Pleasure with Pain for Leaven

Ross L. Bender

Mennonot, Issue #5

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Who's going to hell this week and why or why not

The Go-To-Hell Lady

She lurks in the gloomy depths of the City Hall subway station, beneath the thunking, quivering, wheezing, scum-choked heart of the metropolis, decked with a decorative sandwich board emblazoned with the vivid word “REPENT,” and spasmodically clutching and jerking a tattered Bible. The Market-Frankford subway lumbers in, its steel wheels screeching like a bat out of hell, and disgorges its load like a full bowel its bolus: red brown yellow black and gray, and as they spew from the subway doors the go-to-hell lady takes up her stance, ratchets up her inhumanly powerful voice to an insane bellow: “Y’all goin’ to hell! Y’all goin’ to hell! Not one of you is righteous, no not one, y’all goin’ to hell!”

The Quest for the Historical Hell

How did hell originate? Whose idea was it anyway? Scientists are baffled, historians uncertain, and theologians, as usual, are clueless. N. K. Sandars, in the introduction to her English translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, comments, “It would be an over-simplification to say that where the Egyptians give us the vision of heaven, the Babylonians give the vision of hell; yet there is some truth in it. . . It is a depressing vision of heavy moping voiceless birds with draggled feathers crouching in the dirt.” Enkidu, on his deathbed, relates to Gilgamesh a dream in which a black bird seizes him and carries him away to the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness:

“There is the house whose people sit in darkness; dust is their food and clay their meat. They are clothed like birds with wings for covering, they see no light, they sit in darkness. I entered the house of dust and I saw the kings of the earth, their crowns put away forever; rulers and princes, all those who once wore kingly crowns and ruled the world in the days of old.”

Elsewhere in Mesopotamian literature, hell is described as a place of constant thirst, as a city whose lord feeds on mud and drinks it by the cupful and barrel-full.

All very well, you say, but what does hell mean to us today? How can I use my knowledge of hell to win friends, influence people and discover interesting sexual partners?

Hell Today, Gone Tomorrow

The modern 20th-century sophisticate realizes that hell is not so much a place you go to but more of a place that persons construct in the here and now. Take Jean Paul Sartre’s play No Exit—please!:

“So that’s what Hell is. I’d never have believed it. . . Do you remember, brimstone, the stake, the gridiron?. . . What a joke! No need of a gridiron; Hell, it’s other people.”

“Hell in a Very Small Place”—a history of the French-Indochina war. “Life in Hell”—by Matt Groenig, a cartoon of all things. Dachau, Buechenwald, Dresden, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Serbo-Croatia, Rwanda, Guatemala. Do I put my finger right on the nub? Do I have to spell it out for you? I sincerely hope not.

The Hell of Intensely Hot Dung

Due to the jazzy notoriety with which Dante and Milton embellished the concept of hell, some folks might suspect that hell is merely a dead white European thang. But the truth is stranger than fiction, and the evidence is not all in. The evidence for Oriental hells is overwhelming, although scholars still don’t know for sure whether the idea of hell originated independently in the East, was diffused from a single point of origin in the Near East, or is an archetype of the collective unconscious that manifests itself in all bodies of religious thought around the world. A fourth possibility exists, namely that hell actually exists. Sound farfetched? Let’s go to the scriptures.

Here we have Genshin, an evangelist in the Pure Land Church (Buddhist) of medieval Japan, and a forerunner of the True Pure Land Church:

“Outside the four gates of this hell are sixteen separate places which are associated with this hell. The first is called the place of excrement. Here, it is said, there is intensely hot dung of the bitterest of taste, filled with maggots with snouts of indestructible hardness. The sinner here eats of the dung and all the assembled maggots swarm at once for food. They destroy the sinner’s skin, devour his flesh and suck the marrow from his bones.”

This, by the way, was translated by Professor Philip Yampolsky of Columbia University, who used to teach a graduate seminar in Zen. You may recall that when the Japanese exterminated Christianity in the 16th and 17th centuries, they suspended Christians upside down over pits of dung and left them there until their brains burst.

Comparative note: The Mayan underworld, Xibalba, is ruled by gods who smell like they’ve just stepped in from the barnyard.

The Hell You Say!

Whatever your walk in life, wherever you may roam, whether you be Buddhist or Baptist or Jew, hell may be coming your way, whether you think much about it or not. In any case, you must admit, as I am sure you will agree, that the concept of hell has irrevocably enriched the English language. Without it, we would never have had such gems as:

Ross L. Bender is a regular columnist for Mennonot. Ross lives in Philly, teaches ESL at Penn, and attends the West Philadelphia Mennonite Fellowship. The title of Bender's column comes from a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne: Pleasure with pain for leaven, summer with flowers that fell, remembrance fallen from heaven, and madness risen from hell. You can email Ross at rbender@sas.upenn.edu.

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