The Myth of Hell

Juan A. Caballero Prieto

The Myth of Hell: How it is Inside Us, from Where it can Build our Souls

My first note on this course was: You never know until someone says their own name. The thought struck me because it is true that you can never know what someones name is until they say it, but also because myth is very much the same way: until it is told, we do not know it, and the truth of it we cant verify. Instead, what myth does is tell us something about the storyteller; it reveals his or her nature in ways that only the story can tell. It is not that myth is a lie then, it is a Freudian slip of the soul of man. During this course, Hell has been at the forefront of every discussion, been the butt of every joke, served the cause of good and evil, and has arisen feelings of anger or peace depending on the notion, or the mood, of every individual in the class. Our journey has taken us from ancient Sumer and Gilgamesh to the modern world on the wings of ancient Greeks, Romans, Christians, Muslims, Jews; people like Dante, Milton and CS. Lewis have been our story tellers, and our professor, our psychopomp, the transgressor of boundaries without whom we could not have taken the journey. Initially, the trek seemed scholarly enough, though, as I read, the subject of my studies become not so much the history or the readings, but rather, how those concepts applied to me as a person and, in retrospect, to all of us. I will explore how Hell is a myth of the individual, a place of suffering for the bettering of the soul, a katabasis necessary and preliminary to an anabasis of the inner self. I will show that Hell, as we understand it, is the extrapolation of individual belief; and though we think of it as inexorably religious, it stemmed from individual souls. As we progressed through this course, we found first its individuality, then its generality in religion, and later its individuality once more in Pop Culture; thus now that Hell has found little room in the minds of the religious due to the cruelty they themselves created, it has taken root in Popular Culture not as a new phenomenon, but rather, as a return to its proper place; not as an outwardly expression of belief, but an inwardly expression of self-suffering necessary to better ourselves.

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I find that like Eve, we must transgress the boundaries set for us in order to obtain further understanding. In that process, the old self dies, and we become anew in what we gain, unable to return to our former state. I shall descend on my own journey, through the suffering associated with writing, reading, struggling; I shall wrestle with thought and understanding to bring about my notion of hell, of life. Hell is the struggle, and Gilgamesh, our first reading, knew it better than most. The Ancient Greeks began plays with the most important word in them; thus the Odyssey of Homer opens with in reference to the man, husband, hero that Odysseus is, and as precursor to his struggle to find his place in life. The Iliad opens with , ire, the anger of Achilles, also a preview of his doings. Hesiod opens his Theogony with , from the Muses; indicating that his work is an inspiration of the divine. In the same manner, I shall begin my telling of the myth of hell with a key word: (a word we now use as agony), the struggle.

Hell as Myth: Stories of Complex Thought Struggle is indeed what all of our stories, and especially the Epic of Gilgamesh begins with; why these deeds are worth proclaiming at all is expressed to us thus: This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story [sic]. A man of knowledge and writing indeed; the story is worth telling because this man attained a level of understanding higher than the average human being, and yet, as remarkable as this was, Gilgamesh was almost perfect, things were easy to him. The young king was proud and his lust [left] no virgin to her lover, neither the warrior's daughter nor the wife of the noble. Then, the gods created Enkidu, a rough man who lived in the woods. The Epic of Gilgamesh addressed the nature of humanity: are men beasts made civilized, or are they the creation of an unknown entity, already perfect? The epic addresses another point: that of the civilized man vs. the one who discovers civilization after much wandering in the wild. Time and time again we are told of Empires besieged by nomadic tribes, the mobile attacking the settled;

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shepherd Abel vs. agriculturalist Cain. However, Enkidu is like a god in the sense that he has suffered, suffered sexuality, suffered rejection, suffered personal loss in that rejection. Enkidu has been enlightened through suffering, the struggle, an agony, and he now marches towards Gilgamesh. Enlightened Enkidu, unable to return to the simple life of a Wildman, decides to go to the city and challenge Gilgamesh; the young king is baffled at a dream he has, yet his mother interprets the dream as if Enkidu will become Gilgameshs best friend. As Enkidu the spit of Gilgamesh grows in power, he approached Uruk to challenge the king, the two men wrestled, and Gilgamesh won the day; they were friends from then on. Gilgamesh, now established as the strongest of men, finds in Enkidu a problem: his friend is sad, for he has lost his power, lost his family, lost his match with Gilgamesh. Now, the king wants to avoid this depressive state, and for that he has to make a journey, find the greatest foe, in the deepest forest, and defeat it. The monster is Humbaba, the forest is the Land of Cedars. Despite his better lot, Gilgamesh is jealous of Enkidu; his friend has one thing the king does not, suffering and sorrow. Suffering gives meaning, sorrow gives us purpose, and Gilgamesh needed to defeat the one that could kill him in order to gain it, he needed to go through hell; it was in that conversation prior to his departure, that the king found he needed to mark his name upon the stone, and if he were to die, he would still be famous in the mere attempt, for no man can clamber to heaven. Only the gods live for ever with glorious Shamash, but as for us men, our days are numbered, our occupations are a breath of wind. Gilgamesh must also become a God, as Enkidu is, and that is not possible without suffering. The theme will play time and time again in all of our stories; suffering is a means to Godhood, a conduit of purification that burns away the mortal flesh to reveal the immortal soul. Thus, seeking to know himself, Gilgamesh along with his friend (or psychopomp) Enkidu descends to the forest in order to struggle against Humbaba. The king of Uruk will yet make another descent after Enkidu dies; he, being afraid of death, seeks eternal life. It is important to note that after Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh does not find him in the underworld, but on the mountains of the gods. A guardian of the mountain pass questions Gilgamesh, the child of the gods, as to his reason for being

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there. The king of Uruk replies he wants the body of Enkidu, and he is allowed to pass; then he ascends to heaven, and Shamash finds disturbing that a mortal is in the presence of the gods. From there, Gilgamesh is sent into more suffering, a journey to find Utnapishtim and obtain the secret of eternal life, because of my brother [Enkidu] I am afraid of death, because of my brother I stray through the wilderness and cannot rest. Finding Utnapishtim and inquiring of eternity the god replies:
There is no permanence. Do we build a house to stand for ever, do we seal a contract to hold for all time? Do brothers divide an inheritance to keep for ever, does the flood-time of rivers endure? It is only the nymph of the dragon-fly who sheds her larva and sees the sun in his glory. From the days of old there is no permanence. The sleeping and the dead, how alike they are, they are like a painted death. What is there between the master and the servant when both have fulfilled their doom? When the Anunnaki, the judges, come together, and Mammetun the mother of destinies, together they decree the fates of men. Life and death they allot but the day of death they do not disclose [sic].

Gilgamesh asked Utnapishtim for the secret of eternal life, and the god tells him the story of the flood. After Utnapishtim and his family were saved, he and his wife were made gods by Enlil, and Gilgamesh would not enjoy the same honor. The tale is worth the time it took to tell it in its expression of the necessity to suffer in order to become something better. Gilgamesh would return to Uruk with a flower that made men young again, though it too would be lost, this one to a snake. The myth, like any other, can be interpreted in various ways, but one of the prevalent themes is that there is no way to turn back the clock, no remedy for death, and though men, through hope, may feel young again, this too will be lost to the thief that is time. Gilgameshs epic is the story of a man and his suffering, his hell. The story told of men who were sons of the gods, who had to cleanse their mortality to become immortal, and could only be called to godhood by the gods they worshipped.

Hell as Fact: From Polytheism to Monotheism As I continue my descent into hell, the struggle to write this essay deepens. Suffice it to say that the other myths we have read represent the Gilgamesh story fully. However, the descent to the Underworld proper is told to us in the tale of Innana, the wife of Dumuzi, the Sumerian form of Tammuz, god of vegetation, fertility, and the Underworld. Innana descends into the Underworld and then returns,

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breaking the laws of nature. With her escape from hell and army of undead comes with her, so that she may take vengeance upon her husband. Just as Gilgamesh wondered about death, so did Innana. Both of them had loyal friend-servants who save their lives in their descents, though we remain to see Enkidu die in the Gilgamesh epic. As we move on to the world of the Greeks from Ancient Sumer, the stories take on a much more accented individual tone. Descent myths proliferate (or simply survive in more numbers) in this period. The neutrality of Hell seen in Sumer also remains constant as Odysseus, Hercules, Orpheus, Alcestis, Psyche, Jason, and many more, have to descend to Hades, but all for different reasons and due to their own personal problems. Hell then is individual; it cannot be replicated by others. Of course, as Sumer has Enlil, Enki and Anu as their three most important gods who divide the world amongst themselves, the Greeks have Zeus, Poseidon and Hades. Hades is merely the ruler of the Underworld, where the dead go. As the heroes descend, it is only natural that they meet the ruler of it. The individuality of the Greek journey to Hell is common to all only in the fact that it is a destination to which men and women travel. However, the individuality of the punishment is telling of their suffering, not of a common human theme of Heaven and Hell. I have argued before that Hell is less important to polytheistic religions because they allow for multiple views on belief while adhering to a common set of ritualistic rights of passage. All Greeks believed in the gods, though the myths told about them could vary according to the individual; to the travellers and thieves there was Hermes, to the handymen and cunny there was Athena, to the warriors there was Ares. These individual beliefs were united in the belief of Zeus as supreme god, Poseidon as the ruler of the sea and earthquakes, as well as horses, and Hades as ruler of the Underworld. In the same way, early Judaism seems to have cared little for hell during its polytheistic state. Etymology stands with us, for the names that represent the concepts of Hell have meaning, and that meaning doesnt tell of a general hell; it tells us of Judaisms neutrality toward that place: Sheol (the

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grave), Elohim (princes who are sons of God1), Rephaim (a dweller in the grave that is Sheol), etc. Ancestor worship, as we have learned in this class, was a concept accepted in, shall we call it, ProtoJudaism; this concept however, was rejected, as we first have record of it, by Abraham, who rejected his idol past and was commanded by the one God to follow Him. The terms, of which we have seen some examples above, then were extrapolated from individuality to generality. I am not saying that religion takes away the individuality of men, though many cults have been accused of doing just that; but that many gods permit the individual beliefs of men so long as they participate in common rituals; while the One God permits only belief in Him as those same rituals are being practiced. Abraham had only one God, and he, as Gandalf would say to us through the world of the Lord of the Rings, does not share power. It is this inability to be anything other than the Supreme Being that makes Hell change. Religion found something common to us all, and provided it with a connotation of generality associated with the belief in one god. YWHW, or El, expressed that those who believed would be saved. It is very clear that early on, the definition of Hell is vague. Abraham himself asks of God: Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked? The philosophical question demands a fair answer. Gods punishment is deterred, but suffering as a means of creating a better being (Gods way to make us god-like) will eventually be superseded by suffering as an end; individual Hell as a means to achieve deification became general Hell as the end for those who did not behave in life. Hell was no longer the way to a better man; it became the place to which the disobedient were condemned forever. As Abraham travelled from Sumer to Canaan with this new belief, Greece and Rome would remain individualistic in nature; their Hell, as it was described, was the lack of mens honor and their inability to perform great deeds. The Greeks emphasized the individual, know yourself and nothing in excess, were two of the phrases stamped at the temple of Delphi. Pindar writes that brief is the growing time of joy for mortals, and brief the flowers bloom which falls to earth shaken by grim fate. Things of a

According to Ben Moses Maimonides (Chapter II), write of The Guide for the Perplexed: Elohim is a homonym, and denotes God,angels, judges, and the rulers of countries, and that Onkelos the proselyte explained it in the true and correct manner by taking Elohim in the sentence," and ye shall be like Elohim" (Gen. iii. 5)

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day! What are we and what are we not. Mans a shadows Dream.2 Polytheistic Romans thought the same way: it did not matter who you believed would save you, only that you behaved well. Written in Rome, very early during the transition from Republic to Monarchy (29-19 BC), Virgils Aeneid, tells the story of the beginning of the great city after the fall of Troy; the belief is that men go through Hell, though from the ashes can rise greatness. The famous words "Audentis Fortuna iuvat"3 (Fortune -personified as a goddess- favors the bold) are also symbols of the blessings that can be obtained from individual gods. The Romans indeed, like the Greeks, were predominantly individualistic, and believed that Hell is this life, and the suffering we must endure to become worthy of our own salvation or deification. In direct response, the Romans became Stoics, individuals who stood apart from their circumstances, and were only responsible to their beliefs and their honor. This tradition would be challenged when, fully matured, Judaism emerged in the time of Tiberius Caesar into the world of Rome. As we had left it, Judaism was only a mutant, a one in a million rise out of the healthy cells of polytheism that took on its own shape. Abraham, its founder, passed on his beliefs to his sons Isaac and Jacob. Jacob himself would wrestle with God to find meaning and, his hip broken, was able to ascend the ladder of Heaven. Now named Israel, his son Joseph would be sold to Egypt, initiating a chain of events that would culminate in ten laws written by God himself. The first one, of course, stated that you shall have no other gods before me.4 Notice however, that God does not say there are no other gods, but simply that there are no other gods before me.5 There were other gods, but their rejection by YHWH as secondary and incapable of blessings that were good to humanity rendered them obsolete. Equally, the sacrifices offered to this god were not for His appeasement, as with Sumer, Greece, Rome, and ProtoJudaism, but for the remission of human sins. If we could be saved by the mere act of animal sacrifice,
2

As Translated by Edith Hamilton in The Greek Way. Compare to the quote from the Epic of Gilgamesh above. Gilgamesh tells Enkidu the same thing when the best friend fears going into the forest to fight Humbaba; it is only in this life that we can prove ourselves worthy of the gods presence 3 X.284 4 Exodus (lit. the road/journey out) 3:20 5 Ibid. Cursive added for emphasis. During our course on the Byzantine Empire, presented by Professor W. Lindsay Adams, which was marked with Christian schisms and the eventual break between the Catholic, Coptic and Orthodox Christians, he kept repeating the same words, as if they had some mystic meaning. I have realized, thanks to this class, that our polytheistic past is simply too rooted into our subconscious to avoid

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why do we need suffering? The most important question of all time is posed as: What is Hell, if suffering is only the will of an everlasting God who will save you if you repent of your wrong deeds? The explanation of what this Hell was, would lead humanity to rethink suffering, or rather the failure to bear it properly, as the means by which you will go to Hell, a think that had now become an end in itself. Thus, if Hell is a place of suffering as payment for sins, Heaven must be a place of joy as payment for good deeds. Until now, Heaven did not really exist, as we understand it; it simply wasnt needed. We could say that Heaven is a result of monotheistic belief in Hell. The individual and his Hell were superseded by Gods Heaven and His Hell. No longer allowed to vary in thought, the Orthodoxy of religion became the measuring tool by which men and women could attain worth, and during the third and fourth centuries after the birth of Christ Christianity rose to the religion of choice of the Roman Empire. Out of this period6 came the rise of Christianity with its Hell and its Heaven. New scriptures were written, a new witness to the mercy of God in giving us these two places, a New Testament. In it, prophets were no longer saying that man was an individual deserving of his own way, but a part of a common group, a society. Salvation was no longer an individual thing, but as sheep, under a shepherd, we followed the course marked for us to a green pasture of eternal joy.7 The Supreme God recognized our individuality, for Christ said when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, [that] the kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you; yet our individuality is His, as we form part of a whole, a community. God is all of us; or rather, God is the combination of our individuality. As Christianity arose and the Roman Empire took on it, the rise of Hell as we know it today took place. After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, in the onset of the Middle (or Dark) Ages, men and women were too busy trying to stay alive to question the status quo, to think for themselves; to try to have a good life as poverty, disease, and flat-out bad luck, became the norm. In the 7th century, the third religion to have this view arose from the dusts of Arabia. Islam would follow in the footsteps of the

6 7

33-325 CE; from the death of Christ to the Council of Nicaea Remarks inspired by post-exodus times in Psalm 23 and Mark 17

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new Judaism and its schism, Christianity. The world would become part of one of these three religions and its offshoots, and the individual would be lost forever in the depths of a Hell designed to have no escape from it.

Hell Redeemed: The Individual and the Rise It took a thousand years for humanity to see the rise of the individual again. Hell had become common to us all as punishment, a scare tactic. It is no wonder that our next writer titled his individual view of Hell as Commedia; it was ironic, even comedic, that the very tool which was designed to make people better, had become the method of punishment for those who made mistakes. Sometime between 1300-1321 CE, Dante wrote of a descent to Hell, his individual descent to Hell. It is no surprise that he uses the tools of the Greeks and the Romans: Virgil is his psychopomp, myth is his playground, and gruesome punishment his means of irony. Dante descended to the deepest and most recondite corners of Hell, and it seems he is to be punished and condemned forever and yet, he is not. Dante is saved. The Devil and Hell are but tools of punishment; Christ, the means by which men may ascend back to Heaven.8 However, though Dante uses the archetypal figures, they are but tools, never the end; he shows readers that Hell is there, and so is a weeping Satan,9 but that we can save ourselves if we but follow the path set by Christ.10 Notice the path, for Hell is a place from which one can escape in Dantes mind. The popularity of the literature is expected; people coming out of the Dark Ages saw hope in suffering, and danger in orthodoxy. Dante said that we could be saved without the dogmatic view of the church, that we needed only follow Christ in our ascent as an example of good living. The Renaissance would see some of the greatest minds of all time arise to explain the natural world around us once again. Humanity found its individuality, but also its mercy, and thus we began to question the natural order in which the world had fallen during the Christian struggle for generalities induced by its one Supreme Being. The concepts of Purgatory came into being, and our pity towards
8 9

See the last Canto (XXXIV) Canto XXXIV.54-55 10 Canto XXXIV.120-140

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those who, in vain, suffered in Hell became a problem in religion that needed to be addressed. In many ways, Miltons Hell is a response to that. Women and children are absent in his Hell. In the early 16th century, Martin Luther would question the values of the Catholic Church, resulting in his excommunication in 1520. This disassociation with a Supreme Being who was so good that He created Hell and its inescapability, becomes overridden by the seemingly superiority of Jesus Christ, who is so good he provides a way out of the Hell God created.11 Writing only one hundred years after Luther, John Milton introduces a Satan that dares question the status quo. In Paradise Lost, Satan is a Prometheus that brings knowledge to man while God is, seemingly, not paying attention. Like Dante, Milton sees the individuality of Hell, and pays homage to the polytheistic Sumerians, Greeks and Romans. When Satan finds himself in a position to debate his fall, he realizes that God is simply the current victor, and that through experience of this great event in arms not worse, in foresight much advanced, we may with more successful hope resolve to wage by force or guile eternal war irreconcilable, to our grand foe, who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven.12 Suffering is experience, Satan says, and it can be used to gain the upper hand. Satan is a god punished, going through his own Hell; of course, he wont win, but his struggle is his own. With the 19th century came a religion that minimized the role of Hell and saved more innocent souls; thus also arrived Romanticism, Goethe, and the revival of an age-old problem: Universalism vs. Fundamentalism. In 1808, Goethe, a man of many guises, as the ancients spoke of Odysseus himself, 13 wrote of a man named Faust, who also had a vision of Hell. Faust is a realist who does not believe in the supernatural yet sells his soul to the devil for power; this seems like a paradox, though I do not see it as such. Great thinkers like Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and Loren Eisley (1907-1977), were also man of science, famous for their contributions to humanitys secular knowledge. They spoke of the great
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Christianity fixed this in the beginning by making Christ a part of God in the Holy Trinity. I feel there is a separation as time goes on due to Gods absolute dominion and unwillingness to suffer for our sakes 12 I.118-124 13 We have been told in this class he was a lawyer, writer, philosopher, poet, playwright, visual artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, etc

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eye, an entity, an inspiration, that would visit them and help them see the world for what it really was. These early views certainly would agree with Faust, a man who understood the natural process in life, and yet was visited by a form that represented this belief and agreed to bargain with him for higher powers.14 The Faustian Bargain became a tool of religion for the foolish man. We mentioned in class that Faust may have been a prisoner of knowledge, as if knowledge was a corrupting tool. My notes for that specific class period say: The argument of religion: Knowledge can only take you so far; to truly understand you need God, his spirit, which explains that which is unexplainable. I still believe so, though Faust seems to say things a bit differently. The argument of the enlightened scientist is that knowledge is the gate by which God can be understood; in our study of the world, we find the answers to the questions we have placed, as he intended us to find them. Furthermore, Satan in these new Hell narratives is but a tool, a means by which God allows us to suffer in order that we may find meaning in our lives. In all of the readings from 1300 on, we find an absentee God, not preoccupied with our status; or rather, who allows us to suffer individually that we may find our own way to Him. Shamash, in the Gilgamesh epic, though present, does not actively save the hero; He merely provides ways for his salvation. The more by dive into modernity, the more the very ancients come to the fore. As we closed our descent into Hell to find what it was, we finally run into two very important writers: Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and C. S. Lewis (1898-1963); here, I would like to also mention J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), for reasons I will quickly explain. In No Exit, Till we Have Faces and The Lord of the Ring series, the story is about people, not God; gods exist, but they serve merely as guides, rarely fighting for us, barely present. Sartre argues against conformity in the shape of Bad Faith, a concept that we must avoid to find out who we are; in his world, Hell is other people. Lewis took us on a journey to ancient Greece, to understand suffering and descent into Hell as an experience that is highly individual, and yet one that we all have to participate in. Tolkien writes of the necessity of equally suffering persons

14

The thought is extremely complex, too complex to attempt an explanation on this paper. However, suffice it to say that these men thought of nature as an entity, and that this entity could manifest itself through our observation of it. Thoreau would contributed greatly to modern Ecology; Eisley, who quotes him at length in his book The Star Thrower, was a very important Anthropologist

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to fight together, though the journey into the deep abyss of Mordor can only be made by the sufferer Frodo, and his guide, the psychopomp Sam. These writers all take on Hell as the Greeks did; a journey of the individual as seen through his own eyes or the eyes of others. The rebellious need not conform, for conforming is a mistake made by the sheep who, grazing forever in the prairies, see their happiness cut short only by the shedding of the wool the master needs for his own comfort. Loren Eiseley wrote that God asks nothing of the highest soul but attention; and quotes Thoreau in saying that the world is only a prairie for outlaws, all of us alone, seeking our own way. In this light, Popular Culture has not only taken on Hell, it has also popularized the notion that there are different views than those put forth by the Church. Our mythology of Hell keeps evolving, and we must see it not as sacrilegious, but as evidence of the changes taking place in our own culture.

My Descent Ended: It is all up from Here In conclusion, Hell is a myth, though before I am crucified by Orthodoxy, I feel I should explain that myth, as we have discussed in this class, is simply the addressing of issues too complex and taboo to be explained in any other way. Myth allows us to express our concerns without offence, to bring out the deepest part of our souls into a safe environment in which it can be discussed; it is the epitome of the Ihad-a-friend-once conversation. As we take the focus off ourselves, we can address our problems indirectly. I discussed the Epic of Gilgamesh in such detail because I believe it is the archetype of our belief in Hell. Hell is suffering, it is life, and it is us. In The Return of the Jedi, while Luke Skywalker trains to become a Jedi Knight, Yoda, his master, tells him to go into a cave, a gate to another world ruled by the dark side of the force. When Luke asks whats in there, Yoda replies: only what you take with you. What Luke took into his descent to Hell, his suffering, was Darth Vader, and by defeating him, what he gained, was the knowledge that he too was Darth Vader, for Vader was Lukes father. Suffering, then, is good; a block, though not a stumbling one, but one for building. Hell is a place of purification; a tool by which men can become worthy of commuting with the gods. Edith Hamilton Page 12

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(1867-1963) wrote that it is our ability to suffer that makes us of more value than the sparrows. Aeschylus would have agreed, because, he wrote in his play Agamemnon: In our sleep, pain that we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.15 Pain and suffering then are not the ends to which our lives are held in punishment, but the means by which we gain the upper hand on knowledge and obtain wisdom. Peter Pan, the boy who never wanted to live because it meant to die said, in the closing scene of the version put forth in Hook that to Live; to live will be an awfully big adventure. In this light, the greatest Hell descent of all is that of our birth, life is the suffering and pain that makes us greater souls, and our behavior the vindication needed for salvation; we seek to find in our darkness, the light that is our souls. Our souls are our darkness, our hell, and only within them we can find out who we are. When religion stopped thinking about Hell, the question remained, burning within us because religion had failed to explain it. The ancients knew that without distinction there is no definition, and without definition there is no vision; without vision there is no perception, and without perception, we are all blind-walking men. Hell was individualized because we must suffer knowledge to purify us, to burn our mortality so that our immortal understanding may pass on to others. In the end, as I have learned in this class, Hell is our innerself. Religion simply took hold of that for a while, and then gave it back when it had no further use for it. Who we are is not defined by a God seeking to shepherd us, being blind, into a pasture of ever-growing grass, but by us, with a God seeking to explain himself to us, be it nature, the uncanny, the unexplainable, or the mythological. Hell is a myth inside of us all, a place from which it can build our souls. If we tell of our experience we can help others see a way out of their Hell, and perhaps become immortalized in our own right, as psychopomps of our own. We suffered in this class, and the suffering was good; the descent was complete, and so, if we so choose, will be our ascension.

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As translated by Edith Hamilton

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