Meditations on Hell, The Underworld

Art: Justin Estcourt

A meditation on Hell...The Underworld

Yesterday, I was rereading an article I wrote a year ago. One of the lines really stood out to me because it contained a word I don’t normally use… “For thousands of years, across cultural lines the Goddess had always come in pairs. Light and dark. One symbolizing heaven and the other hell.”

I don’t like the word “hell” with all of its fire and brimstone connotations.

However, I do spend quite a bit of time talking about the Underworld, and thought I might take a moment to flesh out how “Hell” could be an appropriate word, when in its proper context.

In the post I wrote about the fact that my “underworld” work has been around not gripping, or controlling outcomes. My mantra with this work being “I surrender, I receive, I release, I trust.

My fear of death was actually a fear of a loss of control, a fear of the unknown. It had been showing up all over my world. And the more I talked about it, the more I heard from others that had a similar make-up.

Over-Control, or Over-Responsibility, (extreme vigilance) is a type of trauma response. I had so much resistance to the unknown. I wanted to dictate outcomes. Conquering my reality with the force of my will.

So I set out to become a practitioner of the Underworld. That meant unwinding the places that this pattern was choking off my ability to truly flourish. Which inevitably led me to engage more deeply with the underworld than I ever had before.

———

Hell, from the Hebrew root word, she'ol is often understood in the mainstream western world as hell, the place of the damned or the underworld.

However, when we look at the root words, sha'al, “asked”, she'eylah “request”, we see that the word was likely co-opted later. Or we overlayed other ideas onto it.

Sha’al shows up in the Hebrew bible 200 times. We see that when it is used, it is to derive information that is “Unknown”. In other words, the questions are not rhetorical.

Request, She’eylah, as used in prayer to ask God to bestow favor on us, generally denotes something that one does not already possess. In the Hymn of Inanna, we see that she must give up all of the things she divinely possessed to gain entrance to the Underworld. (I’ve related to this in the past as things that give us a feeling of safety and power. And while it can be that, some Underworld experiences require us to give things even more precious than this)

When we then study she’ol, in its context, it is evident that nobody actually knew anything about it.

For instance, it was used when proper burial rites couldn’t be performed. As in this line "No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning." Thus his father wept for him (RSV). In this account Jacob believed his son Joseph had been eaten by a wild beast. As Joseph's body could not possibly be in a grave.

There is good reason for the mind to relate to “The Underworld” or “Hell”, as the place of the “Unknown”. We often suffer the most when operating in the unknown, especially when we feel we lack safety.

For me, the reason I embarked on this path was so that I could engage with “world upending” events without gripping. So that I could surrender and stay present with myself in the midst of them.

I have so much more to say about the Underworld. This is exploration is but a fractal of what is here in this vast place of regeneration. But I’m going to save that for another day. I just thought I’d begin by illustrating that it is truly a quintessential mystery.

How do we as a culture, and in our personal lives, relate to the unknown, to the mystery? It's a good question to begin to play with.