Heaven

• 1. Introduction

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  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero turns to his companion Enkidu with a hard truth. "Who can go up to heaven, my friend? Only the gods dwell with Shamash forever." For the ancient Mesopotamians who told that story, heaven was sealed shut to mortals. The sky above was a series of domes, each cut from a different precious stone, and ordinary people had no path through them. Yet across other times and places, that same word would come to mean something a person could enter, even something a person could carry inside them. Heaven is a religious or supernatural place where deities, angels, souls, saints, or venerated ancestors are said to originate, be enthroned, or reside. Often it is described as the highest place, the holiest place, a paradise set against Hell or the Underworld below. Some traditions guard its gates with strict standards of goodness, piety, or faith. Others say it is simply divine will. How did one idea travel from a stone vault no human could pierce to a state of the soul, a garden of rivers, a relationship rather than a location? Who gets in, and who decides? And why have cultures separated by oceans and centuries kept arriving at strikingly similar pictures of a layered sky?

• 2. Vaults Of Precious Stone

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  Three domes, sometimes seven, covered the flat Earth in the Mesopotamian sky, and each was carved from a different precious stone. The lowest dome was jasper, home of the stars. The middle dome was saggilmut stone, where the Igigi dwelled. The highest and outermost was luludanitu stone, personified as An, the god of the sky. The planet Venus was Inanna, goddess of sex and war. The Sun was her brother Utu, god of justice, and the Moon was their father Nanna.

  Funerary evidence suggests some people believed Inanna could grant special favors to her devotees after death, even though all souls otherwise shared one fate. When a person died, their soul went to Kur, later known as Irkalla, a dark shadowy underworld deep below the earth. A person's actions in life had no bearing on their treatment there. Still, mortals reached toward the gods through oracles and omens, and through temples seen as channels between Earth and Heaven. The Ekur temple in Nippur was called the Dur-an-ki, the mooring rope of heaven and earth, and was widely thought to have been built by the god Enlil himself.

  The Hittites who came after held a divided picture. Some deities lived in Heaven, while others lived in remote places on Earth, such as mountains where humans rarely went. The Song of Kumarbi records a violent succession in the sky itself. Alalu reigned in Heaven for nine years before his son Anu was born, and Anu was later overthrown by his own son, Kumarbi. Of Bronze Age Canaanite views almost nothing survives. The ruins at Ugarit, destroyed around 1200 BC, yielded no answers, leaving the first century Greek author Philo of Byblos as a faint possible echo of older Phoenician belief.

• 3. A Closed Sky Opens

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  The Hebrew word shamayim, meaning heaven, is plural, and scholars read that plural as a sign the ancient Israelites pictured layered heavens, much like the Mesopotamians. The phrase "heaven of heavens" in Deuteronomy 10:14, 1 Kings 8:27, and 2 Chronicles 2:6 supports that reading. The Hebrew Bible divides the universe into heaven and earth, sometimes adding a third realm of sea or a vague land of the dead.

  Prophets in the Hebrew Bible sometimes glimpse Heaven, as in 1 Kings 22, Job 1 and 2, and Isaiah 6, but they hear only God's deliberations about Earth and learn nothing of Heaven itself. The dead are described as resting in Sheol rather than ascending. Only two figures seem to be exceptions. Enoch, in Genesis 5:24, is described as having been taken by God. Elijah, in 2 Kings 2:11, ascends in a chariot of fire. According to the scholar Michael B. Hundley, both texts are ambiguous, and neither explains what became of the man afterward.

  Things shifted during the Second Temple period, from about 515 BC to 70 AD, when the Hebrew people lived under Persian, Greek, and then Roman rule. Their views of death absorbed those cultures. The immortality of the soul came from Greek philosophy, and the resurrection of the dead is thought to trace to Persian cosmology. By the early first century AD these two ideas, once incompatible, were often blended. The notion that the soul belongs in Heaven and that Earth is a temporary test grew popular in the Hellenistic period, from 323 to 31 BC, and some Hebrews began to see Heaven as the eternal home of the righteous dead.

• 4. The Kingdom Among Us

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  "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." That line from the Lord's Prayer, recorded in Matthew and in Luke 11:2, sits at the center of a debate scholars still have not settled. The Gospels of Mark and Luke speak of the Kingdom of God, while Matthew more often writes Kingdom of heaven, a phrase thought to be more acceptable in the author's late first century setting. Both are believed to mean the same thing.

  Modern scholars agree the Kingdom of God was essential to the teaching of the historical Jesus, yet none of the gospels record him explaining what the phrase meant. The likeliest reason is that it needed no explanation. According to the scholars Sanders and Casey, Jews in early first century Judea believed God reigns eternally in Heaven, and many also believed he would establish his kingdom on earth, driving out the Romans. Other scholars, including Wright, argue Jesus taught a kingdom both present and still to come, with his death and resurrection as the climax of that message.

  Jesus told his followers to prepare for the kingdom by living moral lives, urging a perfectionism found throughout the Synoptic Gospels and concentrated in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 to 7. He promised a reversal in which the last will be first and the first will be last. That teaching recurs in the call to be like a child, in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16, the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard in Matthew 20, the Parable of the Great Banquet in Matthew 22, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15.

• 5. From Place To Presence

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  The New Testament Greek word ouranos applies first to the sky, then metaphorically to the dwelling place of God and the blessed. Traditional Christianity has taught that Heaven holds the throne of God and the holy angels, though in varying degrees this is read as metaphor. In traditional terms it is a state or condition of existence rather than a spot in the cosmos, the supreme fulfillment of theosis in the beatific vision of the Godhead. For most Christians it is also the abode of the redeemed dead, usually a temporary stage before the resurrection and the return to the New Earth.

  The resurrected Jesus is said to have ascended to Heaven, where he sits at the Right Hand of God, and to be destined to return in the Second Coming. Several figures are described as entering Heaven while alive, including Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus after his resurrection. Roman Catholic teaching holds that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was assumed into Heaven and titled the Queen of Heaven. In the second century AD, Irenaeus of Lyons recorded a belief, drawn from John 14, that those who see the Saviour dwell in different mansions, some in the heavens, others in paradise, others in the city.

  Pope John Paul II pressed the idea furthest from geography. Heaven, he said, is "neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. It is our meeting with the Father which takes place in the risen Christ through the communion of the Holy Spirit." The English word still keeps its physical root when the stars are called lights shining through from heaven, or when an astronomical object is named a heavenly body.

• 6. Gardens And Conditions

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  Rabbi Yaakov offered an image in the Mishnah. "This world is like a lobby before the World to Come; prepare yourself in the lobby so that you may enter the banquet hall." Rabbinical Judaism discusses the afterlife, sometimes called olam haba, the World to Come, far less than Christian thought discusses Heaven. By the time of the rabbis, two ideas had taken hold among Jews, a Greek-derived immortal soul and a Persian-derived resurrection of the dead, combined so the soul departs at death and returns to the body at resurrection. Around 1 AD the Pharisees believed in an afterlife and the Sadducees did not. Judaism holds that the righteous of all nations have a share in the World to Come. According to Nicholas de Lange, it offers no clear teaching about the individual's destiny, since "the future is inscrutable" and "the only certainty is that each man must die."

  The Qur'an and Hadith speak of seven samawat, heavens, cognate with the Hebrew shamayim, marked at the end of the seventh by Sidrat al-Muntaha, a large enigmatic Lote tree. Shi'ite sources record Ali naming the seven heavens, beginning with Rafi', the least heaven. The righteous reach Jannah, the Garden, described in physical terms as a place where every wish is fulfilled at once, where dwellers wear costly apparel, share exquisite banquets, and recline on couches inlaid with gold or precious stones. Islam rejects original sin and holds that all are born pure, so children go to paradise regardless of their parents' religion. Entry comes only through God's mercy, and the more good deeds one has done, the higher the level of Jannah. The Qur'an names it variously, including Al-Firdaws, Jannatu-Adn, Daru-s-Salam the Abode of Peace, and Jannatu-l-Khuld the Garden of Immortality.

  Three later movements turned the garden inward. The Ahmadiyya view reads much of the Qur'an's imagery as metaphorical, with Mirza Ghulam Ahmad teaching that the soul gives birth to a rarer entity, an embryonic soul that takes shape as a person learns to enjoy spiritual pleasures over carnal ones. The Bahai Faith calls heaven a spiritual condition of closeness to God and hell a state of remoteness. Bahaullah likened death to birth, writing that "the world beyond is as different from this world as this world is different from that of the child while still in the womb of its mother." Mandaeans, by contrast, name a luminous place, Alma d-Nhura, the World of Light, where the Great Living God Hayyi Rabbi and his uthras dwell, and the source of the Great Yardena of Life.

• 7. The Layered Sky Worldwide

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  Yaldabaoth, the lesser god or Demiurge of the Gnostic codex On the Origin of the World, created seven heavens, each ruled by one of his Archons, with an eighth heaven above where benevolent higher divinities dwell. At the end of days those seven heavens collapse on each other, and Yaldabaoth's heaven splits in two, sending the stars falling from his celestial sphere. The same instinct to stack the sky appears far from any Gnostic text.

  The Chinese concept of Tian, Heaven, derives from the supreme deity of the Zhou dynasty, who after conquering the Shang in 1122 BC identified Tian with the Shang deity Shangdi. The character for heaven originally depicted a person with a large cranium, and Heaven was said to see, hear, and watch over all people, blessing those who please it and sending calamities on those who offend it. Confucius warned, "He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray." Mozi took a more theistic view, casting spirits as angels carrying out Heaven's will and championing universal love, jian'ai, the teaching that Heaven loves all people equally. By the later Han dynasty, under the influence of Xunzi, the concept had become largely naturalistic, though the ruler still performed annual sacrifices, usually slaughtering two healthy bulls, at sites like the Temple of Heaven in Beijing.

  The Aztecs, Chichimecs, and Toltecs of the Nahua peoples built the heavens into thirteen levels, the most important being Omeyocan, the Place of Two, ruled by the dual lord Ometeotl. In Polynesian creation myths the universe is an egg or coconut split between earth, the upper world of gods, and the underworld. Maori versions number the heavens from as few as two to as many as fourteen, with realms like Hauora, where the spirits of newborn children originate, and Naherangi, where the great gods live under Rehua. A Tuomotuan chief drew the nine heavens in 1869, dividing them left and right, each tied to a stage in the earth's evolution, with the first murder, the first burials, and the first canoes built by Rata shown in the third division.

• 8. Escaping The Wheel

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  Good karma can carry a being into a deva realm, a heaven, but the stay never lasts. In Buddhism these realms are still part of samsara, the world of suffering, and once the good karma is spent the being is reborn elsewhere, as a human, an animal, or another being. The Buddhist focus lies past the heavens, on escaping the cycle of rebirth and reaching nirvana. Buddhist cosmology stacks the planes vertically, heavens above the human realm, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings below. According to Jan Chozen Bays in her book Jizo: Guardian of Children, Travelers, and Other Voyagers, the realm of the asura was a later addition inserted between the human realm and the heavens. Deva realms accepted across traditions include the realm of the Four Heavenly Kings, Trayastrimsa ruled by Indra, the Yama heaven where Maitreya resides, and Brahmaloka ruled by Mahabrahma. In the Mahayana worldview lie pure lands beyond samsara, the most popular being Sukhavati, the pure land of Amitabha Buddha, where birth assures eventual Buddhahood.

  Hinduism treats heaven as ephemeral, tied to the physical body, just another name for pleasurable and mundane material life. Above the earthly plane sit other planes, including Swarga Loka, the Good Kingdom, the general name for heaven, where most Hindu Devatas reside with Indra, king of the Devas. Because every heavenly dweller remains bound to the cycle of birth and death, the wheel breaks only through self-realization by the Jivatma, which is Moksha, liberation and final communion with Brahman. In the Vaishnava traditions the highest heaven is Vaikuntha, above the six heavenly lokas and outside the mundane world, where eternally liberated souls reside with Lakshmi and Narayana.

  Jainism maps the universe as a human figure standing upright, with South at the top. The Deva Loka, the heavens, sit at the symbolic chest, layered to reward souls of varying karmic merit, while the Narka Loka, the hells, lie beneath the waist. The pure souls who reach Siddha status rest at the very southernmost end, the top of the universe. Sikhism rejects an otherworldly heaven outright. Kabir, in the Guru Granth Sahib, writes, "I do not know where heaven is," and declares, "The Company of the Holy is heaven," something lived here and now. Two later systems return heaven to the inner life and the imagination. Theosophy, founded mainly by Helena Blavatsky, gives each religion its own heaven in the upper astral plane, a region called Summerland, with souls recalled to Earth after about 1400 years and a final heaven, Devachan, reached billions of years later. In Inside the Neolithic Mind from 2005, Lewis-Williams and Pearce argue that cultures across time describe the same tiered heaven so consistently that the structure may reflect real neural activations during altered states of consciousness. Two of the most famous visions still come from fiction, in Dante Alighieri's Paradiso and John Milton's Paradise Lost.