Hell

• 1. Introduction

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  Hell is one of the most contested concepts in the history of human belief. Across thousands of years and dozens of cultures, people have wrestled with a single question: what happens to the wicked after they die? The answers range from a frozen lake at the center of the Earth to a shadowy cavern where the dead eat nothing but dry dust. Some traditions insist the punishment never ends. Others say it lasts no longer than twelve months. A few argue it is not a place at all, but a feeling you are already living through right now.

  What drives this diversity? Why do some religions need an eternal hell while others find the concept unnecessary? And how did a single Old English word, first written down around 725 AD, come to carry the weight of so many different ideas? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Word With Deep Roots

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  Around 725 AD, scribes writing in Old English first recorded the word hel to describe a nether world of the dead. That single syllable had cousins across every branch of the Germanic language family. Old Norse hel named both a location and a goddess-like being. Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German, and Gothic each had their own versions. All of them trace back to a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root, a feminine noun meaning roughly "concealed place" or "the underworld."

  The deeper ancestry runs further still. Linguists connect that Proto-Germanic root to the Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to cover" or "to conceal." The Latin word celare, meaning to hide, is a relative, and so is early Irish ceilid, which also means "hides." The English word cellar shares the same distant ancestor.

  When the Germanic peoples converted to Christianity, the existing word and its relatives were reinterpreted to carry specifically Christian meaning. Related compound words carried their own freight. One family of compounds, reconstructed as pointing toward "one who travels to the netherworld," later became associated with witches and necromancers in Old English usage. Another compound linked the idea of the underworld to concepts of the mind, drawing on roots related to "wits" and "understanding" in Old English, Old Saxon, and Gothic. Hell, even before it described any specific theology, was a word bound up with concealment, travel underground, and the limits of human reason.

• 3. Before the Bible

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  As early as 1500 BCE, Egyptian belief held that the dead would be judged, and if found guilty, punished for their crimes. At death, a person faced a tribunal of forty-two divine judges. Those who had lived in accordance with Maat, the goddess representing truth and right living, were welcomed into the heavenly reed fields. Those found guilty were thrown to Ammit, called "the devourer of the dead," and condemned to a lake of fire. Crucially, the punishment ended in annihilation, not endless suffering. The ancient Egyptians had no concept of eternal torture. Divine pardon at judgment remained a central concern.

  One ancient text, the Tale of Khaemwese, describes the torment of a rich man who lacked charity and compares it to the blessed state of a poor man who died alongside him. Scholars believe these Egyptian depictions of punishment may have shaped medieval Christian images of the inferno through early Christian and Coptic writings.

  The Sumerian picture was bleaker in a different way. Their afterlife, known as Kur, was a dark, dreary cavern deep underground where the dead continued a shadowy imitation of earthly life, regardless of how they had behaved. All souls went to the same place. A person's conduct in life made no difference. Family members would pour libations into a clay pipe set in the grave so the dead could drink, because in Kur the only food available was dry dust. The goddess Ereshkigal ruled there, and the entrance was believed to lie in the Zagros Mountains, guarded by the gatekeeper Neti behind seven gates.

  One of the oldest detailed descriptions of hell as moral punishment, however, appears in the Kathavatthu, an early Buddhist text written around 250-100 BCE. It frames hell as a state produced by a bad action, directly linking punishment to the concept of moral cause and effect. Notably, this conception required no god. Hell, in that formulation, was a consequence, not a sentence handed down by a divine judge.

• 4. Fire, Ice, and the Many Shapes of Torment

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  Dante Alighieri set his Divina commedia in the year 1300 and gave readers the most elaborately mapped hell in European literature. Nine concentric rings lead deeper into the Earth and deeper into punishment until, at the center of the world, Satan himself stands trapped in a frozen lake called Cocytus. That image of ice at hell's core is not as unusual as it might seem.

  Buddhist descriptions, and Tibetan Buddhist accounts in particular, feature an equal number of hot and cold hells. The Apocalypse of Paul, dating from the early third century, already included cold in Christian depictions of hell or purgatory. The Venerable Bede's "Vision of Dryhthelm" from the seventh century continued that tradition, as did several twelfth-century visions including "St Patrick's Purgatory," "The Vision of Tundale," and "The Vision of the Monk of Eynsham."

  The Islamic hell, Jahannam, runs in the opposite direction: it is divided into seven layers filled with blazing fire, boiling water, and a variety of torments. The seven gates of Jahannam, mentioned in the Quran, prompted Muslim commentators to develop a corresponding system of seven stages, each named by one of the seven different terms the Quran uses for hell and each assigned to a different category of sinner. The highest level, jahannam itself, functions as a kind of purgatory reserved for Muslims, while the deepest levels are reserved for hypocrites and polytheists.

  In the Chinese tradition, Diyu is a maze of underground levels ruled by Yanluo Wang, the King of Hell. Legends vary on the exact number of levels, with some counting as many as eighteen. Each court deals with a different category of sin. Murder is punished in one court, adultery in another. Most accounts agree that after a soul has atoned and repented, Meng Po gives that soul the Drink of Forgetfulness before sending it back into the world for rebirth.

• 5. Eternal or Temporary

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  Whether hell lasts forever is one of the sharpest fault lines running through comparative religion. The Council of Trent, in the fifth canon of its fourteenth session, taught that damnation is eternal. The 1993 Catechism of the Catholic Church defines hell as "a state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed" and states that "the chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God." Cardinal Vincent Nichols, identified in the source as the most senior Catholic in England and Wales, observed that "there's nowhere in Catholic teaching that actually says any one person is in hell."

  Pope John Paul II, speaking at a public audience in 1999, said that the images of hell in scripture "show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God" and described hell as a state rather than a place.

  The Seventh-day Adventist Church reads the same tradition differently. Adventists teach that the dead lie in a state of unconscious sleep until the resurrection and that after the millennium the wicked will be permanently destroyed by the lake of fire, which Revelation 20:14 calls "the second death." Jehovah's Witnesses hold that the soul ceases to exist at death entirely, and that Gehenna, unlike Sheol, holds no hope of resurrection.

  Jewish tradition adds yet another variation. Rabbinic thought, drawing on the Kabbalah, generally holds that the maximum stay in Gehinnom is twelve months, after which the soul ascends to Olam Habah, the world to come. Maimonides went further, declaring that the hells described in rabbinic literature were pedagogical inventions designed to encourage respect for Torah. He taught that the souls of the wicked would actually be annihilated rather than punished.

  Zoroastrian eschatology imagines a sequence of three saviors arriving at thousand-year intervals, after which Ahura Mazda destroys evil and resurrects tormented souls to perfection. Even the wicked are ultimately redeemed. The Persian system pictured a bridge spanning hell over which the dead must pass; the virtuous cross safely while those who did evil fall.

• 6. Hell Without Fire

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  Not every tradition requires punishment at all. The Serer religion of West Africa rejects the general notion of heaven and hell entirely. In Serer belief, acceptance by the ancestors is as close to heaven as one can get, and rejection becomes a kind of hell: the soul of the dead must make its way to Jaaniw, the sacred dwelling place of the soul. Those who lived in accordance with Serer doctrines can make the journey; those who cannot become wandering souls, but they do not burn in hellfire.

  In Yoruba religion, the irredeemably wicked are confined to Orun Apaadi, the "heaven of clay potsherds," while the good and charitable continue in the ancestral realm called Orun Baba Eni. Sikhism teaches that heaven and hell are not afterlife destinations at all but spiritual states available in the present life. Guru Arjan described people entangled in emotional attachment and doubt as dwelling in the most horrible hell, now, on this Earth.

  For the ancient Mesopotamian tradition, morality was simply irrelevant to what came after death. The Sumerian underworld, Kur, made no distinctions. During the Third Dynasty of Ur, what mattered was not how a person had lived but how they were buried; those given sumptuous burials fared better, while those given poor burials fared worse.

  Ainu religion presents a further wrinkle. Missionary John Batchelor recorded that some sources described a hell below ground for sinful people, but this belief does not appear in Ainu oral tradition. What Ainu belief does consistently hold is that the soul of the deceased becomes a kamuy after death, and that a soul belonging to someone who was wicked, committed suicide, was murdered, or died in great agony might instead become a ghost called a tukap, haunting the living until it achieves the fulfillment denied to it in life.

• 7. Hell on the Page

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  John Milton opened Paradise Lost in 1667 with the fallen angels, led by Satan, waking in hell after their defeat in the war in heaven. Milton's hell is a passive prison from which the demons plot their revenge through the corruption of the human race. The poem returns to hell at several points, making it one of the earliest long works in English to treat the geography of the underworld as a serious literary subject.

  Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 play No Exit gave the concept a secular philosophical form. Sartre was not a religious man, but his interpretation of a hellish state of suffering produced the idea that "hell is other people." Arthur Rimbaud had moved in a different direction with A Season in Hell in 1873, using the concept to examine his own suffering in poetic form.

  C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, published in 1945, borrows its title from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell from 1793 and takes its narrative inspiration from Dante. Lewis portrays hell as an endless, desolate twilight city upon which night is slowly falling. The night, in his telling, is actually the Apocalypse. Before it arrives, anyone can escape hell by leaving behind their former selves and accepting heaven's offer. A journey to heaven then reveals that hell is infinitely small: nothing more or less than what happens to a soul that turns away from God and into itself.

  Dante's own guide through the Inferno was the Roman poet Virgil, who had himself written an underworld into the Aeneid, where Aeneas descends into Dis to visit his father's spirit. Virgil cannot guide Dante through heaven, however, because as a virtuous pagan he is himself confined to Limbo at hell's edge, belonging neither to the damned nor to the saved.