lady
The Quest for the Historical Hell
How did hell originate? Whose idea was it anyway? Scientists are baffled,
historians uncertain, and theologians, as usual, are clueless. N. K. Sandars, in
the introduction to her English translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, comments,
"It would be an over-simplification to say that where the Egyptians give us the
vision of heaven, the Babylonians give the vision of hell; yet there is some
truth in it. . . It is a depressing vision of heavy moping voiceless birds with
draggled feathers crouching in the dirt." Enkidu, on his deathbed, relates to
Gilgamesh a dream in which a black bird seizes him and carries him away to the
palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness:
"There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay
their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no
light, they sit in darkness. I entered the house of dust and I saw the kings
of the earth, their crowns put away forever; rulers and princes, all those who
once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old."
Elsewhere in Mesopotamian literature, hell is described as a place of constant
thirst, as a city whose lord feeds on mud and drinks it by the cupful and
barrel-full.
All very well, you say, but what does hell mean to us today? How can I use my knowledge of hell to win friends, influence people and discover interesting sexual partners?
Hell Today, Gone Tomorrow
The modern 20th-century sophisticate realizes that hell is not so much a place
you go to but more of a place that persons construct in the here and now. Take
Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit -- please!:
"So that's what Hell is. I'd never have believed it. . . Do you remember,
brimstone, the stake, the gridiron?. . . What a joke! No need of a gridiron;
Hell, it's other people."
"Hell in a Very Small Place"—a history of the French-Indochina war. "Life in Hell"—by Matt Groenig, a cartoon of all things. Dachau, Buechenwald, Dresden, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Serbo-Croatia, Rwanda, Guatemala. Do I put my finger right on the nub? Do I have to spell it out for you? I sincerely hope not.
The Hell of Intensely Hot Dung
Due to the jazzy notoriety with which Dante and Milton embellished the concept
of hell, some folks might suspect that hell is merely a dead white European
thang. But the truth is stranger than fiction, and the evidence is not all in.
The evidence for Oriental hells is overwhelming, although scholars still don't
know for sure whether the idea of hell originated independently in the East, was
diffused from a single point of origin in the Near East, or is an archetype of
the collective unconscious that manifests itself in all bodies of religious
thought around the world. A fourth possibility exists, namely that hell actually
exists. Sound farfetched? Let's go to the scriptures.
Here we have Genshin, an evangelist in the Pure Land Church (Buddhist) of
medieval Japan, and a forerunner of the True Pure Land Church:
"Outside the four gates of this hell are sixteen separate places which are
associated with this hell. The first is called the place of excrement. Here,
it is said, there is intensely hot dung of the bitterest of taste, filled with
maggots with snouts of indestructible hardness. The sinner here eats of the
dung and all the assembled maggots swarm at once for food. They destroy the
sinner's skin, devour his flesh and suck the marrow from his bones."
This, by the way, was translated by Professor Philip Yampolsky of Columbia University, who used to teach a graduate seminar in Zen. You may recall that when the Japanese exterminated Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries, they suspended Christians upside down over pits of dung and left them there until their brains burst.
Motoori Norinaga, the eminent 18th-century Shinto theologian, concurred that Hell was a stinky place. At their death, he stated, all humans go to the underworld, the land of Yomi, "an exceedingly filthy and bad land." Yomi is the Hades-like land into which the goddess Izanami descended, as graphically described in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. Norinaga, being Japanese, even wrote a poem about it:
The Hell You Say!
Whatever your walk in life, wherever you may roam, whether you be Buddhist or
Baptist or Jew, hell may be coming your way, whether you think much about it or
not. In any case, you must admit, as I am sure you will agree, that the concept
of hell has irrevocably enriched the English language. Without it, we would
never have had such gems as:
