There's Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself: Preying Upon People's Phobias

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Asked what he feared, Stephen King once replied, “Everything!”

While his reply might have been purposefully overstated, it suggests a way of enhancing the fear factor of the horror story. The horror fiction writer can enhance the audience’s aversion to and anxiety toward the story’s antagonist (the monster) by preying upon readers’ natural fears.

Fortunately, if they don’t fear quite everything, many people do fear many things. We tend to be rather fearful creatures.

First, there are the phobias. There are plenty. Although these fears are held to be irrational, there may be an organic cause for them, according to psychologists, who, Lea Winerman, author of “Figuring out phobias,” says, locate the amygdala, perhaps by way of the brain’s higher cortex, as the point of origin for fear. Dr. LeDoux offers an example of the split-second timing characteristic of the fear response to threatening stimuli: “If a bomb goes off, you might not quickly be able to evaluate any of the perceptual qualities of the sound, but the intensity is enough to trigger the amygdala. If you knew a lot about bombs, then through the cortex pathway you could evaluate the danger, but it will take longer.”

Although studies have focused on obsessive-compulsive disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder, phobias were once believed to represent “abnormalities in the fast-track through the amygdala,” Dr. Scott Rauch declares, but further research suggests, instead, that “the amygdala responds immediately to anything that might be threatening, but that with more time to process other areas of the brain suppress the amygdala's initial response.”

Fear, like other emotions, appears to have an organic and chemical basis.

Meanwhile, there are the phobias, such as (just to list some that begin with “a”) acrophobia (fear of heights), agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), androphobia (fear of males), arachnaphobia (fear of spiders), astraphobia (fear of thunderstorms), autophobia (fear of being alone), aviophobia (fear of flying). For those who are interested in others, a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) article, “The A-Z of Fear,” lists a number of select others, only one of which, anuptaphobia, the fear of remaining single, begins with “a.”

How can phobias be used to heighten horror? Many people are claustrophobic. They fear close places, which suggests that they also fear being trapped. A person who is trapped is at the mercy of his or her environment, which means that the trapped individual is at the mercy of other people (perhaps his or her captors, from whom the person had escaped before becoming trapped), of wild animals, of extreme temperatures, of hunger and thirst. The trapped individual has no control over circumstances or events. By setting a story in a cramped environment from which there is no escape, such as a subterranean cavern that becomes sealed off by a landslide or an avalanche, a writer takes advantage of the audience’s claustrophobia. If, before reading such a story, a person was not claustrophobic, afterward, he or she might be.

Many horror movies have been produced that revolve around wild animals as the monsters. One reason may be that men and women fear quite a few animals, including cats (ailurophobia), bees (apiphobia), spiders (arachnaphobia), bats (chiroptophobia), dogs (cynophobia), insects (entomophobia), horses (equinophobia), reptiles (herpetophobia), mice or rats (musophobia), snakes (ophidophobia), birds (ornithophobia), frogs (ranidaphobia), and animals in general (zoophobia).

In reading through this list, you probably thought of several movies that are based upon these phobias, but let’s list a few, anyway, for those who may have missed them:

• Ailurophobia - Cat People
• Apiphobia - Attack of the Killer Bees
• Arachnaphobia - Arachnaphobia
• Chiroprophobia - Dracula
• Cynophobia - Cujo
• Entomophibia - Them!
• Musophobia - Willard
• Ophidophobia - Snakes on a Plane; Anaconda
• Ornithophobia - The Birds
• Xenophobia - The War of the Worlds; Alien
• Zoophobia (and some others as well) - The Food of the Gods

Another film, The Others, even preys upon photophobia, the irrational fear of light!

One might say that horror fiction itself is based upon phobophobia, the fear of fear.

Writing As A Schizophrenic, Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In Part I of "Writing As A Schizophrenic," we saw that, while two heads may be better than one, neither nature nor God has seen fit, more than rarely, to equip any of us with such an advantage. We also discovered a work-around. It may not be possible to grow a second head, but we can develop multiple perspectives on the same topic, or theme. Good news! There's another advantage to having several points of view toward something. In this case, the "something" is the object of fear.

An example may help, as examples usually do.

Let's bash the lowly snake. Let's say you imagine six different characters, each of which is afraid of the serpent. Some may be older, and others may be younger, and we should have some males and some females among the crowd we're imagining, so we can have a variety of perspectives--in this case, a variety of reasons (and non-reasons) as to why the serpent is feared. The result may be something like this:

Boy 1 fears the snake because of its appearance: it is long and narrow, without legs, and it has pitiless, lidless eyes, flared nostrils, and a flickering, forked tongue.

Boy 2 fears the snake because of the physical associations he imagines it has: it is slimy and cold (he believes), and its skin is coarse and raspy.

Girl 1 fears the snake because of the things a friend told her about an encounter with a blue racer that her grandmother had as a child. According to the grandmother’s story, she was in an outhouse when a blue racer inside the privy chased her from the toilet and across the backyard in front of a neighbor boy who saw her immodestly attired, the snake in hot pursuit. Irrationally, the girl fears that something similarly frightening and humiliating might happen to her (despite the fact that blue racers are not indigenous to her own locale).

Girl 2 fears the snake because of a personal experience that happened to her. To tease her, her pesky little brother once held a snake inches from her face before awakening her, causing her to have nightmares about the creepy reptiles ever since.

Woman 1 fears the snake because of its symbolic value. The serpent is associated with evil, temptation, and sin, and seeing one gives her the willies, making her think that she may be in the presence of Satan himself in his serpent’s disguise.

Woman 2 fears the snake because a cousin had the misfortune of being killed by a rattlesnake when he fell off his horse at an inopportune moment.

Man 1 fears the snake because it’s one of the creatures of which he is afraid, and he fears encountering one because, in doing so, he may expose his fear of the animal.

Man 2 fears the snake because, well, he fears snakes--in other words, he has snake phobia, or ophidiophobia, "an unwarranted fear of the reptiles" that causes him to suffer such symptoms as "shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, nausea, and. . . dread."

By imagining six different characters and the reason (or, in some cases, the non-reason) that each fears the snake, we’ve added verisimilitude to our character's or characters’ emotional reactions to serpents. We can combine one or more of these six emotional responses so that the same character has all of them or we can parcel them out to as many as six different characters. We can also scatter these emotional reactions throughout our story, keeping the appearances of the snake interesting because, each time it appears, it frightens the same character for a different reason (or non-reason) or frightens a different character because of his or her ideas and attitudes concerning the snake.

Once again, writing as a schizophrenic proves the old adage, “Two heads (or, in our case, two or more perspectives) are better than one.”

Creepy Crawlies Quiz

Note: Keep track of your answers so you can check your accuracy!

1. According to math, which monster is impossible?

A. Ghost
B. Vampire
C. Werewolf
D. Zombie

2. Which monster’s true purpose is to carry water away from buildings?

A. Demon
B. Gargoyle
C. Lamia
D. Witch

3. Which monster is created from the use of a toxic drug?

A. Vampire
B. Werewolf
C. Witch
D. Zombie

4. Which of these items were used to frighten away evil spirits?

A. Crystal balls
B. Jack-o-lanterns
C. Halloween masks
D. Ropes

5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Christabel is about a(n)

A. Demon
B. Gargoyle
C. Lamia
D. Witch

6. Whose “keen fashion sense” helped her to fight monsters?

A. Buffy Summers
B. Daphne Blake
C. Nancy Drew
D. Prudence, Piper, and Phoebe Halliwell

7. According to ancient Hebrew legends, Adam’s first wife, Lilith, was a(n)

A. Ghost
B. Vampire
C. Witch
D. Zombie

8. Horus is an example of a(n)

A. Lycanthrope
B. Misanthrope
C. Therianthrope
D. Xenothrope

9. Which of these figures is considered an omen of death?

A. Banshee
B. Gorgon
C. Lamia
D. Siren

10. The enemies of the Norse gods were

A. Genies
B. Ghouls
C. Giants
D. Goblins

Click here to check your answers.

How To Rob A Grave

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Verisimilitude means "true to life," and it's a quality that enhances any story, those of horror included, as it helps in the suspension of disbelief if a fantastic tale is believable in its mundane circumstances. Therefore, should an author of such fiction assay to write a story about grave robbers, he or she ought to be familiar with the extraction methods of such ghouls.

Resurrectionists, as they were known in merry old England. supplied the vast majority of the corpses that medical schools needed for their anatomy courses, the dissection of dead bodies being outlawed except when capital punishment furnished the bodies. There were never enough executions, so the schools were in a constant need of fresh corpses. Body snatchers supplied this need. They used two methods to do so.

In one, a small opening was created, above the coffin. A manhole-size opening was then made in the casket, a rope was secured around the corpse, and the body was pulled free of the grave.
Since family members often mounted a watch upon the graves of their dearly departed and placed various obstacles in their way, such as criss-crossed iron bars, the resurrectionists adopted the strategy of opening the earth some distance from the targeted corpse, dug a narrow tunnel to the coffin, and withdrew the body from the end of the casket, pulling it through the tunnel. The disturbed earth was several yards from the violated coffin and, being of relatively small size, was difficult to spot.

Ed Gein, the Plainfield, Wisconsin serial killer upon whom such fictional killers as Norman Bates, Leatherface, and Buffalo Bill are based, collected bodies and body parts from the graves he robbed in the Plainfield Cemetery and the Spirit Land Cemetery a few miles north of Plainfield. To collect just the heads, as he sometimes did, he simply twisted the neck back and forth until it snapped. He never sawed off the head, he said, because he never took a knife, a hatchet, or a saw with him on his after-hours forays into the local cities of the dead.

According to "Stealing Lincoln's Body," by Thomas J. Craugwell, a pair of would-be grave robbers, commissioned by Jim Kennally, tried to rob the grave of Abraham Lincoln, but they made the mistake of including two police informants as assistants, and the undertaking was botched when one of the detectives who were lying in wait for the robbers accidentally discharged his firearm. Kennally's men fled, only to be arrested a short time later at their hideout.

As a result of the attempted robbery, Lincoln's body was exhumed and reburied inside "a steel cage, lowered into a vault, and covered with cement."

According to "The 1876 Attempt to Steal Lincoln's Body!", therobbers, Terrence Mullen and John Hugehs, were actually counterfeiters, but their "chief engraver," Ben Boyd, had bee arrested; the theft of the president's body was to have provided a means of liberating Boyd and of generating a recovery fee of $200,000.

Evil As A Threat To Social or Communal Values

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A society fears the opposite traits or conditions that it values and regards these contraries as threats. Therefore, for the society that values certain qualities or circumstances, a creature that symbolizes the traits or conditions that are opposed to these values represents a monster. These are qualities and objects that the tribes of Beowulf value and the opposites of, or the threats to, these values:

The monsters in the poem threaten several of the Anglo-Saxon values that Beowulf defends. In addition, Grendel is Beowulf’s shadow--the monster represents values that the Anglo-Saxon society of which Beowulf is a member and, indeed, a leader. In exiling him from human company, God has cut him off from humanity. The attitudes, beliefs, emotions, ideas, and other qualities that Grendel embraces are spurned by the Danes and Geats. He, his mother, and their kind, as well as their values, are rejected by Beowulf and his people and by the other peoples of their world.

In myths that have developed a concept of paradise, such as that of the Norse, one can easily discern the social values behind or beneath the idea of heaven. These are the sources, in fact, of the bliss that the blessed experience in paradise. In Norse mythology, Valhalla, as the Hall of the Slain, is the warriors’ portion of the paradisiacal Asgard. By day, the dead warriors, restored to life, feast, drink, and enjoy the attentions of their Valkyrie lovers. In the afternoon, they take to the heavenly battlefield and hack at one another with axes, stab and slice one another to pieces with swords, and club one another with spiked maces, to be made restored to life, health, and wholeness at the end of the day by Odin. The cycle is repeated until the advent of Ragnarok, the final battle between the gods and the frost giants that ushers in a new age. The ticket to Valhalla is valor; only the warriors who die courageously on the battlefield are selected as residents of the Norse paradise. Those who die of illness or old age spend their afterlives in Hel. It is easy to identify the values that these myths reflect and their opposites, the threats against the values:

The early and modern Christian church represents a community more than a society as such. Its enemy, however, threatens its values just as other monsters may threaten a society’s (or even a civilization’s) values, as Beowulf threatens the values of the medieval Scandinavian nations’ values.

According to the New Testament, the “fruits of the Spirit” number nine and, together, comprise a truly loving and godly personality; their opposites represent threats to such a personality:

In Christianity, Satan is Jesus’ shadow (in the Jungian sense), because Satan is able to tempt Jesus. Therefore, Satan represents qualities or things that Jesus would like to have. Instead, Jesus represses his desires for these things, resisting the devil. To ask what Jesus values, we need simply to identify the temptations with which Satan tempted him. There were three.

In the first, Satan invited Jesus to end his fast by transforming a stone into a loaf of bread.

In the second, Satan challenged Jesus to throw himself down from a high place, arguing that God would send his angels to protect Jesus from harm.

In the third, Satan told Jesus that if he would worship him, Satan would give Jesus dominion over the world.

It seems that Jesus was tempted to set aside his dependence upon God for his food, to demonstrate his status as the Son of God and of God’s love for him as such, and to take upon himself the rule of humanity. In each case, Jesus was tempted to act according to his own will and to accomplish his desires in his own way, as Satan did when he rebelled against God and was exiled from heaven. Satan tempts Jesus to act out of pride rather than humility and out of his own will rather than out of faith. These are the impulses within himself that Jesus represses.

A History of Hell, Part III

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 IV, The Age of Faith, of The Story of Civilization:

• Al Ghazali claimed that theists considered heaven and hell to be “spiritual conditions only,” rather than actual places.
• The Sufi Moslems held that hell is but temporary and that, ultimately, salvation is universal.
• Arab descriptions served as part of the basis for Dante’s vision of hell in The Divine Comedy.
• For their inspiration for hell, the Hebrews referred to He Hinnom or Sheol, a valley in which rubbish heaps were continuously ablaze to prevent the spread of disease. Sheol, Durant observes, “was conceived of as a subterranean region of darkness that received all the dead.” The Hebrew hell consisted of seven stories , “with graduated degrees of torment.” It was a place of temporary torment for all but adulterers, those who shamed others publicly, and those who slandered or libeled others.
• Irishman Johannes Scotus Eringena believed that heaven and hell were spiritual conditions, not physical locations.
• Pope Gregory the Great held that hell is a physical place, wherein fire eternally burns the damned, tormenting them without destroying them; their suffering is increased, he maintained, by their being made to witness the torment of any of their loved ones who have also been damned and by their despair at ever being liberated or delivered from their suffering.
• Durant says that medieval Catholic men and women “hoped vaguely for heaven, but vividly feared hell.” The Bulgarian king, Boris, was converted, it is said, by seeing a mural of hell that an artist painted upon his palace wall. Mystics claimed to have visions in which they saw the “geography of hell.” Satan, chained upon “a burning gridiron,” was alleged to snatch suffering sinners and crush them in his teeth, swallowing “them down his burning throat,” as “assistant demons with hooks of iron plunged the damned alternately into fire or icy water, or hung them up by the tongue, or sliced them with a saw, or beat them flat on an anvil, or boiled them or strained them through a cloth.” A sumptuous stench permeated the damned and their environs, and the flames gave no light, the darkness adding to the terror and the suffering of the damned. Christ was feared in his aspect of the judge of the living and the dead, for he could send or deliver the souls of the dead to eternal bliss or to everlasting damnation. “The devil,” Durant points out, “was no figure of speech but a life and blood reality, prowling about everywhere, suggesting temptations and creating all kinds of evil.” He was also quite the ladies’ man, fathering monstrous children, one of whom is alleged to have had “a wolf’s head and a scorpion’s tail.” His many assistants also tempted people and liked to lie with women as incubi, or sex demons. Although the people feared the greater demons, “a saving sense of humor saved this demonology, and most healthy males looked upon the little devils rather as poltergeist mischief-makers than as objects of terror,” and one exhausted demon, resting “on a head of lettuce. . . was inadvertently eaten by a nun.” Limbo was introduced as the abode of the unapprised infant, although St. Augustine had believed that they also went to hell. There was debate as to whether more souls would be saved and go to heaven or more souls would be damned and go to hell, and Moslems believed most Christians would go to hell, while Christians believed the opposite. No soul could be saved, the Roman Catholic Church contended, except through itself. Volcanoes were assumed to be “the mouths of hell,” and “their rumbling was a faint echo of the moans of the damned.” According to Pope Gregory, “the crater of Etna was daily widening to receive the enormous number of souls that were fated to be damned.” Pope Gregory IX held as heretical Raymond Lully’s assertion that the greatness of Christ’s love ensured the salvation, rather than the damnation, of the vast majority of souls. “The last moment of life” was considered to be “decisive for all eternity,” which added to the terror of life that many felt. Purgatory offered slight hope to the living. According to a legend, St. Patrick had a great pit dug, into which monks descended; “some returned. . . And described purgatory and hell with discouraging vividness.” Many other travelogues of hell also existed. As Durant notes, “Apocalyptic literature describing tours or visions of heaven or hell abounded in Judaism and Christianity,” and priests, such as Peter Damian, delivered “fiery sermons on the pains of hell.” Nevertheless, some challenged these doctrines of the faith--and, indeed, the faith itself, asking, for example, why God should have created the devil if he’d known in advance that the devil would sin and fall, whether a just and loving God could “punish finite sin with infinite pain,” and whether hell-fire would not at some point render the damned insensitive to its pain.
• The doctrine of original sin was a theological attempt to account for “the biological theory of primitive instincts” and “the preaching of this doctrine” led to a diminishing of the “fear of hell. . . till the Reformation,” when it was “to reappear with fresh terror among the Puritans.”
• St. Anselm said that only the “infinite atonement” of Christ could atone for the “infinite offense” of Adam and Eve, their sin being “infinite” because it had been directed “against an infinite being,” God. Therefore, only “the death of God become man could ransom humanity from Satan and hell. . . . and restore the moral balance of the world.”
• For medieval people, “the earth was the chosen home of Christ, and the shell of hell, and weather was the whim of God.”
• Roger Bacon endorsed the study and use of mathematics because this subject “should aid us in ascertaining the position of paradise and hell.”
• Dante used many Arab sources as inspirations for his descriptions of hell, including the Koran, “the story of Mohammed’s trip to heaven and hell in Abu-l-Ala a;-Ma’arri’s Irisalat al-Ghufran. . . . and Ibn Arabi’s Futubat.
• The hell of Dante’s Inferno is entered through an opening in the earth near a forest. The opening leads to the gates of hell, where an inscription reads, in part, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” In the poem, “hell is a subterranean funnel, reaching down to the center of the earth,” imagined by the poet as featuring “dark and frightening abysses between gigantic murky rocks; steaming, stinking marshes, torrents, lakes, and streams; storms of rain, snow, hail, and brands of fire; howling winds and petrifying cold; tortured bodies, grimacing faces, blood-stilling shrieks and groans.” The funnel leads through nine levels. Nearer the surface, the lesser sinners reside, whereas the greater sinners dwell at the lower levels. At the lowest level, the ninth circle of hell, traitors are housed, and, at the lowest of all points, “Lucifer lies buried to the waist in ice, flapping enormous wings from his shoulders, weeping icy tears of blood from the three faces that divide his head, and chewing a traitors in each of three jaws--Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.” Dante included actual people among the damned, including, in addition to popes. His Divine Comedy also describes purgatory and heaven, or paradise.

What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? Many sources have formed the idea of hell, including mythological, pagan, Jewish, and Christian ones.

For the first time, the idea is formed that hell may signify a spiritual condition, rather than a literal place. Theology seems to be losing out to psychology as an explanation of human behavior.

The idea that hell is permanent and eternal rubs some the wrong way, and the doctrine of universal salvation appears, both in Moslem and Christian faith, only to be condemned in Roman Catholicism as heretical. However, Limbo is allowed for unapprised infants, to spare their innocent souls from hell. For those who maintain faith in the existence of an actual, physical hell, the torment of the damned becomes more extreme, the imagination supplying many details as to the nature and effects of the suffering that the lost souls must endure there, forever, as if the catalogue of horrors somehow ensures their reality and, therefore, the reality of the hell in which they occur.

Many write of their supposed journeys to heaven and hell, as if they are reporting trips to foreign lands. Locating heaven and hell becomes a motive for the study of science and mathematics.

Satan and the lesser demons are believed to be incarnate and to be able, in fact, to have sexual relations with women, as incubi (and with men, as succubi). Lesser demons are considered mischievous rather than malignant.

Churchmen argue whether more souls will be saved or damned, with more supporting the latter over the former view.

Dante’s Inferno, borrowing from many earlier sources, Christian and otherwise, offers the most detailed geography of hell, populating it with both imaginary and actual historical figures, including popes, suggesting that hell is a real place to which anyone, including leaders of the church itself, may be tormented in a variety of real and agonizing ways.

Today, the imagining of hell continues in sermons and in books written by people who claim to have undergone near-death experiences, and the debate continues as well as to whether a literal hell exists or, whether, for that matter, literal demons live and stalk the earth.

Those who appear as damned in literary texts represent the values of the society or the poet or other writer in whose work the damned appear, for the values of the lost souls are the values that are rejected by these creators of hell. Therefore, hell can be thought of, in the Jungian sense, as representing a psychic reservoir, akin to the universal mind, in which humanity’s collective shadow archetype lives, in bits and pieces, disguised as this or that individual or type of person. For example, in Dante’s hell, from least (closest to the surface) to the greatest (farthest down), these are the damned; whose values represent the opposites of those embraced by the poet himself:

1. Unbaptized infants
2. Lustful
3. Gluttonous
4. Greedy and wasteful
5. Wrathful and sullen
6. Heretical
7. Violent
8. Fraudulent
9. Treacherous

Plus, did anyone notice the historical references to "mouths of hell"? Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, apparently did, because at least two are mentioned in his television series, one of which was located beneath the Sunnydale High School library (or, in the high school later built on the same site, the principal's office)!

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.