Dante's Inferno
The History of Hell
Alice K. Turner, Donadio & Olson
3.88
670 ratings69 reviews
A “lively...generously illustrated” (Washington Post Book World) survey of how, over the past four thousand years, religious leaders, artists, writers, and ordinary people in the West have visualized Hell-its location, architecture, purpose, and inhabitants. Illustrations; full-color inserts.
GenresHistoryReligionNonfictionMythologyReferencePhilosophyArt
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288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
Paul Bryant
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September 3, 2016
PEEP BOOTHS IN HEAVEN
“Abominable fancy” is the Christian theological idea that one of the pleasures of the blessed in Heaven is the contemplation of the torments of the sinners in Hell. I was thinking about that, and it seemed to me that it might be considered a little embarrassing to be seen guffawing at someone having a hot poker shoved up their fundament, so I imagine, in consideration of the feelings of the blessed, they will have arranged these viewings to be held in a series of booths, like a peep show. You would go in to your booth and switch on the viewing screen and you would see the ongoing grisly tortures. (This would not be allowed here on Earth, or at least you would have to pay a lot of dough, like in that movie Hostel. But in Heaven, it's free.)
But I’m also thinking that seeing random people being tortured will get tiresome after, say, a few thousand years, so there must be a way to spice it up a bit, and what better than to watch someone you actually knew on Earth being tortured. So I think there must be a kind of request system – you fill in a form giving the name of the person you want to see, could be your son’s games instructor or the old bat who lived at No 37 and threw boiling water on your cat, or it could be Saddam Hussain, and then it would be like ordering a dvd from Lovefilm, you’d build up a list of torturees and you might have to wait quite a while for the more popular ones (Heinrich Himmler, Myra Hindley) but no one else would be interested in your brother-in-law, so you’d get to see him writhing and howling in agony any time you wanted.
Hell was a popular subject in religious books for centuries and Alice Turner comments
It is not going too far to say that the Hell scenes of early apocalypses are a form of self-righteous pornography.
ABANDON LOGIC ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE
The whole idea of Hell being everlasting gets Christians into all kinds of logical conundrums.
What, after all, was the point of Hell after the Last Judgement? Punishment can be deterrent, corrective, curative or vindictive… But infinite pain at the end of time for those whose sins were, after all, finite? This would be neither curative nor deterrent. How could it be other than vindictive?
You know, Alice Turner is right. So the idea seems to be that God creates millions of human beings knowing that only a tiny minority of them will escape the infinite tortures of Hell. What kind of dear Lord and Father of mankind is that? The idea is horrendous. It’s sadistic is what it is.
The little child is in the red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out! See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor.
From The Sight of Hell by the Reverend Joseph Furniss, 1882. A book written specifically for young people. Best seller too.
So horrendous that, eventually, thoughtful Christians became very uncomfortable with the doctrine and they began taking it apart. They replaced it with annihilationism and universalism. The first says that bad people just die when they die and simply don’t get an afterlife. The second says that bad people do go to Hell but that eventually they will be purged of their sins and forgiven and released from Hell. That gave rise to other Christians saying well, if God eventually forgives everyone, what’s the flooking point of the whole flooking shebang anyway? What a lot of botheration – creating a whole universe, creating the human race, sending Jesus, heaven, hell, if everyone end up the same, playing Yes We’ll Gather at the River on the autoharp and gazing raptly? Was the game worth the candle?
Don’t ask me, pal. I just review here.
HELL 2.0
Let’s try and figure this thing again. When you have the person of Jesus as Saviour, and you have the idea of Hell as the thing he is saving us all from, certain ineluctable deductions then follow. Iddy bitty babies and white-bearded Jewish patriarchs gave Christians a big but strangely similar problem. What happened to them if the babies died before being baptised (as often happened in plague times) or the good patriarchs lived and died way before Jesus? Could we really have a hard-line no-baptism no-heaven system? Meaning that if Heaven was not your destination, you were hellbound, and the itty babies and the patriarchs would get the hot oven treatment for all of eternity? You wouldn't get Moses supposing that his toeses were roses in Hell, of that I assure you. You know, that even seemed harsh to the stern Christians of the 4th century. But as Alice turner puts it (p82)
Either baptism is a solemn and holy sacrament washing away Original Sin or it is not; you cannot have it both ways.
So eventually to resolve this the idea of Purgatory grew up. Purgatory was a kind of de-coking plant for souls where all the black gungy sins are burned off with a few quick centuries of eye gouging and red hot poking - then they run you through a sinometer and if you score 90% pure or over then okay, you’re done.
The Sopranos Season 2, From Where to Eternity
Christopher Moltisanti is getting concerned about the awful things he has been doing lately. He consults with his spiritual adviser Paulie (Walnuts) Gualtieri who says nah, he won’t go to hell, he’ll go to purgatory :
Christopher: How long do you think we've got to stay there?
Paulie: That's different for everybody. You add up all your mortal sins and multiply that number by 50. Then you add up all your venial sins and multiply that by 25. You add that together and that's your sentence. I figure I'm gonna have to do 6,000 years before I get accepted into heaven and 6,000 years is nothin' in eternity terms. I can do that standing on my head.
HELL ON EARTH
I saw Before Midnight yesterday, highly recommended, and Julie Delpy playing Celine threw out a definition of Hell, but it was a description of our own world:
The only upside for a woman in being over 35 is you don’t get raped so much.
In Christopher Marlowe’s renowned Doctor Faustus, the devil Mephistopheles agrees with Celine :
Faust. Where are you damn’d?
Meph. In hell.
Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Meph. Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Yes, the idea that this world is actually Hell can seem very convincing if you turn on the news at any time in the last, say, 3000 years.
I KNOW WHERE I AM GOING
My Muslim friend thinks I am going to Hell. I say come on, what did I ever do? I smoked a little dope and I didn’t return a couple of library books? It was years ago! He says no, it’s not that, it’s because you aren’t a Muslim, Sorry and all, but I don’t make the rules. I say - That's a bit harsh, don't you think? He says he's sorry but the solution is in my hands.
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Nathan Dehoff
784 reviews3 followers
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February 5, 2021
I enjoyed the hell out of this book. In a casual style, it explores the concept of Hell throughout history, in both religion and popular culture. It begins with early takes on the world of the dead, including the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek. A lot of the geographical features that came to be associated with underworlds first showed up in Mesopotamian mythology, while the Egyptian world of the dead was very complicated, with multiple zones and dangers. Tartarus was originally a prison for the Titans, but came to be a place of punishment for dead mortals as well. Hades has multiple rivers, and was inhabited by monsters. Christian thought struggled with working together the various ideas of the afterlife presented by what became the New Testament: Jesus' mentions of a fiery place of punishment, the parable of Lazarus (not the guy who came back from the dead) ending up in the bosom of Abraham while the rich man who ignored him went to Hell, the Kingdom of Heaven, and the upcoming resurrection and Last Judgment. It's been a common question as to what the need is for immediate reward and punishment after death when that's going to happen at the end of the world anyway, and whether eternal damnation is really in line with Jesus saving the world from sin. Another common theme in early Christianity was Jesus' harrowing of Hell, which had its antecedents in the tales of Inanna, Orpheus, and others. Purgatory was devised to provide a way for people to pay for their sins in a finite way. Jesus' mother Mary came to be regarded as the ruler of Purgatory, who would intercede with her son to get people out of Purgatory. The Protestants, who wanted to remove most Catholic trappings, threw out Purgatory with the rest. Religiously themed plays often depicted Hell, and the Hellmouth from Anglo-Saxon art became a common prop. Dante's Inferno placed Hell underneath Jerusalem, with Satan in the center of the Earth. It was thoroughly laid out into nine circles, each with its own sorts of sinners, and also incorporated the rivers from the Greek Hades and a city that was home to fallen angels. The city of Dis came to be seen as a medieval citadel. The Jesuits regarded Hell as a ridiculously crowded place full of squalor. And John Milton wrote of the place as a separate part of the universe from Earth, and that the city of Pandemonium was incredibly opulent. There's even a mention in the book of Tobias Swinden claiming in 1714 that Hell would have to be located in the Sun. Turner reports more modern versions of Hell being less literal, more symbolic and often satirical. She doesn't go into that much detail on most of what she mentions, making a lot of them tantalizing inducements to further reading. There's a lot of fascinating art as well, and it's disappointing that most of it is small, at least in the edition of the book I got from the library; but it's cool that it's there.
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Lee Harmon
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January 20, 2011
This is not a new book; I dug it from my shelves just to write this review. It's not a scholarly-looking book; the oversize cover, glossy pages, and color pictures on every other page make it look more like a children's book than a theological treatise. It's not the work of a notable scholar; Ms. Turner is better known for her fiction and as an editor for Playboy. So what is this review doing on my blog today?
Against all odds, this is an important book about an important topic. Is it Alice's fault that she manages to turn it into a fun read as well?
The History of Hell begins at the beginning, with the earliest religious beliefs of an underworld. You'll explore the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Zoroastrianism. You'll move forward in time to the Greek understanding of Hades, the Platonic description of Hell, and the Hebrew teachings of Sheol. As these ideas merge into one, you begin to see glimpses of today's Christian version of Hell emerging.
In time, Purgatory arrives. Christian ideas continue to evolve through the centuries, giving birth to artwork and stories like Dante's Inferno, as imaginations let loose. Satan, once destined to chains in a dark netherworld transforms before your eyes into an evil taskmaster. Now, trident in hand, he gleefully tortures lost souls in a lake of fire forever and ever, amen.
You continue to travel through the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, through the 19th century, and on into today's time, as Hell continues to evolve. Why is this journey important? Why put yourself through Hell? Because, as Christians, it's vitally important to our spiritual well-being to understand that we have made our own version of Hell. Ideas have evolved from the beginning of religion, and understanding this, knowing the "history of Hell," can set you free from the undertow of today's spiritually-damaging teachings.
And if you're going to take this frightful journey, you may as well make it an entertaining one. Pick up Alice's book.
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Natalie
503 reviews108 followers
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November 12, 2021
Four thousand years of hell, as long as you’re largely after the Catholic/Christian variety and not any flavors of Eastern religions. It can get a little dry and hard to follow, but that might be because I encountered some of the religious concepts for the first time and my mind just doesn’t work well with them.
Two takeaways: Christians absolutely made this shit up as they went along; and most educated Christians, even clergy, didn’t really believe in hell at all, but considered it useful for the illiterate masses to do so as an incentive for good behavior.
The generous illustrations are really great.
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Emm
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October 31, 2009
A really fun and comprehensive look at the history of Hell. Turner's writing is easy and humorous; a great introductory text!
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Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk
848 reviews119 followers
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October 27, 2019
This is an interesting and very easy to get into book which really does give you a good guide through the human vision of Hell and its origins in the religions of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. It goes through the different European cultural eras and demonstrates how our vision changed or evolved according to the times. The way Hell is integrated into the literature of those periods is very clearly laid out.
Very good for anyone who wants a clear, clean picture of how it all fits together.
history non-fiction philosophy
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Tracy
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March 8, 2010
Really well done. An interesting look at the evolution of Hell from the Sumerians to the Age of Freud. Also includes some amazing art. My eight-year old picked up the book and flipped through the pictures. Funny, he wasn't at all frightened by the images. He just said, "Mom, why is everyone in Hell naked?" Good Question.
mythology non-fiction religion
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Cindy
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June 13, 2023
I live in a pretty religious place, and the people on my street already think I’m a little bit of an odd duck, so I was positively buzzing when my neighbor approached head tilted asking “whatcha getting” as I was checking out a biblical tower of books about hell from the library (I'm researching for a story). It did feel a little weird reading this before bed with all the “gnashing of teeth” and whatnot, but at least I’m not a child. There exists a formerly popular kids’ book called The Sight of Hell (written by the appropriately named John Furniss, and still available on Amazon) that describes the dungeons of hell and reads thusly: “The little child is in the red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out; see how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor.” This is also accompanied with similarly vivid illustrations. Sweet dreams, children.
In terms of content, this book does present, as you would expect from the title, a historical view of how thought about hell changed over the years. It also summarizes influential non-Bible eschatological literature such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. I didn’t realize Greek views of the underworld had such a large impact on the biblical hell. It also makes a lot more sense now why there are so many paintings of Mary from the Middle Ages, as she was believed to have the ability to save souls in purgatory. I’m glad I have finally finished the book. It’s nice to be free from the clutches of eternal hellfire, at least for now.
2023-nonfiction
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H. Givens
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March 6, 2018
A pretty good history of how hell has been envisioned, from the earliest history up to the modern day. It was talkier than I expected, with a few pages each for even rather obscure strains of Christianity, and I just skimmed a lot of it because it became rather more theological than I was up for today. Lucifer/Satan is mentioned occasionally when relevant, but the book makes clear in the introduction that it's about hell, not Satan. Could've used a few more pictures, but generally satisfactory.
history nonfiction religion
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Theresa
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November 11, 2007
An interesting overview of historical perceptions of Hell from literature, art and scripture from the dawn of western civilization through the age of Freud. Beautifully illustrated with works of art from each period covered. Throughout history, ideas of Hell, its location, purpose and denizens have constantly changed. The author examines the changes and the reasons for them.
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Ben Smitthimedhin
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May 19, 2017
I was at Wells Fargo once to replace a debit card that I lost, and I figured I would bring a book because I didn't know how long I was going to have to wait and my parents told me that I should never waste an opportunity. Well I didn't actually have to wait because Shian told me that she could help me open an account right away. Her computer started lagging because it had to process my long name through, so she decided to ask me what I was reading.
"The Skeletons in God's Closet.... it's about how Christians can reconcile the judgment of hell with the love of God."
"Oh..." she said.
It wasn't until after about five minutes of my theological musings on hell that I realized she wasn't interested... or maybe she was uncomfortable about the subject. I wasn't sure. She was probably taught by her supervisors to be friendly at all costs. Poor lady. Since my parents told me not to waste an opportunity and I figured I would awkwardly leeway into the Gospel like one of those awkward Christians. Sure enough, the conversation died before I could even get close.
Well, anyways this book reminded me of Shian and our conversation. And I decided that I would dedicate this review to her.
Alice Turner, who writes for Playboy magazine(!), did a fantastic job in compiling an enormous amount of information into a readable book on how hell has evolved from ancient Mesopotamian "The Great Below" through the Middle Ages and its bizarre visions of monsters with spears up their butts (I'm not kidding) to hell's eventual "disappearance" in the Freudian age where hell is allegorized as repression. The History of Hell is well-rounded in its approach; combining history, literature, psychology, art, theology, and philosophy. The illustrations were fantastic (it was also a chronicle of how Western art's depictions of hell has evolved). I had to take off a star though because Turner would throw out character names left and right without any context, so I was confused at times, especially the chapter on classical Hades.
Still would recommend it though.
Cheers, Shian.
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Carla (There Might Be Cupcakes Podcast)
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June 11, 2019
4 1/2 stars—the half removed only because it ended so abruptly. The author started talking about Hell in 20th century film, briefly discussed Aliens as metaphor...I turned the page...and there were the Acknowledgements and the Bibliography. What happened? Where’s The Exorcist? Where’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose, its motifs of Mary as Intercessor and sufferer as example rampant throughout the book? And those are the easy grabs. Very odd. Otherwise a fascinating book that has lined up about ten more books for me to read, and those are the most fun nonfiction books to read, aren’t they?
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skyozlem
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March 8, 2021
Dante okurken iyi bir yan okuma oldu benim için,
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Nancy Oakes
1,988 reviews829 followers
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January 21, 2009
from page 135, footnote:
"According to The Weekly World News of August 28, 1990, Hell is nine miles beneath the surface of a point in western Siberia where Soviet engineers drilling for oil broke through. They capped their hole after smelling the smoke and hearing the cries of the damned." Pretty interesting, huh?
The History of Hell is like the textbook for a course on (as she calls it) "Infernology". I will be up front and tell you that if you are a Christian, you're going to absolutely hate this book. The author examines in chronlogical format how hell has been depicted and understood from the time of the Sumerians through the present. Hell's heyday, of course, was during the medieval period, when works of art, sermons, pulpit manuals, papal decrees etc etc made Hell a very vivid weapon of control by the Church. Turner examines the works of the "chief architects" of hell: "Homer, Virgil, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Bosch, Michelangelo, Milton, Goethe, Blake and more." (3)
Turner's work has been criticized by some reviewers as being shallow. Personally, this isn't meant either to be a definitive or scholarly history; it is more on the order of Hell for the layman. She has also been criticized for losing steam at the end and I agree with this call. IMHO, she should have ended the book with "The Romantics," and left it at that to keep the book's potency and momentum fresh.
This is a wonderful book; if you get offended by her explanations of how the whole hell/final judgment/fire & brimstone stuff was manipulated by Christians at large throughout Christian history, or, if you're offended by the fact that the early Christians probably lifted the geography & images of hell from earlier, non-Christian cultures, then just sit quietly and look at the pictures. The works of art she's chosen as illustrations are simply magnificent.
I highly recommend this one to those interested in the topic.
nonfiction
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Lucas
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March 8, 2012
I must have thought this book was good. For about six years now I have been rather pissed that I misplaced it and can't seem to find it anywhere.
Here's what I remember. It was a rather sleek looking book that was beautifully illustrated. But its glossy appearence belied the large amount of information in the book. That's not to say it was delivered like a textbook on the subject. I seem to recall the author had a good sense of humor.
The book describes several concepts of Hell from different cultures. "Merry Hell" doesn't sound half bad. Also, the author believes that the Hell most Christians have been threatened with is a fiction of the church used to keep followers in line. I thought she made a convincing case for this point of view (though, admittedly, I didn't need convincing of this before reading the book).
History of Hell made me really want to read a couple of books cited on the topic. The first one was "Visions of Tundale" (may have the title wrong) and the second one was "The Frogs." Haven't done this yet mainly because I can't seem to find an English copy of Tundale.
I am almost certain that I will reread this book someday...if I can ever find it.
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Dave
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July 2, 2009
A great read, has a lot of really interesting information. The chapters at the beginning and end are a bit sparse (covering early Mesopotamian concepts of the afterlife and modern views of Hell, respectively), but the chapters on the medieval period, the renaissance, and enlightenment are suitably meaty.
There are definitely some old works that I'd like to take a look at now, though the only one I've found so far is a Victorian Poem, "The Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti. (which was claimed to be a children's story, though it clearly is not, given such passages as
"They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.")
The book also contains a modest helping of illustrations that span the history of hell that are also quite good. I'm quite enamored with Bosch now.
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M.C.
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September 4, 2008
What is Hell? We can but perceive its existence with our mortal eyes. Why should one believe something that he or she cannot sense? Such a question reminds me of peace and other ideas that we believe in. Many of these we cannot perceive but we apparently invest faith or something of the like into them. Why?Some do it for pious reasons, others for the sole satisfaction of their feelings of uncertainty, and still there are those who have alternative reasons.
The History of Hell offers a comprehensive view into the origins and evolutions of Hell. However, I must, with disappointment, say that this text offers a more Western view into Hell rather than a blend of different cultures. True, there were mentions of Zoroastrianism, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the like, but in all, it lacked to offer a view that is as detailed as its accounts of the Western perspective of Hell. However, the information that was provided seemed valid--making this a most fascinating read.
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Mephistia
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August 7, 2009
It's interesting. I was actually a little surprised at how engrossing this book was. I loved the way the author traced Hell from the polytheistic influence on the Christian perception, through the various theological and political influences until we arrived at our most modern interpretation. I particularly enjoyed some of the religious theories she cited and how they altered theology in various ways. Some of the facts she included were a fascinating surprise -- the book as a whole was just a delightful journey of discovery.
I have to admit, I also liked it because I could never pin the author's theological beliefs down. There were points when I thought she was Catholic, other times when I'd decided she must be atheist, and once or twice when I was convinced she was some fringe religion like Mormonism. I really appreciated this ambiguity, because it never felt as though she was coming at the topic from a biased direction.
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Bogydog
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April 3, 2008
Hahahahha... no one I know will read this book. And, as well they shouldn't. I just had to put this on my (so-far) list, 'cause this is the book I desperately needed when writing my thesis in college. Actually, I guess that doesn't make sense, 'cause if this book existed then, then there'd be no reason to write my thesis. So... now I'm just talking to myself. Umm... oh snap! I need to figure out what I'm bring to Phoenix this weekend. Note to self: bring pants. Doo-doo-doo... man, I'm kind of hungry. Maybe a sandwich? What's that noise? A DEMON??? BEGONE FROM MY HOUSE, THOU FOUL HARBINGER OF-- okay, I'm done.
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Kirsten
2,137 reviews105 followers
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February 9, 2008
This is a fascinating cultural history of Hell. Since it focuses mainly on Hell in Western popular culture, it draws most heavily on Judeo-Christian (mostly Christian), Greek, and Roman conceptions of punishment in the afterlife. I imagine if you have done a lot of reading about the history of Hell and Satan, this probably wouldn't reveal much that's new, but for the curious layperson it's an excellent overview, related with wit and charm. I've done quite a bit of reading about the history of the Devil, but there was a lot here that was new to me. It's also marvelously illustrated, with both black & white and full color plates.
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J.M. Hushour
Author 6 books229 followers
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May 31, 2015
With an eye always on the future, I leapt at the chance of reading about Hell. Just in case. This is a fine book on Hell. There don't seem to be many books about Hell, histories anyway. This one served my purposes well because in many ways it's very much a history of how the geography of Hell evolved. Starting with Inanna, Sumerian babe-goddess who harrowed the underworld with the best of them, this book carries the story of the development of Hell's structure and torments up to Freud. It's a fun read, succinct and clever in parts with some interesting tangents. Not as detailed as the Hell devotee might want, but sufficient for the lay Hell-gazer.
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Kate Davis
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June 6, 2011
Can get pretty slow in parts, when she goes heavily into the literature about Hell. Overall, I'm glad I read the first few chapters especially, which showed that the generally accepted ideas of Hell aren't ones that came from Judeo-Christian scripture. I can have more sympathy towards the idea and its followers now that I understand the history behind it, and I can also be reassured that those beliefs don't need to align with mine.
nf-theology nonfiction
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Michael
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August 26, 2016
Eh. Interesting factoids and interesting notes about the broad sweep of cultural history, but the more I knew about the subject/time period at hand the more unsatisfied I was by Turner's oversimplification and uncritical passing off of popular history as history. Fun, but should be taken with grains of salt, ideally distilled from the tears of the damned.
history non-lds-religion
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Top reviews from other countries
Lee Roy Eddie
5.0 out of 5 stars If you are not familiar with hell it is a place that has been recommended to most people
Reviewed in the United States on 26 August 2014
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Pack your bags and get ready for a hot vacation down in "HELL." This book tells the history of hell through era's of history dating back 5 millennium. There are not any fancy hotels though, no room service and there is not even cable! "For crying out loud" which is what you will be doing during your stay there. If you are not familiar with hell it is a place that has been recommended to myself and most people whom I ask, adults mainly. If a person was to examine all the faiths and pick any one at random then for sure there will be a religion that will damn you to hell. If you do not espouse to any faith then you are for sure going to hell according to so called experts. Either way, no matter what you believe, no matter how good and beneficent a humanitarian you are Hell awaits you. Watch the film "Red State" and top it off with all 17 seasons of "South Park" with audio commentary. You may be forever packing the right clothes(or at least while being alive) and preparing for your vacation to hell because "Plato's Retreat" was closed along with the "Turkish Bath's" in the late 1980's. Happy Trails. :-)
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 January 2016
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Was very impressed with the oredring process and the quality of the book received
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Tom
3.0 out of 5 stars Fine
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 January 2019
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Not amazing, not terrible. Would have been better with more detail, quoted sources etc.
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Shane Liberty
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent. Hope to see it on Kindle soon
Reviewed in the United States on 21 May 2017
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I bought this book a while back and as a Christian Universalist who does not believe in 'eternal hell punishment' it is excellent.
I pretty much do all my reading on kindle now. Are you guys ever going to make it available in Kindle format? With a bit of research through Amazons site, it's really not too hard. Would love to see it.
Also, after, you might consider making an audio version, as I love listening to books when they are available in this format as well. Although that takes time so if possible, just get it on Kindle since I did it for my dad's book and it is surprisingly easy.
For a fair price that we could work out, I might even be able to help if you were interested.
And, I have professional studio recording equipment which I could also do an audio version if interested also :)
Author leave a reply and I will figure out a way to get in touch :D
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Julianne3205
4.0 out of 5 stars All you need to know about hell
Reviewed in the United States on 20 July 2015
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This seems like a really good book, showing the author's extensive knowledge of the history from ancient Egypt to modern times. As someone who teaches and needs to know where the author got her sources from, I was seriously upset with the lack of endnotes, which seems to have become increasingly common in history books these days. However, she knows her stuff (since I know it too), so I won't hold it against the publisher, who undoubtedly made the decision.
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ALICE K. TURNER
The History of Hell
Dantes Inferno
THE VOLUMES OF COMMENTARY WRITTEN about Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) would fill his own Inferno, and the part of those volumes that has to do with that Inferno's engineering and geography would form a substantial subdivision. The architectural ingenuity Dante put into his landscape of Hell has always fascinated readers: modern editions of the Divine Comedy carry maps and diagrams, while illustrators have presented not only the characters and monsters of the story but also the wonderful underground embankments, moats, castles, paved trenches, and the City of Dis with walls of red-hot iron. Galileo himself did a technical report on the structure of the Inferno in 1587 as a playful student thesis. Virgil's Hades is a spectacular stage set without much depth, but Dante's Inferno is limned in three dimensions, right down to the cracks, fissures, and ruins created in the infrastructure at the time of the great earthquake that followed the Harrowing of the First Circle
Writing his great poem in exile, Dante was concerned with history, with Florentine politics, with the corruption of the clergy, with the moral position of his contemporaries, and most of all with the state of his own psyche. At a distance of seven centuries, we can no longer easily appreciate
any of these things except the last Dante is generous with his emotions.
But anyone reading the Inferno 'just for the story" can still marvel at not only the stories the Pilgrim is told but also at the sights and sounds—and smells!
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Dante took every theme traced in this book—philosophic, mythic, Orphic, demonic, repulsive, fantastic, allegorical, grotesque, comic, psychological—and put them together with meticulous care for all time. His religious views were orthodox, but his imagination was not. Even if his artistic contribution had been limited to the radical step of marrying the classical attributes of Hades to those of the Christian Hell of the vision tours, it would be a milestone. But his influence went far beyond that.
On earth, Dante led a complicated life. Orphaned early, he was brought up by well-to-do relatives in the city-state of Florence, where he received an excellent education in both the classics and the poetry of his time, He was interested in vocabulary and at one point wanted to construct an "all-Italian" language merging the many dialects of the peninsula; this project was completely undermined by his decision to write the Comedy in his own Florentine dialect, which, together with the later contributions of Petrarch and Boccaccio, made Tuscan once and for all time Italy's literary language. At various times he worked as a businessman, a soldier, a politician, and a professor of philosophy. Because he ran afoul of the tangled politics of the period, he was forced to spend the last twenty years of his life in unhappy, though not uncomfortable, exile.
The most famous event of Dante's childhood was his encounter with Beatrice Portinari when he was nine and she a year younger. Theirs was a model of courtly romance, for they seldom met, each married someone else, and he continued to write poetry to her all his life. She died in 1290, a date remembered because Dante set the Comedy in 1300, just ten years later. In the poem, she appears as Divine Love or Grace, which inspires and guides the Pilgrim after Human Reason, represented by the poet Virgil, can go no farther. Dante had other reasons for choosing 1300: he was thirty-five at the time, "midway along life's journey"; it was a centennial year, and numbers are essential to the scheme of the poem. It was also the year his political troubles began.
To picture Dante's physical and ethical universe, think of the round ball of the earth pierced in the northern hemisphere to its center by a hole in the shape of an irregular cone or funnel. The center of that hole is Jerusalem, and its diameter, the width of the circle around Jerusalem, is equal in size to the radius of the earth, about 3,950 miles, though Galileo's calculations showed it a few hundred miles less. This hole was formed by the weight and force of Lucifer and his angels striking the earth as they fell
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from Heaven. The matter displaced by the impact, forced upward and backward along the tunnel Virgil and Dante use to escape, formed the mountain of Purgatory that rises in an inverted cone on an isolated island in the southern hemisphere. On top of Purgatory is the Earthly Paradise. The opening to Hell is covered by a vault of earth that Galileo calculated to be 40511/22 miles in depth, though obviously there are irregular shallower fissures such as the one by which the poets enter.* In the Dark Wood of the inferno's first canto, where the Pilgrim flees from the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf, is a hill that must be climbed to reach the entrance to the lower depths where the famous words are inscribed: Abandon hope, all you who enter here.
To complete the picture, remember that for Dante, though notoriously not for Galileo, the earth was at the center of a Ptolemaic universe around which circled nine crystalline heavenly spheres—the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the fixed stars, and the primum mobile or "first mover," which keeps the universe in order. (The three outer planets had not yet, of course, been discovered.) Beyond the spheres was the vast Empyrean, home of God, the angels, and saints, but Dante's heavens are lodged in the spheres. The nine circles of Hell are a direct inversion of the scheme; the vestibule makes a tenth area, as does the Empyrean, as does the earthly paradise atop the nine levels of Purgatory.
Dante's love of precise structure and symbolic numerology extends to the poetry itself. It is written in terza rirna, in which the first and third lines of each three-line stanza rhyme while the second rhymes with the first and third line of the next stanza. Each of the three sections, the inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, is further divided in thirds, of thirty-three cantos each, with an introductory canto to make one hundred in all. To have carried off this structure so readably is amazing.
When the two poets enter the Gate of Hell in Canto III, they find themselves in the vestibule, an area where Dante places the "indecisive," those who have never committed to anything, including life—thus though they have not earned Hell they get no real death either. This vestibule slopes down to the river Acheron, the first of three circular rivers, each of which debouches into the next, finally to flow into Cocytus, the frozen lake at
"According to The Weekly World News of August 28, 1990, Hell is nine miles beneath the surface of a point in western Siberia where Soviet engineers drilling for oil broke through. They capped their hole after smelling the smoke and hearing the cries of the damned.
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Dante's Inferno
Map of Dante's Inferno
the center of the earth. The fourth traditional river of Hell, Lethe, Dante locates in Purgatory for dramatic reasons. All of these waters, Virgil tells the Pilgrim in an image worthy of Hesiod, flow from the tears of a great metal statue at the core of Mount Ida in Crete (the statue comes from Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2.31-34, but the tears are Dante's).
The entire underground cone is terraced in descending ledges or circles of narrowing size down to the nethermost well or pit at the center of the earth, which holds Cocytus. Between the Acheron, across which Charon
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the boatman ferries the poets, and the Styx are Hell's first four circles, the highest of which is technically Limbo, the residence of virtuous unbaptized souls, mostly pagan. No one is punished in the First Circle, which resembles the Elysian Fields of asphodel in the Aeneid and has its own Castle of Philosophy and its own fresh little stream, which seems to have nothing to do with bitter tears. Virgil himself inhabits this circle together with Homer (Dante is thought to have known Homer's work only by reputation) and other famous pagans. The Hebrews had, of course, been rescued in the Harrowing. Dante avoids the question of unbaptized babies.
The next four circles punish the Incontinent, those who, in life, gave in to their passions. Dante followed Aristotle's ethical system in his classification of sins rather than the more common Seven Deadly Sins listing. Thus the Second Circle, guarded by Minos, holds the lustful, whirled forever in winds of desire. The Third, guarded by Cerberus, traps gluttons in a cold, smelly garbage heap. The Fourth, guarded by Plutus ("Father Rich Man" in yet another guise), pits misers and spendthrifts, many of them priests, against one another. The Styx itself, a filthy marsh, forms the Fifth Circle and also a moat for the City of Dis, as well as the boundary between Upper and Lower Hell. In the swamp, the angry tear at one another, while under the mud the slothful and sullen gurgle incoherently.
The poets are ferried by Phlegyas across the Styx from the great tower on the upper bank to the City of Dis (or Satan), the capital of Hell and home to the fallen rebel angels—who will not permit the poets to enter until an angelic messenger forces the gate. All of Lower Hell lies within the walls of this city—really a citadel—guarded by the Furies and Medusa. Immediately beyond the gate is the Sixth Circle of heretics, who burn in fiery graves; in Dante's Inferno, despite its name, the traditional punishment of fire is used only inside the walls of the citadel.
Down a steep slope guarded by the Minotaur, the poets scramble toward the Seventh Circle and the Phlegethon, the river of boiling blood guarded by the Centaurs, one of whom, Nessus, takes them across it. The Seventh Circle, which punishes the sins of Violence, is divided into three rounds, the first being the Phlegethon itself. Immersed in its horrid flow are the murderous: warmongers, tyrants, predators, gang members, psychopaths. The next round, guarded by Harpies, is the Wood of Suicides (perhaps Dante's eeriest conception), white at the wood's edge are the wastrels. Then comes the Burning Plain of usurers, blasphemers, and homosexuals, which
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the poets can cross only by following the bank of the paved conduit along which the end branch of the Phiegethon flows to a great waterfall at the edge of a cliff.
The monster Geryon flies them down the cliff's edge to the most elaborate circle of them all, and the beginning of a new and final set of sins, those of Fraudulence and Malice. Malebolge is shaped like a great stone amphitheater with a spokelike series of stone bridges leading down to a central well over ten concentric ditches or bolge. Each bolgia holds a group of sinners: in the first, horned demons chivy pimps in one direction and seducers in another. In the second, flatterers wallow in excrement; in the third, corrupt ecclesiastics, including at least one pope, are plunged upside down into something resembling a baptismal font while their feet are "baptized" with flames. False prophets and soothsayers trudge through the fourth with their heads twisted entirely around so that their tears flow down to their buttocks; Tiresias, sadly demoted from his position in the Odyssey, is here.
The Wood of the Suicides, by Gustave Doré
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William Blake put fossils of human bones into the stone of the bridges over the hole.
At the fifth bolgia, Dante introduces us to the Malebranche ("Evil-Claws"), a band of antic devils like those of the mystery plays who athletically and almost playfully toss "barrators"—grafters and public swindlers—into boiling pitch. The mood turns to grotesque comedy, and Canto XXI ends with a traditional fart.
Dante chose to inject comic relief at this particular point because this is his own bolgia; back on earth, he had been exiled from Florence on the grounds of barratry, or political corruption, as well as on vaguer charges of intrigue and hostility to the pope. Grim burlesque is his response to the charges, and it is no accident that the next bolgia holds the hypocrites with whom he must actually consort.
The poets find that the bridge over the sixth bolgia has been broken by the earthquake that followed the Harrowing. In order to escape the angry Malebranche, they must slide down the rubble into the realm of the hypocrites, who shuffle in single file, weeping from the weary weight of their
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The poets escape from demons down a broken bridge, by Gustave Doré.
lead-lined cloaks. Arduously, the two climb up the ruins on the other bank to regain the bridge, from which they look down to see the amazing shape-shifting in the seventh bolgia, where thieves and reptiles merge and remerge.
Deceivers burn in flames in the eighth bolgia: among them is Ulysses —Dante was firmly on Virgil's Trojan (and Italian) side when it came to the great war, and Ulysses was known for his trickery. In the ninth bolgia are the sowers of discord, horribly mutilated by a demon with a sword. Among them is Mohamet the "infidel," a heretic from Dante's point of view. This bolgia is twenty-two miles around; the cone is narrowing severely. The tenth and last bolgia, where the falsifiers (impersonators, perjurers, counterfeiters, alchemists) lie stricken with horrible diseases, is only eleven miles around and half a mile wide.
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In the well at the bottom of the Malebolge construction stand the Giants, each about fifty feet high, Dante's Titans of Tartarus. Here they guard the Pit, their heads and torsos protruding above it. Antaeus lowers the poets in his huge palm to a point about midway down the Ninth Circle.
Three rings around the center of Cocytus, the icebound lake that is the realm of Treason, hold traitors. Caina (named for Cain) holds those who betrayed their families; Antenora, traitors to their countries (Antenor, who supposedly betrayed Troy, was a hero to Homer, but Dante sided with Virgil and the Trojans). Ptolomea is for traitors to guests: Ptolomy was a captain of Jericho who arranged a banquet for his father-in-law, Simon the high priest, and his two sons, then murdered them. In the absolute center—of the Inferno and of the earth—is Judecca (from Judas, of course), for traitors to their Jords, and in its center is the greatest traitor to the greatest Lord: Dis (Satan) himself, frozen fast and mindlessly weeping as he devours the shades of Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. It is up his hairy thigh that the poets must climb to find their exit to clean air and starlight.
Dante's portrait of Dis or Satan is both conventional and original. Vision literature tended to avoid Satan or offer only a quick thrilling glimpse, and even if Dante had read Tøndal, a centipede-like creature would never have suited him. The figure is grotesque enough. It has three faces, red (Judas) in the middle, black on the left (Brutus), yellow on the right (Cassius), and below each is a pair of wings, which fan the freezing wind of Cocytus.
The three heads were inspired by artists' conceptions. Dante, like most of Florence, must have gone to see the spectacular new Last Judgment mosaic on the cupola of the baptistry of the cathedral of San Giovanni, which was completed in 1300, two years before he was banished. Vasari tells us in Lives of the Artists (1550) that Dante was a "dear friend" of Giotto, who was also a Florentine. After banishment, he evidently visited the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, where Giotto completed his famous frescoes around 1307. This chapel was built for Enrico Scrovegni as a penance for the depredations of his father Reginaldo, a blatantly avaricious moneylender who was said to have died screaming for the keys to his strongbox "so that no one can get my money!" Thus, in Heaven (where Giotto also placed himself), the painter shows Enrico respectfully presenting a model of the chapel to the saints. Dante, teasing his friend, retaliated by putting Papa Reginaldo in the Seventh Circle of Hell with the usurers; he is the last
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Enrico Scrovegni offers his model to the saints. Giotto himself is fifth from the left in the bottom row. Note the dead rising at bottom.
person to whom the poets speak before mounting Geryon to fly to Lower Hell.
Both of these Last Judgments feature bestial Satans with a pair of sinner-swallowing snakes emerging from where their ears should be. In description, the snakes may have seemed more peculiar than poetic, and Dante rearranged the image to parallel the Trinity. Byzantine LastJudgments with their humanoid devils had soul-eating serpents emerging from Satan's throne, a clever way of bringing the Heilmouth into the composition. Both the Florentine cupola and Giotto used that device too; the subsequent excretion of chewed sinners is implied by the seated position. Satan's hairy body developed from the devil suits in mystery plays, which were covered with hair or feathers, which is easy to see in Botticelli's drawings of Dante's Dis. Illustrators quickly gave up on the complicated sets of wings, which go back to biblical descriptions of seraphs, and most show only one pair.
What was new in Dante's literary portrait, though theologically correct and implied by Giotto's beast figure and, arguably, by some vision literature, was Satan as utterly defeated, a blob of mindlessly chewing, weeping, semi-frozen protoplasm, oblivious to the escape of the poets along his own body. Dante's view of Satan is brief, which was traditional in visions, but also artistically wise. When it comes to monsters, the distance from the impressive to the ridiculous is perilously short.
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The Inferno was a sensation as soon as it was circulated and made available to copyists. This was about 1314, while Dante was still working on the later sections of the Comedy. Illustrated copies began to appear almost immediately, and the Inferno's enormous influence also extended to public art. The fourteenth century was a great time for cathedral building in Italy, and Last Judgments commissioned for them quickly began to reflect Dante's invention. His purgatorial mountain solved the problem of how to portray Purgatory, but it was his Hell that fascinated artists.
With Dante, the history of Hell entered a new stage. He killed off vision literature altogether, and in a sense he helped to kill off Hell itself by making it possible to think about it in fictional or allegorical terms. He abandoned the old pretense of "truth" in vision literature and invited readers to join him and Virgil in a story, an artistic creation by an individual writer looking back with an appreciative and critical eye at the work of other writers. Even a simple soul looking at Nardo di Cione's mural in Florence would understand that it illustrated not a literal Hell but Dante's Hell. Though this was certainly not his intention, Dante made it easier for intellectuals of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to reject its reality.
Of the three misers watching as the poets prepare to mount Geryon, Regina/do Scrovegni, usually identified by the pregnant sow on his coat of arms, is in the middle.
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From this time forward, the journey portrayed by the Comedy also served as a durable interior metaphor. In our post-Freudian age of industrious myth mapping, it is all too easy to see that literary journey to the Land of the Dead, or Hell, or its surrogates are allegories of the individual experiencing "the dark night of the soul" before a spiritual reemergence into starlight. In psychoanalysis, "the modern religion," a patient must explore with his "guide" the deep sources of his unhappiness and inability to follow the true path. Then he must endure the painful Purgatory of examining and challenging his behavior before achieving the relative paradise of mental health. A twelve-step program confronting drug abuse or alcoholism would interpret the downward spiral as the slide into addiction and destructive behavior until an individual has "bottomed out," and can turn on Satan's hairy leg to struggle toward the light; Purgatory is, then, the behavior modification necessary to reach the precarious paradise of sobriety. In the "hero journey" which Joseph Campbell, leaning on Jung, found basic to religious myth and quest adventure, the hero must venture into "the belly of the beast" before undergoing "the road of trials" toward apotheosis.
But this entirely comfortable and pervasive method of modern metaphorical thinking might not exist if Dante had never written the Comedy. It gave us a new vocabulary and a wonderfully useful way of looking directly at our spiritual lives.
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