So what do you think of when you think of the idea of hell? You’ve probably got an image of a floor made of boiling lava, and horned demons gleefully poking poor burning sinners with pitchforks. I’ll just start off by saying, that image is not from the Bible. It’s much more an image that comes from Dante’s Inferno, and medieval paintings, but we’ll get to that here in a bit.
Our modern image of hell includes the ideas that it’s underground, it’s dark, it’s fiery, it’s full of dead people’s souls, there’s also demons, and the actual devil himself, that people are being actively tortured, and that it lasts for all of eternity.
So how in the hell did we humans come up with the idea of hell as one of the options for a way to spend your afterlife?
Aeneas visits the underworld.
Another painting of Aeneas exploring the underworld. Looks pleasant there.
The Gehenna valley outside modern Jerusalem. I’m pretty sure that is not one of the places I would like to live. ‘Where do you live?’ ‘Uh, Gehenna.’ ‘Yeah, I’m not going to come visit.’
Boccacio’s painting of the 9 levels of hell
The 9 levels of hell, according to Dante.
Satan snacking on Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.