Hell
Playing merry hell with the other place
Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
Shakespeare: The Tempest
An apposite quote for the times…
Whether it’s a scorching realm of torment for the wicked, a place where your greatest fears and nightmares come true, an underworld populated by condemned spirits and devils, or simply the city of Sunderland, we all have a notion of what hell looks like. However, the idea that the good and the evil are separated when they die according to their behaviour when living is not a universal concept: the underworld of Aralu is where all Babylonians ended up, Sheol is the grave for all humanity, according to the Hebrew Bible and Hades was the universal resting place for the Ancient Greeks. Even in religions where an equivalent of hell for the wicked exists, the soul’s journey may not be over. Although hell represents eternal damnation for Christians and Muslims, in Indian religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, you are just there for a very long time. For example, the Hindu hell, Naraka, is a place where wrong-doers are exiled for the expiation of their sins, with the severity of their tortures and punishment there commensurate with how much and how badly they had transgressed in their previous life. They then assume their next incarnation as humans or beasts, the worst offenders reborn as lower beings, and the virtuous reborn higher up the pecking order.
Hell has been traced by linguists back to the Proto-Indo-European root *kel- ‘cover, conceal, protect’, which produced Proto-Germanic *haljo ‘underworld’ and thence Dutch, Norwegian and Icelandic hel, German Hölle and English hell. It is literally a ‘concealed place’, in Germanic religions, under the earth and out of sight. Cognates of hell have several semantic strands. On the ‘under cover’ side, English has hall ‘large place covered by a roof’, hole, hollow and hold ‘storage space for cargo below the deck of a ship’; then there are also words whereby the covering conceals what is within, e.g. holster and hull ‘seed covering’; a third group looks at the cover as protection – German Helm and Swedish hjälm carrying the same sense as English helmet, with -helm featuring prominently in names, such as Kenelm ‘bold protector’, or if you prefer ‘keen helmet’, Anselm ‘divine protector’ and Wilhelm ‘resolute protector’ – as a Williams, it gives me much succour that I’m ‘of the strong-willed helmet’.
The hidden, covered aspect of *kel- has persisted to the current day in its manifest descendants across other Indo-European languages. Ancient Greek contributes to the pot with words with the letter combination -καλ- (English -cal-) from the verb καλύπτω (kalypto) ‘cover’. From this source, we have borrowed calyx ‘seed pod’, eucalyptus ‘well-covered’ – referring to the thick cap-like covering on the bud, Calypso and apocalypse. In Homer’s Odyssey, Calypso, whose name means ‘she who conceals’ appears as a sea-nymph who detains Odysseus against his will on the remote island of Ogygia for seven years, hidden from the rest of the world. Calypso hopes to persuade Odysseus to marry her in exchange for immortality, but the gods eventually find them and intervene to let Odysseus get back to Penelope. Apocalypse sounds suitably hellish, but its etymon ἀποκάλυψις (apokalypsis) actually means ‘revelation; uncovering’. The sense evolution of apocalypse to ‘catastrophe; end of the world’ is due to the Apocalypse of St John, better known as the biblical Book of Revelation, in which global destruction is prophesised. *Kel- is also present in the Latin root cel- ‘hide, cover’, from which English has borrowed a number of descendant forms – often via French – such as occult, conceal, cell, cellar, ceiling, clam, clandestine and even colour, which originally meant ‘covering’.
In Scandinavian mythology, hell is bitterly cold – temperature-wise, you’d definitely have a snowball’s chance in hell there. There was even a goddess named Hel (one of Loki’s daughters), who presided over the evillest of the dead in the Halls of Hel within Niflheim ‘home of mist’, a netherworld of primordial cold, darkness and fog. In Old Norse sagas, Hel is the guardian and sometimes desecrator of graves, owner of a dish named ‘Hunger’, a knife named ‘Famine’ and an entrance threshold named ‘Stumbling-block’. Basically, you’d want to steer clear of her come hell or high water – ‘given to Hel’ was a common phrase used to refer to death. It is thought that these Norse legends reinforced the English word hell, even as it evolved from a pagan to a Christian concept and got a hell of a lot hotter. Hell crops up in Old English terms like hellefyr ‘hell-fire’, helle hus ‘hell-house’, helwara ‘hellware’ – the inhabitants of hell, contrasting with heofenwara ‘heavenware’ – the inhabitants of heaven, and helle pyt ‘hell pit’ – the abyss or bottomless pit of hell. There is also the term helle hund ‘hellhound’, which the Anglo-Saxons used to refer to Cerberus, the multi-headed guardian dog of the underworld in Greek and Roman myth.
From the Middle Ages onwards, it seems that our forebears were hell bent on crowbarring the word hell into as many expressions as possible (and I’ll follow suit in this paragraph). The phrases hell on earth ‘extremely unpleasant place or situation’ and all hell broke loose ‘it was total chaos’ are at least 450 years old and the proverb the road to hell is paved with good intentions, ascribed to St Bernard, dates from around the same time. Shakespeare gets in on the act when Portia in The Merchant of Venice tells Bassanio to let fortune ‘go to hell’, though this directive was soon replaced by the euphemistic go to Halifax for when people wanted to rid themselves of someone in a more genteel manner. Hell as an interjection to express anger, annoyance or surprise (often intensified with a bloody or a fucking) is commonplace by the end of the Victorian era, although it’s hard to imagine such potty-mouthed vulgarity on the lips of Queen Vic. In fact, these epithets were sanitised as heck, blooming and flipping almost immediately by guardians of public morals so as not to pollute impressionable ears with the profane vernacular of the era’s hellraisers. Other 19th-century expressions include till hell freezes over, aka ‘never’, hell for leather, originally referring to a riding on horseback at breakneck speed, go to hell in a handcart/handbasket ‘deteriorate very rapidly’ and come hell or high water ‘no matter how great the obstacle may be’. From this point onwards, the hell-phrases just keep coming: give someone hell, how the hell, play hell with, like a bat out of hell, not a hope in hell, go to hell and back again, see you in hell, hell to pay, laughing like hell, and there are as sure as hell many, many others.
Anyway, I feel that’s one hell of a list! It’s now high time we drew this to a close and for me to get the hell out of here – why not subscribe? Just for the hell of it?