Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

104 Harrowing of Hell
See also Chick Publications; Church of Satan
For Further Reading:
Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. Vol. 1.
New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1949.
Kastenbaum, Robert, and Beatrice Kastenbaum.
Encyclopedia of Death. New York: Avon, 1989.
Harrowing of Hell
In Christian denominations that adhere to the
Apostle’s Creed, there is an unusual line that asserts
that, after Jesus was crucified, “He descended into
hell.” This line—obscure to most contemporary
Christians but an important piece of the new faith
to early believers—refers to the widely accepted
doctrine that Christ invaded hell during the period
between his death and resurrection.
As recounted in the Gospel of Nicodemus, a
document accepted on par with the other
Gospels until after the New Testament was
canonized, Satan arranged to take Jesus to hell
following his execution, only to have the plan
backfire. Technically, Christ harrows the Limbo
containing the Old Testament patriarchs, rather
than hell, as the patriarchs are merely being held
as prisoners rather than being tortured in a realm
of fire and sulfur. Rather than being imprisoned,
Jesus does battle with Satan and his minions,
defeats them, and frees everyone in hell, from
Adam and Eve to Moses.
The Gospel of Nicodemus was popular long
before the full development of the notion of
purgatory, which eventually supplanted the idea
of Limbo. Limbo had been necessary because
Christians of the first few centuries of the
Common Era imagined that only Christian souls
could go to heaven. This, however, creates the
problem of what happened to such righteous and
deserving individuals as the Old Testament patriarchs
(e.g., Abraham, Moses, etc.) who died
before the Christian gospel was preached Placing
them in a Limbo realm, from which Christ later
rescued them and conducted them to heaven,
solved this problem.
The story of the Messiah’s harrowing of hell
and rescue of infernal prisoners is actually older
than Christianity. In the pre-Christian Testament
of the Twelve Patriarchs, for example, the future
Messiah rescued captives from a hell ruled by
Beliar (Baal). Later compositions, such as the
Gospel of Bartholomew, the Gospel of Nicodemus,
and the Teachings of Silvanus, merely placed Jesus
in a role that had already been carved out in earlier
narratives.
From a broader perspective, the motif of a
human being descending to the underworld for
the purpose of rescuing someone’s soul is widespread
in world culture. In particular, in shamanic
cultures sick people will sometimes be diagnosed
as having lost their soul. The attending shaman
will then perform a ritual in which he or she enters
a trance state in order to seek out the lost soul,
which has often wandered off to the realm of the
dead (often an underworld). If the rite is successful,
the wandering spirit will be persuaded to
return, and the ill person will recover. This seems
to be the cross-culture archetype in which the
story of the harrowing of hell participates.
See also Purgatory; Underworld
For Further Reading:
Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New
York: Macmillan, 1987.
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of
Ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1964.
McDannell, Colleen, and Bernhard Lang. Heaven: A
History. 1988. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Turner, Alice K. The History of Hell. New York:
Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993.
Harut and Marut
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have lore
related to the lust of angels for human beings and
their subsequent transformation into demons.
Although the basic idea of spirit beings or demons
having sex with human beings is very ancient,
Judeo-Christian speculation on such ideas grew
out of two short, obscure verses in Genesis (6:2
and 6:4) about the “sons of God” taking to wife the
“daughters of men.” In these rather strange verses,
the expression “sons of God” was taken to indicate
angels. The traditional interpretation of these
passages is that these sons of God are fallen angels.
Islam’s version of this theme is a tale involving
two angels mentioned in the Koran, Harut and
Marut, although the Koranic reference contains no
allusion to these angels’ sexual misconduct.