Related Papers
"What Every Medievalist Should Know About Hell"
Eileen Gardiner
Taking the medieval period as the highpoint of hell, this talks explores where this idea came from, including Greece and Rome, the mystery religions, Gnosticism, the Bible and the Christian Creeds. It explores ideas from Christian scholastics and theologians, and particularly from medieval literature. It looks at what was going on simultaneously in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Finally it discussed what happened to ideas about hell with the dissolution of the monasteries, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment.
“Narrating the Future” in Sarah Iles Johnston, ed.Religion: Narrating Religion.Part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Religion series. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2017, 191-206.
Meghan Henning
Hell in Christian Doctrine and Imagination
2020 •
Caley Tse
This paper examines the Christian concept of hell and its development: how it is represented in doctrine and conceived in the imagination. It seeks to explore the development of the concept of hell and how people have arrived at their modern conceptions and misconceptions through the three general lenses of history, modernity, and Scripture. It attempts to investigate what hell is, is it a place? A state of being? A concrete or symbolic reality? And if it is a place where and how might it exist? Who occupies hell and who rules it? The paper also attempts to clarify hell’s relationship to time- when it might exist and for how long. The paper finally dares to clarify which conceptions of hell are likely the most biblical and useful.
Junguiana
C. G. Jung’s katabasis- from ancient myths to modern visionary experiences
2020 •
Mateus D Martinez
This article aimed to revisit C.G. Jung experiences of katabasis, or in other words the experiences of descending to the underworld, or world of the dead, followed by the return to the world of the living, the anabasis. In psychological terms, these experiences mean confronting the unconscious and the subsequent expansion of consciousness. To revisit C.G. Jung's experiences of katabasis, it was rescued historically (1) in classical antiquity through greek mythology, (2) in the medieval and modern period, through the works of Dante Alighieri, Emmanuel Swedenborg and William Blake, and (3) finally in Jung's own life with an emphasis on the constitution of The Red Book. The katabasis experiences were of vital importance to Jung and culminated in the genesis of analytical psychology.
Where Airy Voices Lead: A Short History of Immortality
Where Airy Voices Lead: A Short History of Immortality
2020 •
Piotr Bienkowski
A short history of how human cultures have understood and attempted to achieve immortality, with global coverage from the ancient Near East to the present. Covers resurrection, the immortal soul, reincarnation, animistic transfornation, longevity, as well as symbolic immortality through fame and legacy, and how these different approaches are assessed by modern science and philosophy.
Hell revisited: A socio-critical enquiry into the roots and relevance of hell for the church today
2008 •
Ernest van Eck
Hell is being written out of theology and banned from serious conversation; for most scholars and modern-minded people it has become more or less a theoretical issue. Yet it remains alive and burning in the Western mind - there has been a surge in the amount of popular literature written on the subject from the 1990’s onwards. Why the sudden interest? Is there a pattern or social trend that can begin to explain the phenomenon? Part of the responsible way of dealing with the history of a concept such as hell is to point towards the social and political reasons for the emergence and need for certain concepts in particular contexts and circ*mstances, as they are all utilitarian concepts which are employed and abandoned as needs change and sentiments shift. This article will investigate the rise of the concept of hell by investigating the ancient sources in which it first appears, in order to establish what factors made the concept popular then and now. In doing so, a continuum will be identified between the first origin of these ideas and their present popularity.
Visions of the end in interwar British art
2019 •
Thomas Bromwell
The cessation of hostilities to the Great War with the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 brought the largest and most devastating war hitherto known to an end. It was meant to be the “War to End War”, yet a little over twenty years later in 1939 it was eclipsed by the devastation of the Second World War. The shadow of war loomed over the intervening years, which were marked by pronounced speculation on where human society was going; for every prophet of doom anticipating collapse into degradation, animosity, and self-annihilation there was a contrasting viewpoint awaiting the move towards a better new world. Further, these assessments often overlapped. This thesis examines the impact of apocalyptic ideas within British art in the interwar years. It looks at painting, drawings, prints, and sculpture, addressing the use and development of apocalyptic concepts during the period 1918-1939, and explicitly relates contemporary anxieties and apocalyptic evocations with Christian...
Revealing Structures: Apocalypse in the Architecture of the Afterlife
Bridget Pupillo
Lingue antiche e moderne 6
Revising Ovid's "Metamorphoses": dramatizing the mythical in Mary Shelley's "Proserpine" (1820)
2017 •
Maria Giovanna Campobasso
This contribution intends to assess the web of intertextual references in Mary Shelley's drama "Proserpine" (1820), an early example of Romantic interest in revisionist mythology. The few critical efforts on the text focus on its transposition of the Ovidian narrative and its proto-feminist instances of mythical revisionism. Shelley's adaptation primarily concerns characterization, structure and intended audience. In light of Ostriker's (1980) suggestion that revisionist myth-making in women's literary production constitutes a significant reshaping of shared culture and personal identity, Proserpine generally reads as a tale of defiance against patriarchal violence. The thoroughness of the existing scholarship on its portrayal of gender performance calls for an evidence-based study of the text as a literary adaptation. With reference specifically to Ovid's episode of Proserpine's rape in the "Metamorphoses" 5.346 ff, the article assesses Shelley's analogue in light of its performative component.
Religiologica
Descents to the Underworld from Gilgamesh to Christian Late Antiquity
2017 •
Jan N . Bremmer
In my contribution I trace the transformations of the descent into the underworld from ancient Assyria via Greece and Rome to the world of Christian Late Antiquity. My aim is to analyse the evolution of a pagan and Jewish hellscape into a Christian one. First, I will briefly discuss the earliest known literary descent, that by Enkidu, which almost certainly influenced the poet of the Odyssey (§ 1), who, in turn, paved the way for the famous descent of Orpheus (§ 2). Subsequently, we will return to Assyria, and from there move to Israel and Rome during the early Imperial period (§ 3), before concluding with Christian Late Antiquity (§ 4). In my argument I will concentrate on the interplay of pagan and Christian traditions, as well as to the nature of the sinners in the various hellscapes.
