A history of hell, from ancient Egypt to Islam

And all of you can go to hell," my former colleague snorted. She looked down the table and gave me a particularly frigid look before stomping out of the room.At least I do not work for that college anymore, I can only say in reflection. The phrase "Go to hell" is one of those prosaic terms we reserve for those particularly obnoxious moments in life when we wish painful ill on someone we know. But what is this place called hell that we so glibly assign our colleagues to? Well, that answer depends on whom you ask.For the ancient Egyptians, the unpleasant afterlife was not really a hell, but a complete destruction. They had a paradise, which they called the Land of the BeautifulWest, to which the noble of the working classes might aspire.

There one had the joy of working at manual labor in the hot sun for all eternity, which sounds bad enough, but one could be buried with clay figurines which would come to life in the next world and do your labor for you. The wicked did not even get the chance to labor in the afterlife. Instead, when they died, they were called before the god Osiris, and their heart was weighed on a scale against the weight of a feather the feather of Maat, or justice. The righteous would be found worthy and would enter eternal life. But the wicked would be destroyed, and their soul would be consumed by the destroyer god Sobek, a divine crocodile who ate the sinners. In one sense, the Egyptian afterlife sounds rather humane, with a boring heaven and no hell. But for their neighbors in ancient Iraq,classic Mesopotamia, it was a rather different show. In pagan Mesopotamia, everyone went to Sheol when they died, a nasty place where there was only clay to eat and bad water to drink, and powerful kings had to sit with the pathetic and all gained little. In ancient Mesopotamia life, agriculture and politics were hard, and so we are not surprised that their afterlife was equally grim. Many civilizations paint their afterlife as a glorified extension of their experience in this world. For the classical Greeks, there was only one place one could go, which was Hades, the land of the dead, named for the god who presided over it. The Greeks imagined civilized life on this earth being always connected to a city, and so the afterlife was about the same. Like any city on earth, the eternal realm had its good and bad neighborhoods. The great heroes might have a pleasantafterlife,......