Hell

Fallen Angels in Hell by John Martin

In religion and folklore, hell is a location in the afterlife in which evil souls are subjected to punitive suffering, most often through torture, as eternal punishment after death.

In ancient Egypt

The ancient Egyptians believed that after death a person faced judgment by a tribunal of forty-two divine judges. If they had led a life in conformance with the precepts of the goddess Maat, who represented truth and right living, the person was welcomed into the heavenly reed fields. If found guilty the person was thrown to Ammit, the "devourer of the dead" and would be condemned to the lake of fire.

The person taken by the devourer is subject first to terrifying punishment and then annihilated. These depictions of punishment may have influenced medieval perceptions of the inferno in hell via early Christian and Coptic texts.

Purification for those considered justified appears in the descriptions of "Flame Island," where humans experience the triumph over evil and rebirth. For the damned complete destruction into a state of non-being awaits but there is no suggestion of eternal torture; the weighing of the heart in Egyptian mythology can lead to annihilation.

In Abrahamic religions

Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as eternal destinations, the biggest examples of which are Christianity and Islam, whereas religions with reincarnation usually depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations, as is the case in the dharmic religions. Religions typically locate hell in another dimension or under Earth's surface. Other afterlife destinations include Heaven, Paradise, Purgatory, Limbo, and the Underworld.

Many scholars of Jewish mysticism, particularly of the Kabbalah, describe seven "compartments" or "habitations" of hell, just as they describe seven divisions of heaven.

The Christian doctrine of hell derives from passages in the New Testament. The English word hell does not appear in the Greek New Testament; instead one of three words is used: the Greek words "Tartarus" or "Hades," or the Hebrew word "Gehinnom." The Catholic Church defines hell as "a state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed," which aligns closely with the Jewish conception of Gehinnom.

In other religions

Other religions, which do not conceive of the afterlife as a place of punishment or reward, merely describe an abode of the dead, the grave, a neutral place that is located under the surface of Earth (for example, see Kur, Hades, and Sheol). Such places are sometimes equated with the English word hell, though a more correct translation would be "underworld" or "world of the dead". The ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, and Finnic religions include entrances to the underworld from the land of the living.

In Hinduism, is believed that people who commit misdeeds go to hell and have to go through punishments in accordance with the misdeeds they committed. The god Yama, who is also the god of death, presides over hell.

Wicca

The Gardnerian Wicca and Alexandrian Wicca sects of Wicca include "wiccan laws" that Gerald Gardner wrote, which state that wiccan souls are privileged with reincarnation, but that the souls of wiccans who break the wiccan laws, "even under torture," would be cursed by the goddess, never be reborn on earth, and "remain where they belong, in the Hell of the Christians."

Other recognized wiccan sects do not include Gerald Gardner's "wiccan laws." The influential wiccan author Raymond Buckland wrote that the wiccan laws are unimportant. Solitary wiccans, not involved in organized sects, do not include the wiccan laws in their doctrine.

Entrances to Hell

Occultist Aleister Crowley believed one of the portals to Hell existed at the Devil's Gate Dam in Pasadena, California. Crowley's fellow magician, rocket scientist Jack Parsons, chose Devil's Gate Dam as the location for NASA's Joint Propulsion Laboratory.