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

110 Hellhole
History. 1988. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Turner, Alice K. The History of Hell. New York:
Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993.
Zimmer, Heinrich. Philosophies of India. New York:
Bollingen, 1951.
Charon, Hell’s ferryman in Greek mythology (Dover
Pictorial Archive)
hell, in which good people and sinners are rewarded
or punished according the degree of their noble
deeds or sins. One of the most well known examples
of the latter is Dante’s Inferno. Dante presents a
picture of a complex, nine-layered hell. Virtuous
but unbaptized souls reside at the top, suffering
only the emotion of hopelessness. At the very
bottom of hell, undergoing the worst punishment,
are those who committed the very worst sin, which
in Dante’s ethical schemata is treason. Ranged in
between is a moral hierarchy of sinners, each experiencing
a punishment appropriate for their crime.
Dante’s heaven is somewhat different. Although
there are concentric spheres of light and nine levels
of angels, righteous souls are not ordered according
to a hierarchy of virtue. The case is different in
other visions of the afterlife. Mormons, for
example, believe in a hierarchically ordered heaven.
See also Dante Alighieri; Purgatory; Underworld;
Zoroastrianism
For Further Reading:
Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New
York: Macmillan, 1987.
McDannell, Colleen, and Bernhard Lang. Heaven: A
Hellhole
Hellhole is a common expression for a place that
is miserable and oppressive, lacking in cleanliness,
order, and basic comforts. A run-down hotel in a
bad part of town, for instance, might be referred to
as a hellhole. A hellhole can also be a place noted
for its illegal and immoral practices, such as a
sleazy bar.
Hellhole also refers to an item of contemporary
urban folklore that was briefly popular in the
early 1990s. According to an article, supposedly
translated from a piece in the Finnish newspaper
Ammennusastia, geologists researching the
makeup of our planet’s crust in Siberia drilled
deep into the earth. Microphones were then
lowered into the shaft they had created. They were
startled to hear countless millions of people crying
out in pain and misery. As reported in a Trinity
Broadcasting newsletter:
A geological group who drilled a hole about
14.4 kilometers deep in the crust of the earth
are saying that they heard human screams.
Screams have been heard from the
condemned souls from earth’s deepest hole.
Terrified scientists are afraid they have let
loose the evil powers of hell up to the earth’s
surface. “The information we are gathering is
so surprising, that we are sincerely afraid of
what we might find down there,” stated Dr.
Azzacov, the manager of the project in remote
Siberia. (Ship of Fools website)
Many members of the team refused to
continue the work. A later embellishment of the
story was that luminous vapors escaped from the
hole, forming a glowing, batlike creature (a bat out
of hell, so to speak). The words “I have conquered”
appeared in Russian in the heavens.
The Trinity Broadcasting Network broadcast
the tale at least three times, and sent out a story
about the hellhole to their Internet mailing list. A