HELL-ON-LINE

HELL-ON-LINE is developing as a comprehensive on-line collection of over 100 visions, tours and descriptions of the infernal otherworld from the cultures of the world: principally from the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Zoroastrian, Islamic and Jewish traditions from 2000 BCE to the present. These texts reveal the development of hell and its relationship to ideas of judgment, reincarnation, salvation, the apocalypse, and cyclic time. Visionaries and voyagers describe the geography of the underworld. Much like any other travelers, they lay out locations and distances, compass points, and physical characteristics, especially the surface features: oceans, mountains, rivers, roads, bridges and ditches. They also describe the inhabitants — both human souls and evil spirits — and the relationships between them, as they fulfill their particular doom, engendered by sins committed in this life, according to the laws and norms of the next life.