Table of Contents
The word hell has a surprisingly ordinary address. Before it was a place of eternal fire, Gehenna was a valley on the south side of Jerusalem, remembered for child sacrifice. Around it, every culture on this site has its own lower world: Hades for the Greeks, Hel for the Norse, Xibalba for the Maya, the night journey of Ra for Egypt.
On this page I start in that valley, then go down into the other underworlds, and end with the sources that say hell was never a place at all.
A valley outside Jerusalem
The prophets name the valley and what happened there:
And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.
Jeremiah 7:31 (KJV)
See Valley of Hinnom and Jeremiah 7. The Qur’an uses the same name for the fate of Iblis and his followers:
I will certainly fill the Gehenna with you and with all those among them who follow you.
Qur'an 38:85
See Iblis -> Azazil. On Vatican Cover-Up the point is made that the fiery hell most people picture owes more to Dante’s Inferno than to the early texts, which speak of Gehenna and Hades.
The underworlds
In Mesopotamia, Ishtar descends to the realm of her sister Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld, and is trapped there. See Ishtar. In Greek myth Zeus banishes his father Cronus to Tartarus, a dark prison below the earth; see Zeus. On Atlantis, Edda und Bibel Hermann Wieland places the entrance to Hel in the farthest west, where the sun sets and the volcanoes were. The Norse brothers Baldr and Hodr are read as opposites:
The weeping, the light of Baldr, all point to him being a Sky God, and Höðr the opposite, a god of the underworld.
Crecganford, Baldr and Hodr, at 32:11
See Baldr and Hodr in Norse and Danish tellings. In the Popol Vuh Hun Hunahpu is killed by the Lords of Xibalbá, and the world tree reaches down into nine levels of the Maya underworld.
Egypt’s underworld is a journey, not a prison. Anubis guides the dead through it; see Anubis. The dead travel by boat:
the Egyptians believed in a solar bark that was a boat that would carry the deceased through the underworld
DeDunking, A claimed Japan and Egypt coffin link, at 12:43
See DeDunking on a Japan and Egypt coffin link and Religion in ancient Egypt, where death is a passage through the underworld toward the Field of Reeds. Osiris rules there:
Through his Resurrection Osiris brought Divine Truth and New Life, lighting the Underworld as Ra lights the Heavens.
Path of the Sun God, Ra from chaos to the night boat, at 25:23
See A narration of Ra and the Osiris rite.
Tartarus also has a modern magical reading. On Hell and the Hexagram the speaker compares the Titans that Zeus locked in Tartarus to the primal forces under the floor of the Vault of the Adept in the Golden Dawn, held down by the magician who stands on the seal above them.
Where hell came from
James Churchward has his own answer. On The Sacred Symbols of Mu he argues that polytheism, idolatry, a devil and hell only appear after the motherland’s control is gone, when the Egyptian priesthood spread a devil named Set and a hell of everlasting flames.
Oahspe treats hell as a spiritual state that the soul falls into and can climb out of:
As God and heaven are of the resurrection, so are satan, hell and the devil of the declension.
Oahspe, God's Book of Eskra
See God’s Book of Eskra and Oahspe’s False Gods, where fallen gods are cast into hell for eventual redemption.
Hell inside us
The Aquarian Gospel takes the last step:
God never made a heaven for man; he never made a hell; we are creators and we make our own.
Levi H. Dowling, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ
See The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ. The channeled pages agree. On 4th Dimension the hell realms and the heavenly realms are both levels of the fourth dimension. And on Transcending Guilt and Conflict Rosenberg describes the belief that we are only our bodies as the hell that keeps us bound.
Related pages
- Valley of Hinnom
- Iblis -> Azazil
- Anubis
- Ishtar
- God’s Book of Eskra
- 4th Dimension
- After death
- Hell and the Hexagram
For every page I tagged with hell, see the Hell tag archive.
