Hell Is What You Make It

by Sam Thielman

I believed in Hell all my life until, I suppose, comparatively recently. I couldn’t tell you when it ended, all I know is that it didn’t last forever, despite what it says on the label. It has been very real to me in nightmares. When I was little, if an episode of a children’s cartoon had a demon or a scene in Hell in it, it was immediately turned off and the cartoon was subsequently banned. I don’t think my parents did this because they were especially strict—they understood I was scared. But no longer.

I don’t remember how I first learned about Hell, or where I first saw it depicted, I just know that it was there, fully-formed, much more available to me than Narnia or Tír nan Óg or even Heaven, because we believed it was a real place where your soul might go after you died, and where you would be alone. I was also scared of going to Heaven, because the idea of eternity frightened me, and then I began to feel that, if Heaven was truly good, the sort of vertiginous terror the idea of it gave me was merely a foretaste of Hell. 

I was here, a part of the fallen world, after all; someone born into sin and, without the intercession of Jesus, condemned to Hell already unless I died before I got old enough to be responsible for my own eternal disposition (twelve, I think?). So that fear of everlasting whatever—life, death, choose your poison—must have been part of that fallen-ness. Just stood to reason.

The word “Hell” is not present in the original texts of the Christian Bible. It is derived from the Anglo-Saxon hel or hele, which means to conceal, or keep secret, and has cognates among Germanic languages with Hel, the name of both the underworld in Norse mythology and of its ruling goddess. It’s a good translation: For Hell to be effective, it must be secret.

For Christians, the chief architects of Hell, the word replaces “Gehinnom” in the Masoretic texts that form the Jewish Tanakh and the basis of the Christian Old Testament (for more on Jewish ideas of the afterlife I humbly defer to Rabbi Dayna Ruttenberg, who published a new post on this topic while we were in edits). Gehinnom, more often Gehenna, is literally “the valley of Hinnom,” a place outside Jerusalem where worshipers of Baal or Moloch or some other disreputable party would “pass [a child] through the fire,” presumably as a blood sacrifice, at a place called Tophet—possibly a tophet. For many years this was (probably) misidentified as the Tyropoeon Valley, which first-century historian Josephus Flavius called “The Valley of the Cheesemongers,” for reasons lost to posterity.

There are few descriptions of Hell in the Bible proper but we do understand it as a place of unlimited and everlasting and often ironic torment. In a parable told by Jesus, an unnamed rich man, sent to Hell, begs Lazarus, the poor man he knew in life, for a drop of water. Lazarus is willing but unable to give it to him, and so, we assume, the rich man burns. We all deserved to go there, it’s important to understand that, and we were only being allowed to skate on our multitude of sins because we were being given a very generous get-out-of-Hell-free pass by a God who had only begrudgingly agreed to honor it and was looking for an excuse to renege. Lots of people are like that. My ninth-grade Bible teacher said that the unforgivable sin was “calling the work of the Holy Spirit the work of the Devil,” which must have been pretty convenient for him, since he regularly scared the bejesus out of us with his flights of theological fantasy. To suggest that he was doing this obviously godly work because he got pleasure from fucking with teenagers was, by his standards, to flirt with an eternity getting roasted over a spit by some guy with cloven hooves.  

Crucially, the main thing we know about Hell is that it is a place you can get to, especially if you’re not careful. Jesus could save you, but you’d better be grateful. Perhaps that’s why the Valley of the Cheesemongers was used to put the fear of YHWH into people—you knew where it was. Once, when I was a kid, a senior member of our church told me that he’d been asked by the elders of his own childhood’s strict Calvinist congregation whether he’d be willing to be damned for the glory of God. It was part of his Communicants classes, a course of study you needed to complete in order to become a member in good standing. (He said he figured the right answer was “yes” and couldn’t imagine his opinion making a difference in the scenario provided, so he agreed to spend forever in Hell and joined the church. He was considered something of an old crank by a lot of his peers but I liked him.)

The passage of time was assumed to be the worst possible thing. But the actual passage of time, up here on earth, has destroyed Hell completely. Christianity’s spread across the world has made The Bad Place into a sort of warehouse for monsters and fairies and evil spirits who don’t fit into Christian doctrine and can’t be ignored or left behind. It’s a problem that was already in the text: “Hell” refers both to Gehenna and to Sheol, which is simply the land of the dead—sometimes “the grave” or “the pit”—similar to Hades in Greek mythology, or, again, the Norse Hel, but the difference between this place and the land of divine punishment seemed clear enough to restore the name Sheol in the text when the King James Bible was officially revised in 1885. (There’s a great cartoon by Joseph Keppler from Puck showing a forlorn Devil sitting outside a boarded-up door while a number of his former tenants look smugly on from the merry banks of Sheol, having emigrated when news of the revision arrived in Hell from Canterbury.) 

Now, in the greatest syncretic traditions of my religion, most translations have just given up and agreed to translate “Sheol” as Hades. Maybe it’s Hell and maybe it isn’t. In the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, there seems to be a non-eternal waiting room called Hell where everybody who has died before the death of Jesus hangs out, waiting for him to show up and take them to Heaven. In this text, Hell has a voice, and he (it? What are Hell’s pronouns?) whines to Satan about not wanting to let Jesus in to rescue Abraham and the rest of the Bible heroes.

The literature of Hell has its basis in Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost; both had a good time helping new residents move in. In his poem, Dante is forced to descend into a deep pit by a ravening beast in “a dark wood,” where he meets famous figures from Greek myth (Cerberus, Medusa, the narratively useful Charon the Ferryman) and people who had pissed him off (Filippo Argenti, who helped his brother seize Dante’s property when Dante was exiled). With the addition of Botticelli’s map in 1490, this obscure region becomes much more knowable, and starts to take shape as the place it will come to be in the popular imagination: Not exactly the Plaza Hotel, in terms of amenities, but definitely a place where you could do some serious networking.

Milton expands on Dante: He borrows Greek names again (Hell becomes Tartarus) and Latin (Dante’s capital city of Dis becomes Pandæmonium), and prefers the name Lucifer to Satan. He also adds a number of demonic subordinates to round out his cast, drawing on supposed Sumerian deities like Moloch and Chemosh. Hell is now a place that preexists earth, where Lucifer is sent after rebelling against God, and whence he watches, jealously, as God bestows his favor on Adam. Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Perhaps Hell was always there, but it wasn’t always a torture chamber—did anyone else live there before the Devil and his angels and other servants? Further invention is required, and a horde of deities are just waiting around to add some color, stranded by some Byzantine expansion or other. The Egyptian goddess of justice, Ma’at, gave dog-headed god Anubis the ostrich feather she wore in her hair to weigh against the deeds of the recently dead; by the fifteenth century, Flemish painters had St. Michael filling in for Anubis and being observed by hordes of occasionally canine demons. 

And so Hell turns from a place of theological discourse into a sort of anti-fairyland, ruled over by a not-altogether-unsympathetic King Satan, where fears and nightmares, rather than dreams and wishes, come true. These additions were mostly permanent, thanks in large part to the influence they had on visual artists. Besides Botticelli there’s also Bosch and Breugel and of course Blake and Gustave Dore, and so on down through the ages. Harry Siegel conducted a swell walking tour of socialist cartoonist Art Young’s visions of the Inferno last month. Cerberus can be seen as Satan’s pet in Ub Iwerks’ 1929 short “Hell’s Bells,” an early Disney cartoon. Eventually, Hell becomes a punchline—a warehouse of pleasant gags for Looney Tunes shorts and cheap scares suitable for children, complete with half-assed classical references (there’s a dog-Charon in the Hell sequence from All Dogs Go to Heaven).

These are the things that have helped me to let go of Hell. You can’t stop believing in something by force of will; I may agree with you about various physical laws and properties but I still pray when I get scared or upset or even happy. But to have Hell expanded upon and populated has made it somewhere I might not mind so much to visit, and indeed visit regularly in my own imagination. It’s now a fun place—a sort of philosophical and folkloric amusement park. 

Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart and the Hellraiser movies and comics adapted from it took Blake to extremes: His Hell was ruled over by an inscrutable godlike creature called Leviathan and populated by, yes, sinners, but also a gentry composed of their wickedest members, called Cenobites, who could no longer distinguish pleasure from pain and simply sought novel sensations. I think that seems as likely as any other version. Alan Moore devised a whole culture for Hell in his contributions to Swamp Thing and Spawn comics; Neil Gaiman set several Sandman stories in the former, including one about two little boys sent there after being murdered at the same boarding school. That is perfectly consonant with my own experiences. Mike Mignola’s Hellboy is the piece of work that is probably closest to Dante or Milton out of all our contemporary literature: It is primarily an encyclopedia of folklore, all of it considered relative to Hell, which, when we finally arrive there in the book’s final storyline, turns out to be more a land of infinite imagination than of infinite torment. I’ll drink to that.

You can’t escape Hell by scaling the walls; ask any of the damned. Its power as a threat comes from its unknowability. If, however, you bring all the things you find scary or weird or threatening into the Pit, it turns out to be a very different place—one full of familiar faces and figures. And then, no longer secret,  it ceases to be Hell at all.

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