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.
About the Author
ALICE K. TURNER served as the fiction editor of Playboy from 1980 to 2000.
Product details
Publisher : HarperOne; First Edition (October 13, 1995)
Language : English
Paperback : 288 pages
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history of hell editor of playboy coffee table subject matter well written bought this book interesting read reading this book hell it is a place hell in his book turner christian dante ancient bible fire historical god ideas infernalTop reviews
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Lee Roy Eddie5.0 out of 5 stars If you are not familiar with hell it is a place that has been recommended to most peopleReviewed in the United States on August 26, 2014
Verified PurchasePack 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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Shane Liberty5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent. Hope to see it on Kindle soonReviewed in the United States on May 21, 2017
Verified PurchaseI 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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Orville Dunworth3.0 out of 5 stars Too dismissive but nice picturesReviewed in the United States on March 26, 2013
Verified PurchaseThe author makes the mistake here of proclaiming hell a "myth", from the get-go. This is a faulty approach for a number of reasons, first and foremost it negates any possible wonder on the (admittedly slight) possibility of some netherworld of unceasing torment. Rather than disseminate the historical records of what people once (or presently) thought or believed about Hell and Satan and allow the reader to absorb and ruminate, the subject is summarily rejected as fantasy.
Personally, I know enough to know I don't have the answers to any of the mysteries of life, and I would never presume to say otherwise. Here, what could have been an interesting impetus to deeper thought is instead a term paper on the folly of the very idea of Hell. An unfortunate missed opportunity to allow the audience to make up their own mind, like a stupid Spielberg preachy movie (read Amistad).
On the plus side, the illustrations within are stunning, with a lot of art I had not seen before. My rating reflects the content of the images.
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LARA14074.0 out of 5 stars All you need to know about hellReviewed in the United States on July 20, 2015
Verified PurchaseThis 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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John Craven5.0 out of 5 stars Very historical and very hellishReviewed in the United States on December 15, 2006
Verified PurchaseI totally forgot that I bought this book from Amazon. Then I saw it and realized, "oh yeah. If I bought this in an actual bookstore, my parents would find out!!!!" Actually, I accidentally gave this review 5 stars when I should have given it 1. There is far too much hell as history and far too little (read: none) recipes on demon-summoning. I got around this by dressing up my little brother as the devil and smearing him with pig's blood, but the effect was not the same.
Only buy this if you're the nerdy kind of evil goth. I'm not.
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Tom Reilly4.0 out of 5 stars Ms. Turner died, recently; I wonder, ...Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2017
Verified PurchaseMs. Turner died, recently; I wonder, if there is an after-life, where is she now? I thought the book was very interesting but had a somewhat anti-Christian slant.
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Quimby's Mom4.0 out of 5 stars Great book, but there was a hole cut in ...Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2015
Verified PurchaseGreat book, but there was a hole cut in one of the pages. So sad to see books defaced. I bought it pre-owned though. This was absolutely NOT the seller's fault.
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Katie5.0 out of 5 stars great readReviewed in the United States on February 14, 2013
Verified PurchaseI am very pleased with this product and will look forward to doing business with this merchant again in the future, The product arrived in great condition and everything met my expectations. This book is not from one religious point of view only. It's more historical than anything else.
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Tom
3.0 out of 5 stars FineReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 17, 2019
Verified PurchaseNot amazing, not terrible. Would have been better with more detail, quoted sources etc.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2016
Verified PurchaseWas very impressed with the oredring process and the quality of the book received
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
religion-philosophy
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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.
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