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O
N
SuNDAY,
July 12,
1 went to hell.
On that day Jerusa–
lem's sun stood directly over–
head as 1 paused to recheck my
map.
If
my bearings were cor–
rect, hell's very threshold lay
before me!
1 had just left the Old City of
Jerusalem tbrough the Dung Gate,
one of tbe eight gates in the old
Turkisb wall. 1 had headed west on
the road paralleling the wall, then
around the area known today as
Mount Zion. From there I began
my descent into the Lower
Regions.
The "House of Hades"
The notion that a mortal might
actually visit hell-and retum–
bas been a source of fascination to
people of almost every age.
Since ancient times, the abode of
the dead has been viewed as lying
deep underground, with various
entrances on the earth's surface–
through caverns, volcanoes, under–
ground rivers and the like. Ancient
peoples-Greeks and Romans es–
pecially-reveled in fanciful ac–
counts of heroes who dared pass
through these fearful portals and
into the Dark Realm.
One of the earliest accounts of
such a journey is found in
The
Odyssey.
It
is an ancient epic
poem by the Greek poet Homer
(8th century B.C.). Homer writes
of the Greek hero Odysseus
(Ulysses), the lost king of Ithaca,
who wandered the seas in search
of his borne for 1O years following
the fall of Troy. In desperation,
Odysseus reputedly found bis way
into the "abode of departed spir–
its" to learn from the ghost of a
famous seer how he migbt find bis
borne.
The underworld described by
Homer was a shadowy place of
dreary darkness lying beneath the
secret places of the eartb. Though a
place of gloom, it was not pictured
as one of punishment and torture as
is the traditional Christian or
Oriental hell.
Homer called the place of the
dead the " House of Hades." Hades
(tbe Romans called him Pluto) was
December 1981
TO
by
Keith W. Stump
Read here about the
true
biblical hell–
from one who has
been there!
the Greek king of the underworld,
god of death. Eventually, Hades
became the common name for the
underworld itself.
The ancient classicists believed
that five rivers flowed througb the
underworld. The principal one was
the Styx, across which the aged
boatman Charon ferried tbe souls
of the dead . (The Styx was an
actual stream that disappeared
underground in Arcadia in
Greece.)
In the
Aeneid,
an epic by the
Roman poet Virgil, the Trojan hero
Aeneas, fleeing the burning ruins
of Troy after the Greek victory,
successfully besought the ferryman
Charon for passage into the infer–
nal region to consult his dead
father. (Virgil preferred the name
Tartarus to Hades for the fabled
infernal region.) Aeneas entered
the underworld through a cavern at
a foul-smelling lake near Naples in
Italy. Descending on a road
wrapped in shadows, he encoun–
tered numerous horrors and fright–
ful terrors.
Tartarus (or Tartaros) was a
named used by the later classical
writers such as Virgil as anotber
name for Hades. Homer, on the
other hand, described Tartarus as a
different place, lying as far beneath
Hades as Hades is beneath the
earth.
lt
was in this bottomless pit
of Tartarus, according to classical
mythology, that the Greek god
Zeus confined those who had resis–
ted him.
Another hero of ancient Greece,
the legendary Hercules, also
reputedly tiaveled to the lower
world. One of bis famous Twelve
Labors was to fetch up from Hades
the triple-headed, dragon-tailed
dog Cerberus, the feared guardian
of Hades' gates.
Many other ancients are said to
have made the fearsome journey
into Hades, including Theseus of
Athens, Orpheus the musician, the
princess Psyche and the twin Pol–
lux, in search of bis dead brother
Castor.
The Interno
Possibly the best-known "journey"
of all is that of Dante Alighieri
(1265-1321), the medieval Ital ian
poet. His travels among t he
damned are recorded in
The Infer–
no.
lt
is the first part of bis three–
part
Divine Comedy,
an account of
his, imaginary journeys through
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