If there’s one thing our Sunday school teachers taught us, it’s that Hell is a terrifying place. Pillars of fire, pits of burning sulfur, the interminable torment of the wicked . . . there’s nothing like your standard vision of the underworld to put the fear of God into small children.
But it turns out that the “standard” version is exactly that: a wishy-washy average that contains only a fraction of the possibilities. Glimpse inside the visions of some of history’s wildest mystics and you’ll find versions of Hell that could give your nightmares nightmares.
1.St. Faustina’s Visions
St. Mary Faustina was an early 20th-century Polish nun now recognized by the Church as a saint. But perhaps what she’s best known for is a series of visions which culminated in her journeying into Hell itself.Unlike the gore-happy sadist who wrote the Apocalypse of Peter, St. Mary refrains from describing the tortures the damned face in too much detail. However, what she does include will make your skin crawl. According to her account, Hell is a gigantic, smoky chamber filled with a suffocating indescribable stench in eternal darkness. Demons tiptoe from pit to pit, unleashing special tortures tailor-made for each new soul, while God Himself burns sinners with His own agonizing fire. The majority of souls in this Hell are specifically named as unbelievers, while those who believed but sinned get to wind up in purgatory instead.
- St. Don Bosco’s Dream
A 19th-century priest who advocated love over punishment and spent his life helping street kids, St. Don Bosco had some pretty extreme views on Hell. Specifically, his infamous dream of April 10, 1868, revealed a terrifying image of cruelty in his subconscious.In his telling of it, Bosco finds himself on a road sloping gently downhill towards an everlasting pit. Suddenly, people he knows start sprinting past him and over the edge like an anathematized version of Wile E. Coyote. Looking into the pit, Bosco sees children he’s taught writhing like mad dogs, tearing flesh off their own faces and throwing it high into the air. And that’s just for starters. As our guide descends deeper and deeper into Hell, he encounters other former students lying motionless, worms chewing on their eyeballs, hearts, hands, and legs. When asked, his guardian angel says they will suffer this for all eternity “with absolutely no reprieve whatsoever.”The dream ends when Bosco puts his hand to one of the walls of Hell. He’s told that this is an outer wall, and there are a thousand more walls, each a thousand miles thick and a thousand miles apart, before you reach the true fires of Hell. Even way out here, Bosco’s hand burns so badly he wakes up—meaning this nightmare vision was meant to be the nice bits of Hell.
3.The Apocalypse Of Paul
The Apocalypse of Paul is basically a gritty, third-century reboot of The Apocalypse of Peter. And you’ll be pleased to hear it continues its predecessor’s delight in utter sadism.In this vision, Hell is divided up into two rivers—one of fire and one of ice, and the damned are split between the two. However, the simple torments of burning or freezing for eternity apparently aren’t enough for the author. Those in the river of fire also have their entrails pierced by iron hooks, stones smashed in their faces, and their lips cut off with red-hot razors. Oh, and some of them are also eaten from the inside out by worms, just in case all this ultra-violence wasn’t bad enough already. Meanwhile, those in the ice river have their hands and feet cut off and are feasted on by vermin.But once again, the worst punishments are distinctly politically ambiguous. Gay people are dropped in a pit full of pitch to suffer for all eternity, while women who lost their virginity before marriage are chained up in red-hot irons and carted off by abusive angels. Not that anyone else escapes these horrors: People are tortured for swearing, for having money, for not fasting properly, and even for giving to charity. In short, the entire human race since the dawn of time is probably festering in this Hell, which suggests that the author thought the whole concept of Christian forgiveness was highly overrated.
4.The Vision Of Tundale
An Irish gent living in the Middle Ages, Tundale (or Tundal) is now known only for his insane two-day voyage into the underworld.In this Hell, people are cooked down to soup in gigantic frying pans, demons with red-hot pitchforks push people off mountains, and surgery-minded devils chop people up into little bits, then magically put them back together to be chopped up again. Tundale himself is even tortured by demons who claw off their own faces and make him lead a wild cow across a narrow bridge studded with nails while horse-shaped monsters try to devour him. But perhaps the most shocking aspect of his Hell is Acheron. A sort of hell-within-a-hell, Acheron is a gigantic beast capable of swallowing 9,000 men at a time. Once inside, people who’ve been eaten are then eaten again, this time by thousands of frightened dogs, snakes, rats, and other toothy things, all while being burned and suffocated with sulfur. It’s probably the biggest case of overkill in Christian literature, but that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.
5.The Vision Of Wetti
Recorded in the ninth century, the Vision of Wetti follows a German monk on his journey into Hell and recounts the things he sees along the way. It has the usual references to darkness and flames and worms and eternal suffering, but the one thing that stands out most about this Hell is how absolutely obsessed it is with sexuality. During the 3,500-word account, Wetti’s guardian angel mentions or discusses sodomy five times, even likening it to the plague. Among the punishments he witnesses, Wetti sees people’s genitals being burned with fire, naked women being flogged, and adulterers tied naked together. But the worst is reserved for Charlemagne.A former Emperor who united most of Europe, Charlemagne is tied to a stake naked, completely unharmed except for an animal eternally ripping at his genitals. This sight of genital destruction is the pinnacle of Wetti’s vision, and just about the most terrifying thing we can possibly imagine. If it gets any worse than this, we don’t want to hear about it.
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