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

Judgment of the Dead 139
and possessions; those who hung by their ears
listened to empty and vain speech and did not
listen to the Torah; those who hung by their
tongues spoke foolishly and slanderously;
those who hung by their hands robbed and
murdered their neighbors. The women who
hung by their hair and breasts uncovered
them in the presence of young men in order
to seduce them (Cohn-Sherbok 1987, p. 29).
At later points in this same account, sinners
were punished by scorpions and by being lashed
with fiery chains by angels of destruction. Heaven
is described with the same kind of vividness,
although its pleasures are far more restrained than
the tortures of hell.
See also Demons; Lilith; Sheol
For Further Reading:
Cohn-Sherbok, Daniel. “Death and Immortality in
the Jewish Tradition.” In Paul Badham and
Linda Badham, eds. Death and Immortality in
the Religions of the World. New York: Paragon
House, 1987, 24–36.
Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New
York: Macmillan, 1987.
Goldenberg, Robert. “Bound Up in the Bond of
Life: Death and Afterlife in the Jewish
Tradition.” In Hiroshi Obayashi, ed. Death and
Afterlife: Perspectives of World Religions.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992, 97–108.
Margolies, Morris B. A Gathering of Angels: Angels
in Jewish Life and Literature. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1994.
Mendenhall, George E. “From Witchcraft to Justice:
Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament.” In
Hiroshi Obayashi, ed. Death and Afterlife:
Perspectives of World Religions. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1992.
Nielsen, Niels C., Jr., et al. Religions of the World.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York:
Vintage Books, 1995.
West, James King. Introduction to the Old Testament.
New York: Macmillan, 1981.
Judgment of the Dead
The notion of the judgment of the dead has infernal
associations cross-culturally. In the Christian
tradition, the unsaved at Judgment Day are
thought of as being given over to demons who drag
them off to hell. The popular conception of hell is
that Satan’s minions have ongoing employment in
the form of torturing the damned in a kind of
underground smelting factory. This contrasts with
the view of early Christianity in which stern, righteous
angels, rather than devils, were so employed.
Deceased evildoers are also tormented by demons
in Hindu and Buddhist hell worlds, comparable to
the torments of Western hells.
Not all cultures differentiate between the afterlife
fates of morally good and morally bad individuals.
In traditions in which such a distinction is
made, the mechanism by which good souls are
sent to happy states and evil souls directed to
unhappy states can take place in different ways.
Sometimes this dichotomization occurs automatically,
as in South Asian traditions in which the net
effect of one’s accumulated karma propels the
departed soul to reincarnate in pleasant or
unpleasant circumstances. Similarly the religious
notion of metempsychosis, the process by which
souls enter a new body in the Pythagorean
doctrine as well as in ancient Druid and Irish literature,
is related to the belief in immortality and
indirectly implies a judgment on the fate of the
souls. In Zoroastrianism and in certain other religions,
the deceased must cross a bridge, which
presents an easy passage for good souls but which
is difficult for evil souls. Here, again, the mechanism
by which this occurs is impersonal. As the
name of the present entry, Judgment of the Dead,
implies, the determination of the fate of the dead
is often portrayed in more personal terms, in
which the deceased is brought into a kind of
otherworldly courtroom to have judgment passed
on her or his life by a divine or semidivine being.
Sources on the notion of a judgment of the
dead are rather meager for Mesopotamian civilization.
In ancient Egypt, tomb inscriptions indirectly
refer to an afterlife judgment during the Old
Kingdom. Religious texts in the Middle Kingdom
(e.g., Instruction for Merikare) are explicit about an
afterlife judgment for sinners, whose sins will be
laid beside them in a heap. In another Egyptian
religious text, the Book of the Dead, one finds
magical spells for protecting oneself from divine
judgment. According to this book, the deceased
recite a “negative confession” in which they must
declare that they have not sinned during life. The