Go to Hell : A Heated History of the Underworld

by Chuck Crisafulli; Kyra Thompson

• ISBN13: 9781416906025
• ISBN10: 1416906029
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-09-20
• Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment

Summary

Close your eyes and picture -- just for a moment -- hell. Fire? Demons? Eternal torment?

Well, yes -- that's the place, in one very hot nutshell. But that's not all there is to the forbidding world beneath us. For a few

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Go to Hell?	p. 1
What the Hell is Hell?	p. 7
Where is Hell?	p. 56
What Goes on?	p. 104
Who's in Charge?	p. 157
Who the Hell is That?	p. 216
What do We Make of It?	p. 268
Final Note	p. 315
Bibliography	p. 317
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction: Why Go To Hell? Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. -- Dante AlighieriGo to heaven for the climate, hell for the company. -- Mark Twain There is one immutable fact of life: It does not last forever.And for as long as humans have been capable of pondering their own mortality, they have pondered most deeply upon one crucial question: What happens when life on earth is over?Around the globe, throughout the centuries, across all manner of cultures and religions, the answer to this question has been twofold: We go to heaven. Or we go to hell.The basic concept of a postearthly reward or punishment is one of the most enduring in all of human history, and it remains a bedrock tenet of faith in most modern religions. Some form of heaven is there for souls that have lived lives of essential goodness and for believers who have followed the dictates of their religion and embraced the will of their God. Hell is there to receive the darkened souls of sinners -- those who have caused pain and suffering among their fellow humans and who have turned their backs on their deity.But there is a strange corollary that accompanies this heaven/hell concept, one that has also endured through time, place, culture, and belief: Heavens have almost always been vaguely, sketchily defined as places of peace, happiness, oneness, comfort, or bliss, while hells, rife with twisted passions and bloody violence, have been meticulously mapped out almost inch by inch, with every torture and torment awaiting a condemned soul vividly imagined in excruciating detail.Heaven has been a place where mystery is part of the appeal, a place so wonderful it is literally beyond comprehension. And perhaps humans have not wanted to jinx any chances of getting into that place by appearing to be celestial know-it-alls.But we haven't shied away from hell. After a few thousand years of civilization, it seems fairly clear that humans have been, and remain, deeply, darkly fascinated with the place. We mortals have written about it, imagined it, painted it, filmed it, dreamt it, and debated its very existence with a level of specificity and a degree of passion rarely mustered in considering "the better place."It would seem that we humans want desperately to end up in heaven. But in the meantime, we can't get enough of hell.Maybe that's because, by nature, we feel a little closer to hell. Heaven is a place of perfected spirit. Hell is the final destination for corrupted flesh. There aren't too many of us who walk around feeling perfect, but just about everybody can think of a fleshly stumble or two to call their own. We may not be certain who the angels among us are, but we sure as hell can spot the wicked. And so hell -- from religion to religion and century to century -- has become a landscape where all our darkest, basest, most corrupted impulses run rampant. In Hollywood-speak, hell has proven to have some legs: it's got conflict, drama, villains, sex, violence, fire, darkness, torment, and ultimate justice -- everything we might demand and expect of our late-night entertainment.Which raises another interesting twist in hell's history. For as long as the place has been a focus of fear, it's also been a setting for wicked fun. Homer's descriptions of Hades in the Odyssey weren't intended as religious instruction; they were rip-roaring adventure tales. The mystery plays of the Middle Ages often made hell a crowd-pleasing showcase of vulgar slapstick. And today, when many of us still believe in hell as a very real place of final, eternal punishment, we can still root for a "Demons" sports team or watch an actor dressed as the devil hawk a brand of spicy salsa without feeling our souls are in particular peril. The proverbial Martian glancing upon our culture-in-general would observe that the hell we might hear about in churches coexists in an