The Penguin Book of Hell
Page 4
A huge throng of the dead came streaming toward the banks:
mothers and grown men and ghosts of great-souled heroes,
their bodies stripped of life, and boys and unwed girls
and sons laid on the pyre before their parents’ eyes.
As thick as leaves in autumn woods at the first frost
that slip and float to earth, or dense as flocks of birds
that wing from the heaving sea to shore when winter’s chill
drives them over the waves to landfalls drenched in sunlight.
There they stood, pleading to be the first ones ferried over,
reaching out their hands in longing toward the farther shore.
But the grim ferryman ushers aboard now these, now those,
others he thrusts away, back from the water’s edge.
Aeneas,
astonished, stirred by the tumult, calls out: “Tell me,
Sibyl, what does it mean, this thronging toward the river?
What do the dead souls want? What divides them all?
Some are turned away from the banks and others
scull the murky waters with their oars!”
The aged priestess answered Aeneas briefly:
“Son of Anchises—born of the gods, no doubt—
what you see are Cocytus’ pools and Styx’s marsh,
Powers by which the gods swear oaths they dare not break.
And the great rout you see is helpless, still not buried.
That ferryman there is Charon. Those borne by the stream
have found their graves. And no spirits may be conveyed
across the horrendous banks and hoarse, roaring flood
until their bones are buried, and they rest in peace . . .
A hundred years they wander, hovering round these shores
till at last they may return and see once more the pools
they long to cross.”
Anchises’ son came to a halt
and stood there, pondering long, while pity filled his heart,
their lot so hard, unjust.
[...]
So now they press on with their journey under way
and at last approach the river. But once the ferryman,
still out in the Styx’s currents, spied them moving
across the silent grove and turning toward the bank,
he greets them first with a rough abrupt rebuke:
“Stop, whoever you are at our river’s edge,
in full armor too! Why have you come? Speak up,
from right where you are, not one step more! This
is the realm of shadows, sleep, and drowsy night.
The law forbids me to carry living bodies across
in my Stygian boat. I’d little joy, believe me,
when Hercules came and I sailed the hero over,
or Theseus, Pirithous, sons of gods as they were
with their high and mighty power.
Hercules stole our watchdog—chained him, the poor trembling creature,
dragged him away from our king’s very throne! The others
tried to snatch our queen from the bridal bed of Death!”
But Apollo’s seer broke in and countered Charon:
“There’s no such treachery here—just calm down—
no threat of force in our weapons. The huge guard
at the gates can howl for eternity from his cave,
terrifying the bloodless shades, Persephone keep
her chastity safe at home behind her uncle’s doors.
Aeneas of Troy, famous for his devotion, feats of arms,
goes down to the deepest shades of hell to see his father.
But if this image of devotion cannot move you, here,
this bough”—showing the bough enfolded in her robes—
“You know it well.”
At this, the heaving rage
subsides in his chest. The Sibyl says no more.
The ferryman, marveling at the awesome gift,
the fateful branch unseen so many years,
swerves his dusky craft and approaches shore.
The souls already crouched at the long thwarts—
he brusquely thrusts them out, clearing the gangways,
quickly taking massive Aeneas aboard the little skiff.
Under his weight the boat groans and her stitched seams
gape as she ships great pools of water pouring in.
At last, the river crossed, the ferryman lands
the seer and hero all unharmed in the marsh,
the repellent oozing slime and livid sedge.
These
are the realms that monstrous Cerberus rocks with howls
braying out of his three throats, his enormous bulk
squatting low in the cave that faced them there.
The Sibyl, seeing the serpents writhe around his neck,
tossed him a sop, slumberous with honey and drugged seed,
and he, frothing with hunger, three jaws spread wide,
snapped it up where the Sibyl tossed it—gone.
His tremendous back relaxed, he sags to earth
and sprawls over all his cave, his giant hulk limp.
The watchdog buried now in sleep, Aeneas seizes
the way in, quickly clear of the river’s edge,
the point of no return.
At that moment, cries—
they could hear them now, a crescendo of wailing,
ghosts of infants weeping, robbed of their share
of this sweet life, at its very threshold too:
all, snatched from the breast on that black day
that swept them off and drowned them in bitter death.
Beside them were those condemned to die on a false charge.
But not without jury picked by lot, not without judge
are their places handed down. Not at all.
Minos the grand inquisitor stirs the urn,
he summons the silent jury of the dead,
he scans the lives of those accused, their charges.
The region next to them is held by those sad ghosts,
innocents all, who brought on death by their own hands;
despising the light, they threw their lives away.
How they would yearn, now in the world above
to endure grim want and long hard labor!
But Fate bars the way. The grisly swamp
and its loveless, lethal waters bind them fast,
Styx with its nine huge coils holds them captive.
Close to the spot, extending toward the horizon—
the Sibyl points them out—are the Fields of Mourning,
that is the name they bear. Here wait those souls
consumed by the harsh, wasting sickness, cruel love,
concealed on lonely paths, shrouded by myrtle bowers.
Not even in death do their torments leave them, ever.
Here he glimpses Phaedra, Procris, and Eriphyle grieving,
baring the wounds her heartless son had dealt her.2
Evadne, Pasiphaë, and Laodamia walking side by side,
and another, a young man once, a woman now, Caeneus,
turned back by Fate to the form she bore at first.3
And wandering there among them, wound still fresh,
Phoenician Dido drifted along the endless woods.
As the Trojan hero paused beside her, recognized her
through the shadows, a dim, misty figure—as one
when the month is young may see or seem to see
the new moon rising up through banks of clouds—
that moment Aeneas wept and appro
ached the ghost
with tender words of love: “Tragic Dido,
so, was the story true that came my way?
I heard that you were dead . . .
you took the final measure with a sword.
Oh, dear god, was it I who caused your death?
I swear by the stars, by the Powers on high, whatever
faith one swears by here in the depths of earth,
I left your shores, my Queen, against my will. Yes,
the will of the gods, that drives me through the shadows now,
those moldering places so forlorn, this deep unfathomed night—
their decrees have forced me on. Nor did I ever dream
my leaving could have brought you so much grief.
Stay a moment. Don’t withdraw from my sight.
Running away—from whom? This is the last word
that Fate allows me to say to you. The last.”
Aeneas, with such appeals, with welling tears,
tried to soothe her rage, her wild fiery glance.
But she, her eyes fixed on the ground, turned away,
her features no more moved by his pleas as he talked on
than if she were set in stony flint or Parian marble rock.
And at last she tears herself away, his enemy forever,
fleeing back to the shadowed forest where Sychaeus,
her husband long ago, answers all her anguish,
meets her love with love. But Aeneas, no less
struck by her unjust fate, escorts her from afar
with streaming tears and pities her as she passes.
[. . .]
“Night comes on, Aeneas. We waste our time with tears.
This is the place where the road divides in two.
To the right it runs below the mighty walls of Death,
our path to Elysium, but the left-hand road torments
the wicked, leading down to Tartarus, path to doom.”
[. . .]
Aeneas
suddenly glances back and beneath a cliff to the left
he sees an enormous fortress ringed with triple walls
and raging around it all, a blazing flood of lava,
Tartarus’ River of Fire, whirling thunderous boulders.
Before it rears a giant gate, its columns solid adamant,
so no power of man, not even the gods themselves,
can root it out in war. An iron tower looms on high
where Tisiphone, crouching with bloody shroud girt up,
never sleeping, keeps her watch at the entrance night and day.
Groans resound from the depths, the savage crack of the lash,
the grating creak of iron, the clank of dragging chains.
And Aeneas froze there, terrified, taking in the din:
“What are the crimes, what kinds? Tell me, Sibyl,
what punishments, why this scourging?
Why such wailing echoing in the air?”
The seer rose to the moment: “Famous captain of Troy,
no pure soul may set foot on that wicked threshold.
But when Hecate put me in charge of Avernus’ groves
she taught me all the punishments of the gods,
she led me through them all.
Here Cretan Rhadamanthus rules with an iron hand,
censuring men, exposing fraud, forcing confessions
when anyone up and above, reveling in his hidden crimes,
puts off his day of atonement till he dies, the fool,
too late. That very moment, vengeful Tisiphone, armed
with lashes, springs on the guilty, whips them till they quail,
with her left hand shaking all her twisting serpents,
summoning up her savage sisters, bands of Furies.
Then at last, screeching out on their grinding hinge
the infernal gates swing wide.
“Can you see that sentry
crouched at the entrance? What a specter guards the threshold!
Fiercer still, the monstrous Hydra, fifty black maws gaping,
holds its lair inside.
“Then the abyss, Tartarus itself
plunges headlong down through the darkness twice as far
as our gaze goes up to Olympus rising toward the skies.
Here the ancient line of the Earth, the Titans’ spawn,
flung down by lightning, writhe in a deep pit.
There I saw the twin sons of Aloeus too, giant bodies
that clawed the soaring sky with their hands to tear it down
and thrust great Jove from his kingdom high above.
“I saw Salmoneus too, who paid a brutal price
for aping the flames of Jove and Olympus’ thunder.
Sped by his four-horse chariot, flaunting torches,
right through the Greek tribes and Elis city’s heart
he rode in triumph, claiming as his the honors of the gods.
The madman, trying to match the storm and matchless lightning
just by stamping on bronze with prancing horn-hoofed steeds!
The almighty Father hurled his bolt through the thunderheads—
no torches for him, no smoky flicker of pitch-pines, no,
he spun him headlong down in a raging whirlwind.
“Tityus too:
you could see that son of Earth, the mother of us all,
his giant body splayed out over nine whole acres,
a hideous vulture with hooked beak gorging down
his immortal liver and innards ever ripe for torture.
Deep in his chest it nestles, ripping into its feast
and the fibers, grown afresh, get no relief from pain.
“What need to tell of the Lapiths, Ixion, or Pirithous?
Above them a black rock—now, now slipping, teetering,
watch, forever about to fall. While the golden posts
of high festal couches gleam, and a banquet spreads
before their eyes with luxury fit for kings . . .
but reclining just beside them, the oldest Fury
holds back their hands from even touching the food,
surging up with her brandished torch and deafening screams.
“Here those who hated their brothers, while alive,
or struck their fathers down
or embroiled clients in fraud, or brooded alone
over troves of gold they gained and never put aside
some share for their own kin—a great multitude, these—
then those killed for adultery, those who marched to the flag
of civil war and never shrank from breaking their pledge
to their lords and masters: all of them, walled up here,
wait to meet their doom.
“Don’t hunger to know their doom,
what form of torture or twist of Fortune drags them down.
Some trundle enormous boulders, others dangle, racked
to the breaking point on the spokes of rolling wheels.
Doomed Theseus sits on his seat and there he will sit forever.
Phlegyas, most in agony, sounds out his warning to all,
his piercing cries bear witness through the darkness:
‘Learn to bow to justice. Never scorn the gods.
You all stand forewarned!’
“Here’s one who bartered his native land for gold,
he saddled her with a tyrant, set up laws for a bribe,
for a bribe he struck them down. This one forced himself
on his daughter’s bed and sealed a forbidden marriage.
All dared an outrageous crime and what they dared, they did.
�
�No, not if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths
and a voice of iron too—I could never capture
all the crimes or run through all the torments,
doom by doom.”
EARLY CHRISTIAN HELLSCAPES (c. 100–500 CE)
The earliest Christian authors inherited from the Greeks and the Romans the notion that the souls of the dead lived in a realm either beneath the earth or on a distant shore (Hades), where particularly wicked individuals suffered eternal punishments (Tartarus), but the holy writings of the ancient Israelites exerted an equally powerful influence on Christian conceptions of the punitive afterlife. In contrast to Greek and Roman literature, the Hebrew scriptures offered no stories of heroes descending to the underworld; there was no Jewish Odysseus or Aeneas. Unlike other ancient religions, Judaism forbade commerce with the dead by means of necromancy, emphasized the living believer’s relationship to God, and did not speculate at length about the fate of the soul after death. Nonetheless, the early Christians inherited two Hebrew words for the afterlife that shaped the way they formulated their idea of Hell: Sheol and Gehenna.
The word Sheol (“the underworld”) appears many times in the Hebrew scriptures. Similar to the concept of Hades among the Greeks, Sheol was a place of darkness where souls abided in silence and forgetfulness. Hebrew prophets described it as a prison of sorts with gates and bars. Sheol was generally reserved for wicked and impious individuals, but it was not a place of otherworldly torture. To express their idea of the punitive afterlife, early Christians repurposed the Hebrew word Gehenna. The name derived from the Hebrew ge-hinnom (“valley of Hinnom”), a site on the southern side of the city of Jerusalem where the Israelites had once sacrificed their children in fire to the Canaanite god Molech. For this idolatry, God sent the Babylonians to punish them and lead them into exile—the Babylonian captivity—for forty years (598–58 BCE). Upon their return, the Israelites treated the valley of Hinnom as an accursed place, where rebels against God would be punished: “And they shall go forth and look on the dead bodies of the men that have rebelled against me; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh” (Isaiah 66.24). The earliest Christians adopted the word Gehenna as the equivalent of Tartarus: the destination of the wicked who merited punishment after death for their sins. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus warned his apostles directly: “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9.46–47). Wedding the pagan notion of a punitive afterlife for those who offended the divine with the imagery of the fire and the worm from the Hebrew scriptures, early Christian authors imagined a host of otherworldly punishments that inspired theologians, artists, and poets throughout the European Middle Ages and beyond.