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260 Torment of the Damned
jokes and cartoons involving hell’s residents. This
contrasts with the view of early Christianity in
which stern, righteous angels, rather than devils,
were so employed. It might be noted, however,
that deceased “sinners” are also tortured by
demons in Hindu and Buddhist hell worlds,
similar to the torments of more familiar Western
hells. A major difference is that, unlike Western
hells, 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 of reincarnation.
The torment of the damned in Christianity
and later in Islam was anticipated by such gloomy
afterlife abodes as the Jewish Sheol and the Greek
Hades. Although the cultures of the ancient world
from which the modern West descends did not
imagine human beings as having an immortal
soul, dim and devitalized “shade” or “ghost” of
each individual continued to exist in a dull, cheerless
afterlife world. These ancient afterlives were
pale shadows of earthly life, making death a thing
to be dreaded rather than looked forward to. The
Mesopotamian afterlife—described in an oft-cited
passage from The Epic of Gilgamesh in which
Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s servant and companion,
relates a dream of the other world—is fairly
typical: “There is the house whose people sit in
darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat.
They are clothed like birds with wings for covering,
they see no light, they sit in darkness. I entered
the house of dust and I saw the kings of the earth,
their crowns put away forever” (Sanders 1972, 92).
The underworld was dark, dusty, and unpleasant.
The deceased wandered aimlessly about, with
nothing but dirt to eat. In these afterlife realms, no
distinction was made between the treatment of
the just and the unjust. The chief distinction was
between the state of those who receive proper
burial and memorial services, and those who do
not. When these matters were attended to properly,
the soul rested easy. When neglected, the dead
became agitated ghosts who haunted the living.
Most of the traditional cultures of the world
visualize the universe as a three-tiered cosmos of
heaven, earth, and underworld. Heaven is reserved
for deities, most of whom reside there. Living
human beings occupy the middle world. The
spirits of the dead reside beneath the earth,
perhaps as a result of the custom of burying
corpses in the ground.
The notion of a heaven world where the righteous
dead reside after death seems to be rooted in
ancient Greek tales about heroes who were so
admired by the gods that they made them immortal
and inducted them as citizens of heaven, rather
than allowing them to suffer the common fate of
humanity, which was to reside beneath the earth
in Hades after death. It is not difficult to see how
this basic notion might develop, by the time of
early, Hellenistic Christianity, into the idea that the
souls of Christian dead would be immortalized
in heaven, and the souls of non-Christians
condemned to Hades. (Contemporaneous Jewish
ideas of the afterlife clustered around the notion of
resurrection, rather than heaven and hell.)
However, it did not seem to be enough to
simply condemn non-Christians—and particularly
active, persecuting enemies of Christianity—
to a bland, boring afterlife. Thus the ancient
underworld that, originally, was the common fate
of humanity became a realm of torture in which
unbelievers were tormented for eternity. The
result was a bifurcated afterlife that provided two
realms, one in which the righteous are rewarded,
and another in which the wicked are punished.
The basic schema of heaven for the believers and
hell for unbelievers carried over into Islamic
conceptualizations of the afterlife.
See also Hell and Heaven; Underworld
For Further Reading:
Cooper, Jerrold S. “The Fate of Mankind: Death and
Afterlife in Ancient Mesopotamia.” In Hiroshi
Obabyashi, ed., Death and Afterlife: Perspectives
of World Religions. New York: Greenwood Press,
1992.
Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New
York: Macmillan, 1987.
McDannell, Colleen, and Bernhard Lang. Heaven: A
History. 1988. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Sandars, N. K., transl. The Epic of Gilgamesh. 1960.
Revised ed. New York: Penguin, 1972.
Turner, Alice K. The History of Hell. New York:
Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993.
Zimmer, Heinrich. Philosophies of India. New York:
Bollingen, 1951.