Hades, Nifelhel, Put, Underworld.
by Estéban Trujillo de Gutiérrez
“There was no Heaven for the Babylonian dead.
All mankind were doomed to enter the gloomy Hades of the Underworld, “the land of darkness and the shadow of death; a land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is darkness,” as Job exclaimed in the hour of despair, lamenting his fate.
This gloomy habitation of the dead resembles the Greek Hades, the Teutonic Nifelhel, and the Indian Put. No detailed description of it has been found.
The references, however, in the Descent of Ishtar and the Gilgamesh epic suggest that it resembled the hidden regions of the Egyptians, in which souls were tortured by demons who stabbed them, plunged them in pools of fire, and thrust them into cold outer darkness where they gnashed their teeth, or into places of horror swarming with poisonous reptiles.
Ishtar was similarly tortured by the plague demon, Namtar, when she boldly entered the Babylonian Underworld to search for Tammuz. Other sufferings were, no doubt, in store for her, resembling those, perhaps, with which the giant maid in the Eddic poem Skirnismal was threatened when she refused to marry Frey, the god of fertility and harvest:
Trolls shall torment thee from morn till eve
In the realms of the Jotun race,
Each day to the dwellings of Frost giants must thou
Creep helpless, creep hopeless of love;
Thou shalt weeping have in the stead of joy,
And sore burden bear with tears….
May madness and shrieking, bondage and yearning
Burden thee with bondage and tears.
In like manner, too, the inhabitants of the Indian Hell suffered endless and complicated tortures.”
Donald A. Mackenzie, Myths of Babylonia and Assyria, 1915.