Hey Thoughty2 here.
From stealing candy, to drinking your dad’s booze or accidentally buying the daily mail,
we’ve all done things we’re not proud of.
For many of us, if we do something bad, it’s just a matter of running away or deleting
our browser history and hoping nobody noticed.
But throughout human history, many people have lived with the idea that someone, somewhere,
is keeping a score and when we finally kick the bucket, we’ll have to account for all
the bad things that we’ve done.
Hell – it immediately conjures up images of flame-filled caves and red-horned demons
prodding people with forks.
But is this what every religion thinks of, or is it just a part of the Judeo-Christian
tradition.
So what do other religions believe?
Today we look at 6 different versions of hell from around the world.
Now, if you lived most of your life on frozen land, crossing the seas under an arctic breeze,
and someone told you there was a way to spend eternity in a fiery pit then you’d probably
quite like that idea.
Norse mythology had nine worlds, all connected by the cosmic ash tree, the Yggdrasil.
One of the worlds was Niflheim, the hell of the Norse, a place of freezing cold darkness.
It was overseen by Loki’s daughter, named Hel, who also ran Helheim, which was just
for regular dead people, not really bad people or the great warriors who had died in battle.
Just regular folk that weren’t particularly liked very much; It mainly consisted of estate
agents and politicians.
Helheim was watched over by a massive eagle called “Corpse Eater”.
One of the other worlds, Muspelheim, consisted of fire and volcanoes and was ruled by fire
giants.
At the other end of the spectrum was another of the nine worlds, Asgard, the home of the
gods, ruled by Odin.
Inside Asgard lies Valhalla, where brave warriors would go to, if they died in battle.
Zoroastrianism is one of the oldest religions in the world and still has a few hundred thousand
followers in India and Iran, as well as some religious hipsters – its combination of
cosmogonic dualism and eschatological monotheism is super retro, you wouldn’t get it.
Their Supreme Being is Ahura Mazda.
Which isn’t a Japanese sports car.
And Zoroastrianism has a really unique afterlife belief.
Once you die, you must cross the beam-shaped bridge that splits the world of the living
and the dead.
But your crossing is dependent on your behavior.
If you were a good person, then you got a nice wide bridge and were met by a beautiful
spirit called Daena who led you off to the House of Song, which sounds like a karaoke
bar and my personal idea of hell, but each to their own.
However, if you were a naughty person, then the bridge would be razor thin and the demon
Vizaresh would push you off and you’d fall into the House of Lies, a filthy place where
you are always alone, permanently tortured and fed awful, spoilt food.
So basically an NHS hospital.
The ancient Greeks loved a good bit of mythology and their gods were like the cast of a psychotic,
horny soap opera.
Hades famously ran the regular underworld but far beneath, as deep as the heavens were
high, was the black pit called Tartarus.
It was created out of chaos at the same time as the heavens and the earth and was mainly
used to house things the gods wanted out of the way, like murderous creatures and Adam
Sandler movies.
But it was also used to punish people who had really bugged the gods and rather than
a generic, off-the-shelf punishment for everyone, there was a unique punishment for each sinner.
Sisyphus had to keep rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity, Tantalus was always hungry
and thirsty and Ixion had to spin around on a flaming wheel, which actually sounds quite
fun, for a while anyway.
Tartarus was also used to imprison many of the Titans after they tried to overthrow the
gods.
Each Titan was guarded by one of the Hecatonchires, giants with 50 heads and 100 arms.
Some stories say how the Titans were burnt and mankind was created out of their fatty
smoke, a bit like how Eve was made created from Adam’s rib.
So the moral of the story is that whatever your religion, we were all created from some
kind of barbeque.
Much like how the Viking’s gods reflected their surroundings, the mythology of Samoa
is, as you’d expect from a remote island, very ocean based.
For example, the God of War lived in O le Fale o le Fe’e, the House of the Octopus,
since he was a giant Octopus.
The entrance to the underworld was found at Fafa and dead spirits would have to swim west
along the cluster of islands until they reached the furthest point on Upolu and threw themselves
from, “the leaping stone”, to swim on out to the afterworld.
Fafa housed two entrances, Pulotu lead to the blessed lands and Sa La Fe was the land
of the bound.
It was guarded by a giant called Moso who jumped from Samoa to Fiji and “may Moso
eat you” is still used as an insult to this day.
Next we head to Mongolia.
The country has a long history of Shamanism, including special objects and animals and
sacrificial altars called Ovoos.
In Mongolian shamanism, dead souls are judged by Erkil Khan, the prince of the underworld,
who does some quick mental arithmetic and counts up all their good deeds versus their
bad ones.
If the maths goes against them, as maths tends to do, then they are hurled into Kasyrgan,
a giant cauldron full of bubbling tar.
But all is not lost, the less they sinned, the quicker they rise to the top of the cauldron
and can go free, to take a shower for a few hundred years as that tar must be bloody difficult
to get off.
What’s more, you’re not in it entirely on your own since anyone in heaven who benefitted
from one of your good deeds can send a spirit to drag you up slightly quicker by grabbing
you by the hair.
Just don’t die bald, that’s what I’m taking from this; Be good and don’t be bald,
die in a wig if you must.
Finally, we come to the most chilled religion out there, Rastafarianism.
It was founded in Jamaica in 1930 when Haile Selassie became emperor of Ethiopia.
Rastafarianism thinks of Ethiopia as Zion, which is the birthplace of mankind and so
is also heaven on earth.
You can enter the holy land by literal geographical travel or in a spiritual way, making the emotional
journey before your lazy body actually gets there.
Because your body may have slight motivational issues given the enormous mountain of weed
you’ve just gone through.
So that’s heaven, what about hell?
Well, hell was actually Jamaica.
This is because many Africans ended up in Jamaica due to the slave trade.
So understandably it had a lot of negative connotations.
Whether it’s freezing caves, pushing giant rocks up hills or just good old fire and brimstone,
at one point we’ve all wished that whoever just stole our parking space should end up
there.
Eternal punishment may seem ridiculous to some of us or very plausible to others, I
guess it really depends on how many times you’ve had to watch frozen with your kids.
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