On this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck explore the complicated concept of hell. While religions may vary on why someone would go to hell, most of them agree about what hell is like, mainly because religions were constantly borrowing ideas about the afterlife from each other for millennia. The idea of an afterlife at all is incredibly ancient, and in many cultures, was associated with being underground. Chuck reflects that this is pretty logical, given that we’ve been burying our dead for over 130,000 years. But the idea of a place of eternal punishment came later, and over generations has had many details embroidered onto it. They take us through some ancient religious ideas that have been woven into the overall story, as well as classic literature like Dante’s Inferno, to show how the tropes of hell came to be cemented into our imaginations forever.
The afterlife has always been used as a way to guide how people comport themselves on Earth. In early Judaism, for example, the afterlife was unpleasant, but not hellacious; souls ate dust and were constantly thirsty. If you were rich in life, you could be buried with all the food and drink you could need; if not, it behooved you to be a good person, because then your family would visit your grave and bring you food and beer to sustain your soul in the underworld. Many religions had similar afterlife stories, more closely resembling the Christian idea of purgatory than hell. And everyone went to the same place, no matter who they were or what they did during life, which even ancient people acknowledged seemed unfair.
In some cultures, there were ways to “work off” your sin and go to heaven, though sometimes it could take a billion years or more. The inescapable dark cave of fire and brimstone where our souls go to experience “eternal conscious torment” that we’re all familiar with today wouldn’t really get popular until Plato and St. Augustine had their say in the matter. And in the 1300s, Dante Alighieri came along to essentially put all the ancient and modern ideas of hell together in his Divine Comedy, delineating the nine circles of hell, the sins you had to commit to get there, and what kind of torments you would experience based on your earthly sin – but mostly he wanted to roast the members of the Florentine community who had banished him. Learn all about the concept of afterlife and hell, and what Albert Brooks has to do with anything, on this episode of Stuff You Should Know.
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