Going Through Hell: Three Guidebooks to the Underworld

Before the Christian invention of celestial paradise, the underworld in most cultures was either undesirable or divided into good and bad sections. Celestial salvation appears early on as a perk for the Pharaohs and later Roman Emperors, who were supposed to ride the boat of the sun or become stars, but the destination of the of the ordinary dead was underground: the Hebrew Sheol, the Greek Hades, the Mayan Xibalba, the Egyptian Duat, the Mesopotamian Kur, and the Old Norse Hel. 

In the oldest Mediterranean systems, including those of Homer and the ancient Hebrews, any afterlife was so joyless that it could scarcely be called life. Unless their families provided for them, the Sumerian dead had only dust to eat and drink. After Odysseus lured shades of the underworld to drink at a pit of sheep's blood, he suggested that the spirit of Achilles should have no regrets, having died well, but Achilles replied that he'd rather be the slave of a peasant than king among the dead (Homer, Book 11, ll. 556-558). Even God's servant Samuel, after his death, is "a ghostly spirit coming up out of the earth," summoned against his will by a witch (1 Samuel 28:13). 

For much of the ancient world, the dead were joyless ghosts, but Egyptians of late dynasties hoped--after judgement in the underworld--to live forever in a sunny replica of the Nile Valley called the Field of Reeds. By the time Virgil wrote The Aeneid in answer to Homer, the dismal plain of shades thirsting for blood had become a vast cavern subdivided into good and bad neighborhoods, including the posh Elysian Fields where the blessed lived a idyllic afterlife.

Many accounts of the world of the dead come from witnesses who are, in Monopoly terms, "just visiting." Typically, they require occult instructions to accomplish this, Odysseus from Circe, Aeneas from the Sibyl, and Dante's Pilgrim from Virgil, protected by talismans such as Aeneas' golden bough. The ultimate case of just visiting is Christ's three-day stay in the Underworld, the Harrowing of Hell, when he is said to have broken the gates and freed the righteous dead. In early Christian depictions of the afterlife, The Revelation to John and the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter, the witnesses are earthbound visionaries outside of the realms described.

Then there are guidebooks for arrivals in the underworld, the newly dead who are in danger of destruction or failure. These include the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and maybe the Mayan Popol Vuh. Contrary to the Christian assumption that the soul's fate is fixed at death, these works suppose that it depends on strategic moves within the land of the dead--monsters and gods that must be recognized and named--actions the dead must perform after entering that perilous realm. Otherwise, the dead will be denied a happy ending. In Islamic tradition, the dead are trapped in their graves until after their funerals, when vast, fire-tongued angels named Munkar and Nakir interrogate them. Only souls professing orthodoxy can rise into Paradise. 

That the world of the dead is a perilous place where even a visitor can be trapped is an ancient idea, attested on pre-Biblical Sumerian tablets, where Gilgamesh's beloved companion Enkidu volunteers to retrieve treasured objects (probably ball-game equipment) that have fallen into the underworld. Gilgamesh advises him that if he is recognized as alive he will be detained by the dead, so he must never wear clean clothes, throw sticks, wear sandals, or shout. Enkidu ignores this advice and is trapped forever. Centuries later, Persephone is bound to the underworld for eating a pomegranate seed there, a mythical explanation of the seasons like the stories of Tammuz and Adonis. Divinities trapped in the underworld symbolize the growing seasons in many cultures, notably the story of two generations of brothers in the Mayan Popol Vuh.

The Popol Vuh survives as a Spanish translation of a phonetic rendering of a recitation in the Quiche language interpreting a pre-Columbian hieroglyphic book. It tells stories about the gods and kings of the Quiche people, who are a subset of Mayan culture. The stories begin with the creation of the world and just-so stories about primal figures who garden, hunt, and sport in a semi-magical setting like that of the Grimm fairy tales. The story-cycle about the underworld--a realm called Xibalba, or the Place of Fear--begins with two brothers who disturb the Lords of Death by playing ball every day over their heads. The Lords, who rule a court of nobles with names like Pus, Jaundice, Filth, Skull, and Woe, summon the brothers to play ball in the Underworld, an offer that they apparently can't refuse. 

From the beginning things go wrong. These brothers are a cautionary tale. They descend into the earth, wading rivers of pus and blood to a crossroads where they take the black road to the Lords of Death. They are tricked by dummies dressed as lords. Even before they can play ball, they fail in the first of five houses set up to test them. This would be the end, but the head of one of the dead brothers is lodged in a gourd tree--indistinguishable from a gourd--and spits on the daughter of a Xibalban lord, impregnating her with twins. She escapes to the upper world, where the mother of the ill-fated brothers adopts her, and the story begins again with a second generation of twins, the tricksters Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

The twins are also ballplayers, and their play again disturbs the Lords of Death, who again summon them Xibalba. Before going, the twins discover their father's ball equipment and reveal themselves as gods of vegetation by leaving corn plants that will sprout if they succeed. From the beginning, they choose better than their fathers did. They cross the rivers of pus and blood using their blowguns as bridges, and at the crossroads they know to take the green road. Before they do, they send ahead a mosquito to sting the lords of Xibalba and report what it hears. With this information, the twins are able to bypass the dummies and call the lords by their names, temporarily subduing them. Given cigars to keep lit all night under pain of death, they trick the Xibalbans with fireflies. The next day, the twins avoid a treacherous ball of sharp blades but lose the game and are given an impossible penalty, but they are helped by ants--an exact analogue to the tale of Rumpelstiltskin.  The twins, with their cleverness and skill at playing ball, pass all of the lords' tests. They even (with the aid of a friendly rabbit) replace the head of one of the twins after it is bitten off in a house of bats.

But the Xibalban don't play fair, and a surprising plot twist reveals the twins as dying and reborn gods of maize. After being baked in an oven and sprinkled into a river, they reconstitute as anonymous vagabonds giving shows in which they are killed and restored to life. The chief lords of Death order a command performance and volunteer to be killed but then, of course, aren't restored to life. The twins reveal themselves in triumph and limit the powers of Death. In a happy ending, the grandmother's corn plants sprout, the gourd-headed father is restored to life, and twins rise to the upper world--and keep on rising until they become the sun and moon.

The Popol Vuh differs from the next two texts in that it isn't explicitly a guide for the dead. We can't be sure if the twins' exploits were meant to be read that way, but there are major similarities between it and texts from Egypt and Tibet that were preparations for death. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a compilation of spells left in tombs over centuries. It evolved from hieroglyphics painted in the walls of the tombs of Pharaohs to scrolls written in script and left in the coffins. A story is implied by the spells, a progress of the newly dead through a perilous underworld toward a goal identified with the rising sun, either the sunlit Field of Reeds or the sky-boat of Ra. By reciting the spells--or having the scrolls do so as proxies--the dead associate themselves with gods and pass through obstacles like those faced by Hunahpu and Xbalanque. 

Similarities include spells to rejoin body parts that have been removed, spells to avoid being devoured by animals--a threat overcome by Mayan heroes in test houses where they face carnivorous jaguars and bats. But the most striking analogue is the meeting with the council of the dead where the twins dominate twelve lords with names like Scab Stripper, Bloody Teeth, and Bloody Claws. A dead Egyptian, ushered into the Hall of Maati to be judged by Osiris, faces his first test in the famous Negative Confession, where he professes his innocence to forty-two gods whom he is instructed to address by names like Destroyer, Crusher of Bones, Lord of Two Horns, and Leg of Fire. 

Success in the Egyptian system, as for the Mayan twins, is not so much about virtue and truth as about having inside knowledge (from Thoth, the scribe of the gods, who is credited for sharing the spells). The newly dead Egyptian is clearly not the god he claims to be in many of the incantations, and it's unlikely--especially if he is wealthy enough to afford funereal scrolls--that he's innocent of every sin denied in the Negative Confession, including lying, talking too much, judging hastily, or seeking distinction. Given the odd names necessary to open gates along the path to salvation and the spells to ward off hungry demons, innocence is not enough. Anybody wandering into the underworld clueless as the first two twins will never make it out to the Field of Reeds or Ra's boat. You need a guidebook.

A very  different guidebook--but one with remarkable parallels--is the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Bardo Thodol. Supposed to have been written by a founder of Tibetan Buddhism, buried, and then dug up in the fourteenth century, the text instructs souls in the bardo, a liminal state between death and reincarnation. It seems that the dead hover near their corpses for days until their future is resolved. During this time, they can hear advice read to them, advice that may help them escape the cycle of death and rebirth. This is the Buddhist objective, and the interval after death--before the soul is trapped inside a new body--is an opportunity to overcome karmic illusions. These illusions take forms familiar from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. 

The bardo is not underground, but is a state of transition where the deceased are trapped in an illusory ghostly body near the earth. The dead are attacked by demons intent on driving them into new karmic bodies and keeping them from rising into the light: "Then the Lord of Death will drag you by a rope tied round your neck, and cut off your head, tear out your heart, pull out your entrails, lick your brains, drink your blood, eat your flesh and gnaw your bones." But this is all illusion because the dead cannot die. Their illusory bodies are reconstituted like the bodies of the Mayan twins and the Egyptian dead. The terrifying karmic ties to their old physical lives drive them back into reincarnation, back into suffering unless the terrors of the underworld are understood to be illusions. This understanding alone, held steadfastly, can defeat the monsters of the Tibetan world of the dead. The Bardo Thodol is a book of instruction and reassurance read over the corpse for the benefit of its still-hovering ghost or astral double.

These three traditions--the Mayan, the Egyptian, and the Tibetan--differ from the Abrahamic religions and most of Western mythology by assuming that the the ultimate destination of the dead is not fixed at death. They project tests and perils into the a world beyond the grave. Even the testing of the Islamic dead by angels can be read as an official stamp on a deathbed state because the answers are obvious to all the faithful, making it a parable of the belief that Muhammad's people are Paradise-ready while other believers, though salvageable, need work.