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

108 Hell and Heaven
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Hell and Heaven
Every human society draws distinctions between
right and wrong. Contrary to what the human
heart might wish, however, adherence to the good
does not always bring reward, nor does evil always
result in an ignoble fate. Afterlife notions can
adjudicate, at least at the level of the imagination,
the inequities of this life by providing a realm in
which the righteous are rewarded and the wicked
punished. There are several ways in which this can
be structured.
In societies that postulate a process of reincarnation,
the righteous and the unrighteous can
reap the fruits of their actions in future lifetimes.
This possibility is most fully developed in South
Asian religious traditions, in which the principle
of karma—the moral law of cause and effect—
assures that even the slightest credit or debit in the
cosmic bankbook is balanced out before individuals
are permitted to close their accounts. In
Zoroastrianism and in the traditions influenced
by Zoroastrianism (particularly Judaism), the
dead are resurrected at the end of history, and
everyone judged by the Supreme Deity. Subsequently,
the righteous live in a renewed world, and
the unrighteous are snuffed out.
One of the more popular and certainly among
the best known “solutions” to the problem of how
to adjudicate right and wrong in the afterlife is to
postulate a realm of reward for the good (heaven)
and a realm of punishment for evildoers (hell) to
which souls go more or less immediately upon
death. This schema is often merged with a conception
of the universe that pictures the cosmos as
consisting of three levels: An upper world beyond
the sky (above the “heavens”) in which the gods of
light dwell; a middle realm occupied by humanity;
and a lower world beneath the earth in which gods
of darkness reside. In certain religious traditions,
particularly the familiar Western faiths, the god(s)
of light became good and the gods of darkness
became demons. A natural consequence of this
moral division is that the realm of reward was
placed in the upper world with god(s) and the
realm of punishment in the lower world with the
demons.
In the Christian tradition in particular, underworld
devils acquire employment tormenting the
souls of the damned. The popular association of
hell with fire appears to originate in the association
of hell with volcanic activity, during which
the underworld belches up liquid fire in the form
of molten lava. And, of course, the popular image
of heaven as a realm where the deceased have
wings and sit around on clouds is a direct result of
associating the abode of the righteous dead with
the upper world.
It should be noted that heaven and hell realms
can also be mixed with other possibilities. Thus in
popular Hinduism and Buddhism, for example,
the notion of punishment in hell worlds (and, to a
lesser extent, reward in heaven worlds) emerged to
supplement—rather than to supplant—earlier
notions of karmic punishment. Many of the
torments of Hindu and Buddhist hell worlds, such
as being tortured by demons, resemble the
torments of more familiar Western hells. Unlike
Western hells, however, South Asian hell worlds
are not final dwelling places. They are, rather,
more like purgatories in which sinful souls experience
suffering for a limited term. After the term is
over, even the most evil person is turned out of
hell to once again participate in the cycle reincarnation.
In the Christian tradition, the notions of
heaven and hell are mixed in a somewhat confused
manner with earlier ideas about the resurrection
of the body. The notion of resurrection—in which
the deceased person remains in the ground until
judgment day—was popular in Jesus’s lifetime,
and this is the notion of the afterlife that the
founder of Christianity taught. However, the
Christian tradition very early adopted the Greek
idea of an eternal soul that went to a realm of
punishment or a realm of reward after the body
died. Hence, resurrection in later Christianity
involves reuniting the soul, which obviously has to