A History of Hell, Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In their exhaustive survey of human civilization, historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel introduce many topics, including some that touch upon matters of interest to the writer of horror fiction, such as hell. This post provides a brief summary of the points that Will Durant (not yet joined in his venture by his wife) makes concerning this rather otherworldly theme in Volume III, Caesar and Christ, of The Story of Civilization.

• Etruscan soldiers believed that they could free one relative’s soul for every foe whom they slew in battle.


• The Etruscan concept of the afterlife included the judgment of the dead, an eternity of torment in hell or of bliss in heaven, and a purgatory of sorts. Their ideas concerning the suffering of the damned haunted Virgil and Dante.


• By far, most of the dead, in Greek belief, went to Hades, but a few spent eternity in paradise, in the Islands of the Blessed or (in Roman mythology) the Elysian Fields.


• Hades, for whom the underworld realm of the dead was named, ruled the subterranean world, and was armed with a mallet by which he could stun the dead.


• Although the Romans sometimes conceived of Hades as a place of punishment, they generally thought of it, as did the Greeks, as a twilight realm in which the dead existed as shadowy figures.


• Dreary Hades as the final destination of almost all the dead disappointed the Roman poet Virgil, and, in The Aeneid, along with “ideas of reincarnation and a future life,“ he sought to describe three alternatives: “a rewarding heaven, a cleansing purgatory, and a punishing hell.”


• Plutarch wrote of the existence or evil spirits who were the source of all chaos and wickedness in nature and humanity and, like Virgil, believed in both heaven and purgatory as well as hell. He believed that even Nero, after his soul had been purified in purgatory, might enter heaven and hoped that the vast majority, rather than a tiny minority, might enjoy a blessed eternity. He rebuked the Stoics for seeking to replace faith in hell with a doctrine of death as annihilation.


• Jesus of Nazareth argued that, upon damnation, hell is eternal, punishing, and irrevocable. In hell, he said, the fire is not quenched, nor is the worm sated. Not the least comfort or compassion is permitted.


• The book of Revelation declares that God’s great enemy, Satan, and his followers, the demons, reside in hell, but will be loosed upon the earth in its final days before being defeated forever and cast, along with the souls of the damned, into hell again, this time for eternity.
  

What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? We see that many of the earlier ideas concerning judgment, purgatory, heaven, and hell continue and are developed more specifically. In addition, we learn that Jesus held a strict view of a literal and eternal hell of endless punishment and suffering and that God’s enemy, Satan, and his demons reside in hell along with the souls of the damned. The idea of the afterlife as a shadowy place full of shadowy figures living insubstantial half-lives is gone, replaced with the idea that the souls of the dead are fully alive and subject either to endless bliss or to eternal torment.

In “A History of Hell, Part III,” we will summarize Will Durant's survey of hell as it was conceived during The Age of Faith.

A History of Hell, Part I

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In their exhaustive survey of human civilization, historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel introduce many topics, including some that touch upon matters of interest to the writer of horror fiction, such as hell. This post provides a brief summary of the points that Will Durant (not yet joined in his venture by his wife) makes concerning this rather otherworldly theme in Volume II, The Life of Greece, of The Story of Civilization.

• According to Greek myth, once they’d died and taken up residence in Hades, kings became judges of the dead.


• Tantalus was damned to Hades by Zeus for a series of offenses which includes having stolen the drink and the food of the gods, nectar and ambrosia , respectively, and attempting to serve his own son, Pelops, boiled and sliced, to the gods. His punishments fit his crimes. Forced to stand forever in a lake, the water drew back from him whenever he tried to slake his thirst and the fruits growing from the vines over his head retreated from his grasp. Moreover, a boulder, suspended above him, threatened at any moment to fall upon him.
  
• One of Hercules’ twelve labors was to descend into Hades and rescue Theseus and Ascalaphus from the torment that these heroes suffered there. In some ways, Hercules is a forerunner to Christ, for he “is the beloved son of a god who suffers for mankind, raises the dead to life, descends into Hades, and then ascends into heaven.”


• Men can enter Hades through a land of eternal darkness that forms a sort of vestibule to the underworld. Using this gateway, Odysseus entered Hades, where he conversed with the shades of Agamemnon, Achilles, and his mother. Hades, or “Hell,” could be also be reached “through southern Epirus,” by way of “the river Acheron,” which “flowed. . . amid ravines so dark and deep that Greek poets spoke of it as the portal or very scene of Hell.”


• Zeus’ brother Pluto ruled Hades. He once complained to his brother that the god Asclepius cured so many of the sick that the underworld wasn’t being populated as well as it once had been, whereupon, lest the gods be inconvenienced by a population explosion among mortals, Zeus slew Asclepius with a thunderbolt.


• According to the Durants, Pythagoras taught that, following the death of the body, “the soul undergoes a period of purgation in Hades; then it returns to earth and enters a new body in a chain of transmigration that can be ended only by a completely virtuous life.”


• Pluto’s kidnapping of Persephone and his later agreement to allow her to split her time between Hades and earth is understood to represent “the annual death and rebirth of the soil.”


• The gods of the underworld were “the most terrible” and were not so much worshiped as appeased.


• According to the hymns and rituals associated with the hero Orpheus, after death, the soul, as a shade, is judged in Hades, after which, depending upon the tradition consulted, the shade undergoes eternal punishment; the transmigrated soul of the dead is reborn repeatedly until it attains moral perfection, whereupon it is admitted to the Isles of the Blessed; or the dead or his friends may gain his release from punishment by performing acts of penance.


• Although notions of an abode for the blessed dead appeared in Greek myth, mention of such places--the Isle of the Blessed Dead or the Elysian Fields--were relatively rare and those who enjoyed their existence in them were few; the bast majority of the departed lived a shadowy existence as wanderers within the gloomy subterranean world of Hades, where the guilty suffered and the others merely existed as shadows of their former, earthly selves.


• Socrates planned to continue his earthly mission as a gadfly in Hades, questioning the dead to see which, if any, of the shades had attained wisdom and helping to enlighten those who, even in death, remained foolish and ignorant.

What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? We see that the ancient Greek idea of Hades, as the abode of the dead, included both judgment and punishment. The themes of purgation and reincarnation are part of the Greek concept of the hereafter. The deities of the underworld may have been the precursors to Jewish and Christian demons, the fierce, feared denizens of the pit. Atonement as a means of righting a wrong is seen in Zeus’ transformation of Orpheus’ lyre into a constellation to expiate the wrong done to Orpheus. In Orphic hymns and rituals, ideas such as eternal punishment, or hell, reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul, and purgatory and the selling of indulgences all have predecessors or parallels to similar doctrines of Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It seems that, in Greek myth, people, in death, are pretty much the same way as they were in life. Socrates, a gadfly during his living days, intends to be one in Hades as well, testing the wisdom of the shades therein. Jewish, Christian, Norse, and perhaps even Eastern religious concepts of the afterlife, of posthumous judgment, of hell as a place of torment, of purgatory, of atonement, of resurrection, of heaven, and the afterlife seem to stem, in part, from the Greek conceptions of these states and places.

Writing As A Schizophrenic, Part I

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

“Two heads are better than one,” it’s been said (although, apparently nature or God disagrees). If we can’t each be equipped with a couple of heads at birth, a couple of personalities, residing in the same body, may be a workable alternative, as schizophrenia could allow a person to take a team approach to writing short stories, novels, narrative poems, screenplays, or whatever. Of course, actually developing schizophrenia may not be as easy as desiring it. Therefore, we need to find another work-around.

Rest in pieces. I think I have just the solution: philosophical, as opposed to psychological, schizophrenia.

Here’s how it works.

Start by identifying your story’s theme. In the interest of the soul of wit, I’ll take a shortcut. Using the biography of Ed Gein, the guy who inspired Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs) as an example, one could argue that the indifference of the community toward him is somewhat to blame for his career as a serial killer and grave robber. This would be the theme of such a story, then: the apathy of a community toward its individual members can create a monster.

Next, briefly summarize various views concerning the responsibility, if any, that a community has for its individual members. These differing views provide the perspectives of the extra heads that nature or God denied us at birth. They’re the voices of the personalities that we’re developing as a result of our nascent philosophical schizophrenia.

We might include Hillary Clinton’s idea that “It takes a village to raise a child.” We might remind ourselves of the fate of Kitty Genovese, the woman who was attacked and killed as her neighbors looked on from their apartment windows, afraid to “get involved” by intervening or by calling the police. We might include the faith-based view of Jesus. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” one of the apostles asked, prompting him to tell the parable of the good Samaritan.

According to the first view, a community’s members have a responsibility to act together to benefit its children. Why? Hillary doesn‘t say, but, presumably, it’s because the community’s own future health and welfare depend upon the rearing of children who have been educated, socialized, and otherwise nurtured.

The fate of Kitty Genovese suggests that a society that fails to protects its individual members is not only morally at fault but also may face social, political, and moral dissolution.

Jesus declared that God is love and that those who do his will also will to love their neighbors. Therefore, they should not be selfish.

However, not everyone agrees that the community has a responsibility to act on the behalf of its individual members. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, and Aleister Crowley, each in his own way, believed that selfishness is a virtue.

Nietzsche believed that life need not have any intrinsic value and that people either affirm or deny it by their deeds, according to their own tendencies; morality, he said, is merely the means by which the powerful control the weak.

Rand believed that the right and proper thing for people to do is to pursue their own values and promote their own lives.

Crowley believed that there is only one law that governs human behavior, which is to “do as thou wilt.”

Our philosophical schizophrenia has enriched our theme. Instead of our writing a simple story with a perhaps-simpleminded moral, we have the opportunity of writing a richer, probably longer narrative that has philosophical height, depth, and breadth. Several characters in the same story, for example, might represent a different view of the topic at hand, as in Twelve Angry Men. The short story that we’d had in mind originally might develop into a novel. Alternatively, it might become several short stories, each of which examines the same theme in a different way, as many writers often do.

Another example? Sure, since we already have one, in another post, “Evil Is As Evil Does.” In that post, we suggest that horror writers in different times and places, often identify as monstrous, or evil, the menaces that seem most to threaten the worlds in which they live, and we suggested that, for the following writers, these were among the chief evils of their respective days:

• Nathaniel Hawthorne: sin
• Edgar Allan Poe: passion (especially coupled with madness)
• H. P. Lovecraft: cosmic indifference to humanity
• Dean Koontz: humanity’s indifference to humanity
• Stephen King: anything that threatens one’s local community

Bentley Little: the indifference of bureaucratic organizations to individuals’ needs

This list, which, again, could profitably be expanded, gives us six heads, instead of one, and helps us to see evil in a more complete fashion than we might were we to limit ourselves to our own ideas as to what constitutes wickedness. The results could be a complexitication and enrichment of our own views and of our fiction.

Writing as a schizophrenic has its rewards.

Inner Demons

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

 

To be alone is to be alone with one’s inner demons, with what plagues or haunts oneself. Perhaps a person doesn’t even know that he or she is possessed, as it were, by an inner demon of some sort (but, most likely, this individual’s friends, if he or she has any, will know).

 

For most people, the phrase “inner demons” refers to emotional obsessions or semi-conscious impulses, such as rage or a tendency toward alcoholism or some other sort of addiction. According to psychoanalyst Carl Jung, these inner demons are aspects of the shadow archetype. The shadow consists of those aspects of the self that one denies and represses. A good example of this archetype is the rogue slayer Faith, a character who appears in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Faith is Buffy’s shadow--the aspects of herself that she denies expression and the temptations she faces in repressing the impulses to behave according to the desires of these potential selves. Dutiful and responsible, Buffy longs for the carefree (or seemingly carefree) lifestyle that the footloose, if irresponsible, Faith projects. Unhindered by the concerns for morality, Faith has a simple philosophy, which she expresses in bold, if amusing, proverbs and slogans of her own devise. Concerning sex, for example, Faith says, “Get some; get gone.” Her use of Xander Harris as a “sex toy” shows that she is serious about the implications of this statement, that it is a principle by which she actually does operate. Her superhuman powers makes her above the law, Faith tells Buffy, just as Buffy’s own superhuman powers as a fellow slayer make Buffy above the law. They are laws unto themselves, Faith argues. Faith and Buffy, as Nietzschean supermen, as it were, are not bound by the traditional expectations and requirements of the herd. Buffy and Faith are wolves. Although Buffy ultimately rejects Faith’s views, she is tempted to live according to Faith’s philosophy, which seems to follow the dictum laid out by Aleister Crowley: “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” In an episode of the series, Faith, stealing from a store, gives Buffy a shopping hint: “Want. Take. Have.” Crashing a hand through a display case, Buffy retrieves an item of merchandise--a crossbow. “Want. Take Have. I think I’m getting it,” she says, smiling as she echoes Faith’s philosophy. As Buffy’s shadow, Faith is a foil to Buffy--a character who, by demonstrating traits opposite to those of the main character, highlights the protagonist’s characteristics. Faith’s amoral nature and her willingness to live as she pleases, even if her irresponsible behavior results in tragedies for others, contrasts sharply with Buffy’s sense of duty and need to take responsibility for herself and others, even at the cost of her own life, if need be. Joss Whedon, the series’ creator, and the others on his writing team were adroit in the use of both character types, such as the foil, and archetypes, such as the shadow, and their use of these types of characters and archetypes adds a dimension of depth to a show that, otherwise, would have been nothing beyond the ordinary fare offered by weekly television series. To view a character’s inner demons, make a two-column chart. In the left column, list the character’s expressed traits (the ones that make up his or her personality as it is known to him or her and to others). In the second column, list the opposites of these traits; these will be the repressed traits that, together, make up the character’s shadow. (A thesaurus is a useful tool in ascertaining opposites traits, because it will list antonyms as well as synonyms.) Here’s an example, based upon the character of Buffy Summers: 

 

EXPRESSED TRAITS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . REPRESSED TRAITS (Buffy, as Persona).

 

(Faith, as Shadow) Dutiful . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rebellious Responsible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irresponsible Careful. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Negligent Humorous. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Snide Altruistic. . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selfish Heroic*

Anti-heroic* *See "Beowulf as the Prototypical Monster Killer" 

 

The list could be extended, but you get the point. (By the way, it’s important to notice that the traits of the character that represents the persona, or public self [Buffy, in this case], and the traits of its shadow, the repressed self [Faith, in this case], need not be mutually exclusive. The characters can share some attributes. For example, both Buffy and Faith are strong, agile, skilled at combat, courageous, witty, popular, and attractive. It’s important to observe that the shadow’s shadow, so to speak, will be the character whose traits contrast his or her own--for example, just as Faith is Buffy’s shadow, Buffy is Faith’s shadow. In the story, however, the viewer or the reader will not be likely to consider the protagonist’s being the shadow of the lesser character, the foil.) 

 

By employing archetypes and stock characters in a similar way, you can add depth (and interest), to say nothing of drama, to your horror story, just as Whedon and his show’s fellow writers did with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This technique is not limited to the psychological level. As we shall see in a later post, it can be employed on the social level as well

Mark Twain's "Rules Governing Literary Art"

copyright by Gary L. Pullman

In "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," Mark Twain* identifies 18 of the 19 "rules governing literary art" that he mentions in his essay (keeping the remaining one to himself, it seems). Since horror fiction is literature, it's safe to say that these rules apply to this genre of writing as well as to any other, so aspiring writers of horror fiction would be well advised to learn from one of the literary giants of American--and, indeed, world--literature. These are the rules Twain identifies:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.


2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.


3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.


4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.


5. The require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject at hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.


6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in the tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.


7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven- dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it.


8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale.


9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.


10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.


11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.


12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.


13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.


14. Eschew surplusage.


15. Not omit necessary details.


16. Avoid slovenliness of form.


17. Use good grammar.


18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.

*Interestingly, Twain said that, as a boy, he'd read and enjoyed the work of Edgar Allan Poe but that, as an adult, he would read Poe "only for money."

Body Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A type of fiction, known as body horror, is based upon the fear that something may be amiss with one’s body. One may be sick. One may be disfigured. One may have been born with a physical defect. One may give birth to a deformed baby. One may undergo some sort of hideous physical transformation. A number of horror films and literary texts fit this subgenre of horror.

Sometimes, body horror references men's fear of castration and the twin fears of sex, erotophobia (fear of the erotic) and genophobia (fear of sexual intercourse). The motif of the vagina with teeth, or the vagina dentata, is an example. This story has a moral. It's a cautionary tale, warning young men to be wary of having sex with women whom they do not know: not only may such a young man acquire a venereal disease, but he may also suffer a fate worse than John Wayne Bobbitt’s. (At least his wife used a knife!) In one such story, a bestial element is added: the vagina is not itself armed, as it were, with fangs, but is inhabited by a fish with teeth.

The movie Teeth (2007) is based upon the vagina dentata theme: a chaste, innocent young woman, Dawn, discovers that her vagina is equipped with teeth. (The movie’s tagline is “Every rose has its thorns.”)

As the movie’s official website points out:

Looking into, touching or entering the female orifice seems fraught with hidden fears, signified by the confusion of sex with death in overwhelming numbers of male minds and myths. Since vulvas have labia, "lips," many men have believed that behind the lips lie teeth. Christian authorities of the middle ages taught that certain witches, with the help of the moon and magic spells, could grow fangs in their vaginas. They likened women's genitals to the "yawning" mouth of hell.

As odd as it may seem, like many of the other horrors of horror fiction, the vagina dentata motif may also have a factual (and physical) basis. Dr. Dean Edell reports one of his colleague’s experiences: “a gynecologist. . . reported that he actually saw some teeth in a vagina.”

She had a dermatoid cyst, Edell explains:

Dermoid cysts are derived from the outer layers of embryonic skin, and they are
capable of growing hair and teeth and bones, anything that comes from the outer layers of the embryo. They can occur anywhere.

So this woman had one in the pelvic region and the cyst grew teeth, and when it ruptured through the wall where her uterus joins her vagina--there were the teeth.

Edell himself also saw a patient who was a victim of dermoid cystitis: “In my practice once, I saw one in the eyelid."

Science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer wrote a pornographic sci-fi-horror novel, The Image of the Beast, that features a character, Vivienne, with a vagina dentata of sorts. A sharp-toothed snake-like creature, reminiscent of the lamia of Greek mythology, lives inside her womb, devouring various body parts of her male lovers. She appears again in a sequel, Blown: Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind.

The vagina dentata is one of the more shocking examples that show that things can and do go wrong with the body. However, it is certainly not the only example that is horrible, as any number of birth defects, physical abnormalities, genetic anomalies, and medical conditions indicate.

Several other such conditions involve primary or secondary sexual characteristics. Normal human males (with the requisite X-Y chromosome combination) have been born without penises; others have been born without testicles. Human females have been born with multiple nipples (multiple nipples syndrome, or supernumerary nipples) or with multiple, or accessory, breasts (multiple breast syndrome; also called polymastia, supernumerary breasts, and mammae erraticae).

Body horror recognizes that the body is subject to these, and worse, conditions. Even before Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Birthmark” and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” there were stories that demonstrated that, with regard to the body (as is true of the mind and the soul as well), sometimes whatever can go wrong does go wrong.

Beowulf: The Prototypical Monster Killer

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In “Killed By Death,” an episode of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, Buffy tells a hospitalized boy that monsters do exist, as the boy suspects, but that there is also good news: heroes who slay monsters also exist. In English literature, the prototypical monster killer is Beowulf, the protagonist of the Anglo-Saxon poem that’s named in his honor. As a hero, Beowulf possesses the characteristics that typify such a character:

• He represents a nation or a community.


• He’s willing to risk danger or sacrifice himself for others.


• His actions benefit humanity or a nation.


• He fights for a greater cause.


• He behaves in a chivalrous manner, especially toward women.


• He lives according to the dictates of a social code of conduct.


• He often represents the nobility or upper class.


• He behaves honorably at all times.


• He has a strongly developed sense of right and wrong.


• He’s praised and rewarded by society.

These characteristics are opposite to the traits of personality that typify the anti-hero:

• He represents himself.


• He’s willing to risk danger or to sacrifice himself for wealth or egoistic satisfaction.


• His actions benefit him or only a select few.


• He fights for his own principles.


• Chivalry is dead to him.


• He lives according to his own code of conduct.


• He often represents the middle or the lower class.


• He will let the end justify the means at times.


• He’s often amoral or acts according to a highly individualized moral code.


• He may be condemned or punished by society.

In Beowulf, the monster Grendel and his mother, the descendents of the God-cursed Cain, represent anti-heroes of a sort, and the heroic culture of Beowulf stands in opposition to the anti-heroic culture of the monsters. Two ways of life vie against one another for survival. The pagan society of Beowulf is becoming Christian; it is being Christianized. The society of Grendel and his mother remains not only pagan but also uncivilized, savage, and barbaric. The former society, the poem implies, gives rise to the hero who is concerned about others as well as himself, whereas the latter maintains a narcissistic world view in which only the desires of the self and those whom it values are important. It is this self-centered, anti-heroic world view, Beowulf suggests, which threatens society and is wicked because sinful: Grendel is opposed not only to human civilization, as represented by the Danes he attacks and by their defender, Beowulf the Geat, but also to God, who has cursed the monster’s race and made them exiles in the earth, cut off from human fellowship. Grendel is inspired by his envy for human companionship. It is because he is an outcast who cannot enjoy such friendship that he attacks the Danes. He would destroy that which God has denied to him. His mother is motivated by vengeance, but it is a vengeance restricted to her own offspring; it does not extend to the members of a whole society of her peers.

The prototypical hero serves his community. Those who serve only themselves and their immediate families, by contrast, represent evil threats to community that the hero must confront and vanquish.