It’s the month of Halloween, the world has logged its hottest temperatures in millennia, and evil is all around us. No better impetus, it seems to me, than to spend some time gazing into the maw of the inferno…
Most of the world’s cultures have an idea that good behavior in life is rewarded by a good venue in the afterlife, whereas bad behavior is repaid with time—perhaps all time—to come in a very bad place. And most of the world’s cultures are a little fuzzy on the details of where that good place is: it’s in the sky, it’s off to the west where the Isles of the Blessed meet the sunset, it’s, well, not anywhere near here. See the closing frames of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series concluding film The Return of the King, and you’ll get the idea.
As to the bad places, however, those cultures tend to be quite specific. Wherever there is an idea of hell, it is usually matched by a very real landscape, one that shares features with the places in which the people who hold those ideas live. A resident of medieval Norway, for instance, was surrounded by stories of a hell that was icy, with no possibility of ever getting warm. A resident of ancient Mesopotamia, a desert land, was regaled with tales of fire and unending heat, a climate rather like Baghdad on a June day. (On which point the words of Mark Twain are apt: “Heaven for climate, hell for company.”)
Hell corresponds closely to earth, in other words. Hell is a place. Hell is many places.
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