Marq de Villiers - Hell and Damnation: A Sinners Guide to Eternal Torment

2019 Jacobus Communications Corp.

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Cover and text design: Duncan Campbell, University of Regina Press

Cover art: Devil mask glyph by Icons Producer for the Noun Project.

Copy editor: Ryan Perks

Indexer: Sergey Lobchev, Brookfield Indexing Services

Excerpts from the Canaanite Baal saga copyright J. C. L. Gibson, 1956, Canaanite Myths and Legends , T&T Clark International, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. reprinted by permission.

Verse and chorus from Paul Simons The Afterlife , copyright Universal Music Publishing Group, by permission. Passages from The Epic of Gilgamesh by permission of the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA) . Passages from Philip Almonds The Devil: A New Biography , by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

De Villiers, Marq, author

Hell and damnation : a sinner's guide to eternal torment / Marq de Villiers.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-88977-584-8 (softcover). ISBN 978-0-88977-585-5 ( PDF ).

ISBN 978-0-88977-586-2 ( HTML )

1. Hell. I. Title.

BL545.D4 2019 202'.3 C2018-906027-1 C2018-906028-X

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

University of Regina Press, University of Regina Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, s4s 0a2 tel: (306) 585-4758 fax: (306) 585-4699 web :

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. / Nous reconnaissons lappui financier du gouvernement du Canada. This publication was made possible with support from Creative Saskatchewans Book Publishing Production Grant Program.

T his book is dedicated to skeptics everywhere. Like Thomas Tailour of Newbury, England, punished in 1491 for denying the power of prayer and doubting the survival of the soul after death. When a man or woman dies in the body they also die in their soul, he declared, for as the light of a candle is put out by casting it away or in other ways quenched by blowing or shaking it, so is the soul quenched by death. Tailour died a heretic, gladly unrepentant.

Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.

Woody Allen

I am on my way to look for the great perhaps.

Rabelais, on his deathbed

part i. what kind of place is this?

1. W

part ii. whos in charge?

part iii. whats the operating plan?

part iv. eyewitness accounts

Introduction

Readers who make it that far will note that many of my sources, especially those from the Christian tradition, are rather less than canonical. Thus, Ive incorporated passages from many early Christian and proto-Christian accounts, such as The Apocalypse of Peter , The Apocalypse of the Virgin , and The Gospel of Nicodemus , that were rejected by the compilers of the Christian Bible. These early gospels, some of them gnostic texts newly (re)discovered, were considered by the early church fathers to be lamentably off-message, and therefore to be either suppressed or ignored (pronouncing them anathema was a favourite tactic). In my defence, consider the alternatives. It is hard for anyone in these skeptical days to consider, say, Genesis as a historical account; and bemusement is the only proper response to the editors/compilers who thought to place Revelation into the canon with a straight face. I can reasonably argue, therefore, that both Nicodemus and Bartholomew, who have given us wonderful eavesdropped accounts of the petty squabbling between Hades and Satan as Jesus descended for the harrowing of hell, are as theologically useful as any of the accepted gospels, contradictory as they are. Sure, it is the right of any reader to reject as reportage the accounts of hell in Arda Viraf and Gilgamesh and Ishtar, as well as in Virgil and Dante and Milton and Tundale and the various apocalypses; but then I am attempting to assemble an overview of humanitys bounteous (not to say riotous) imaginings about the afterlife, not to argue a coherent theological case. That these non-canonical texts conflict with the canon and with each other is okay. In fact, that is sort of the point.

What theological case is made comes only at the end, in the epilogue, where I ask the reader to consider the multiple florid, even lurid, versions of hell in the worlds religious texts, and to wonder why anyone would give credence to any of them as a depiction of how the world and the supposed afterworld really are.

Acknowledgements

For my previous books, I tried to travel as much and as often as possible to the places that appeared in the text, and to interview as many people as I could in situ . Clearly, this time there were certain... logistical difficulties in so doing. Lack of solid check-in data... uncertainty about return tickets... certain meteorological anomalies... a paucity of trustworthy guides. So I relied on people who have been there, and people who have written about people who have been there, and people who have commented on people who have written about people who have been there. Many of these sources are mentioned in the text.

Three people (organizations?) need to be acknowledged off the top: the anonymous writer for The Economist who assembled the altogether engaging piece Hell: A Rough Guide, which was the trigger for this book; Eileen Gardiner, the editor of the hugely impressive scholarly website called Hell-On-Line, where she has assembled a unique (and exhaustive) catalogue of texts on hell from multiple cultures around the world; and the editors of Project Gutenberg, who have placed into the public domain literally thousands of works, some obscure and others renowned, to the immense benefit of human knowledge.

Gardiner, especially, needs to be singled out. I have tried to give credit where it is due in the text, and have quoted briefly from her work, I hope without missing any attributions. But she is more valuable than that. Many of the otherwise obscure works (tracts, polemics, apocalypses, gospels, visions) that I was able to find and to use, I only knew about because Gardiner had been there before. Those, too, will be acknowledged in the text.