Many visions of hell are not fiery at all, but freezing cold
Flames dominate popular images of hell, yet Tibetan Buddhist tradition describes as many cold hells as hot ones. Swahili belief pictures kuzimu as bitterly cold, and Dante placed the deepest circle of his Inferno in a frozen lake. Even the English word began not with fire but with hiding: a concealed place beneath the ground.
Old English hel, recorded around 725, named a shadowy world of the dead long before Christian missionaries arrived. It descends from a Proto-Germanic word for a concealed place, built on an Indo-European root meaning to cover or hide, which also produced Latin celare, to hide, and so the English cellar. In Norse myth, Hel was both a place and a goddess-like being who ruled it. When the Germanic peoples converted, the old word was simply repurposed for the Christian place of punishment.
Many early afterlives punished no one. Sumerians imagined Kur, a dusty cavern ruled by the goddess Ereshkigal, reached through seven gates in the Zagros Mountains, where every soul lived a thin copy of earthly life and relatives poured drinks into graves through clay pipes. Hebrew Sheol and the Greek Hades were similar neutral abodes, which is why translators often prefer underworld to hell. Ideas of judgement appear by 1500 BCE in Egypt, where forty-two divine judges assessed the dead against the principles of Maat. The righteous entered the fields of reeds, while the guilty went to Ammit, the devourer, and were ultimately annihilated rather than tormented forever.
Traditions differ sharply on whether hell lasts. In Indian religions it is a stage between rebirths. Persian Mazdaist belief had the dead cross a bridge over hell, with evildoers falling in, but foretold that God would one day destroy hell and redeem the souls inside. An early Buddhist text, the Kathavatthu, treats hell as the consequence of bad actions, requiring no god at all. The New Testament mentions hell only sparingly, though Gehenna, with its unquenchable fire, became the model for later Christian imagery. Plato's Myth of Er and Dante matched specific punishments to specific sins.
Some faiths reject the idea entirely. In Serer religion from West Africa, the closest thing to heaven is acceptance by the ancestors, and the closest to hell is becoming a lost, wandering soul, with no flames involved. And Hell is also the name of a small unincorporated community in Michigan.
Source: Hell
