RedHanded - ShortHand: Hell

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Boiled in blood, hacked at by knives, torn apart by iron dogs… the world’s religions differ on what exactly might await sinners in the afterlife. But one thing they can all agree on is that if you were naughty on Earth, you are in for one hell of a horrible time.We take a quick tour of history’s grimmest netherzones: from freezing poison rain in the Norse Helheim, to a river of excrement, where monstrous aquatic beings eat your flesh, down in the Hindu Narakas. Welcome to Hell.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Okay, always sound fine. So let's continue. Because there is no greater hell. That is podcasting hell, isn't it? Recording a bunch of episodes, a bunch of content, and then you listen back and you're like sound like you're at the bottom of a sea.

I think the greater podcasting hell is when there's nothing there at all. Oh, yes. Anyway, let's not dwell on that. We'll have plenty of time to talk about personal hells, I'm sure, in the rest of this episode. So let's kick it off and we'll start at the end. you're dead. Uh-oh. Mm-hmm.

So, tough luck. And hopefully, you didn't have too painful of a time on your way out, but still, according to most of the world's religions, what happens next is quite likely to be a lot worse. History's brightest theological minds have reported all manner of ways that you might be punished for all the naughty stuff that you did in your time on earth. Religions and philosophers, theologies, etc., differ exactly on what might await you in the grim nether zone.

They may include boiled in blood, hacked by knives, drowned in bodily fluids, etc. But the one thing that most religions, people, thinkers seem to agree on is that if you don't follow the rules on earth, then after you die, you're in for a pretty bad time. Now look, for those of you who did follow the rules, It could be a picnic. After a long life of piety, purity and God-fearing obsequiousness,

the faithful would trot along to some lovely, blissful place and bask in its warm glow for all eternity. But we're going to ignore those places for today, because sorry, eternal salvation is just incredibly boring. Today we're going to talk to you about what happens to those poor wretched souls who sinned. Because, of course, It's spooky season. And it feels like high time, we took a tour of the Land of the Damned.

This is going to be one hell of a shorthand. The concept of a supernatural land of the dead is as old as we are. But it's worth pointing out that the afterlife wasn't always quite so moralising. We get our first glimpse of an ancient belief in an afterlife with the Sumerians, like literally everything else, because they were the first people we know. about to write things down. And in the afterlife, Sumerians weren't separated into the good and the bad. After you died in ancient Sumeria Mesopotamia land, you passed through seven gates to get

to Kerr the underworld. And yes, it was an underworld, as in below the earth. Which is a very common theme across a lot of cultures, probably because burying the dead in a dark, scary hole made an inextricable link between the earth and death. Anyway, once dead Sumerians got through the seven gates, bribing the guards on the way with all the jewelry that they were buried with, they got to Kerr. And Kerr, below the earth, was not exactly a paradise.

Kerr was a grey and dusty place where everyone drank dust and clay in the dark, forever. Kerr was a sort of sad, diminished, existence, and a pretty pessimistic idea that doesn't say much for the Sumerian national character. Still, although it sounds a bit unpleasant, it's not a place where you were judged and or punished for your sins. So let's keep going for those ones. The afterlife got its first big glow-up with those reliable historic drama queens, the ancient Egyptians. Theirs was a sort of long journey called the Duat. Once you die, your soul follows the sun west through caverns, rivers and gates,

passing all sorts of guardians and divine beings along the way. Then you get to the hall of Matt. And this is where we see the first bit of moral judgment. Because yes, here ancient Egyptians stood before 42 divine judges. And your heart would be weighed against the feather of Matt. If it was lighter, i.e. pure and righteous, then you're all good. Your soul passes into the field of reeds, a perfect paradise with no suffering. And Theresa May running freely.

But if your heart is heavier than the feather, sorry, it's bad news. Because then your heart would be devoured by a monstrous crocodile hippo-lion hybrid called Amit. And you, well, you would totally cease to exist. There are some accounts of people receiving a little torture first as well, burning in a bit of fire or being hacked away out by demons. But even then, it was only a prelude to total elimination, not eternal suffering. The Babylonians refined this idea slightly.

They added conditions. Those without a proper burial or burial ritual would suffer more than those who did, and heroes or kings might retain some privilege in the afterlife. And then between 1,500 BC, a priest called Zarathustra started preaching monotheism in what we would call Iran today. This introduced a big cosmic struggle between good and evil rather than all of the messiness that happens

when you have loads of fallible individual gods. After death, souls crossed the Sinnvat Bridge. If they had been righteous, the bridge widened and the soul walked on to paradise. But if they had been bad, the bridge narrowed, and they would fall into the abyss, where they would be subjected to all sorts of horrific torture. Over in South America, the Aztecs believed that as soon as a person died, they had to undergo a four-year journey through nine levels just to reach the afterlife. on the way they'd pass huge moving mountains

that crash into each other a field with wind that blows flesh-scraping knives and a river of blood filled with fearsome jaguars they did get a psycho-pomp though and if you don't know what one of those is well it's a divine figure whose duty it is to escort newly deceased souls from the earthly realm to the afterlife

so there you go there's a new word for everybody And the Aztec one of these psychopomps was called Sholotl. And even after that tough journey, still, in the Aztec world, wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. Because they believed that the gods created man to work. And just because you're dead doesn't mean you get to stop working. For them, it was the manner of your death that decided where you go to be judged. And only there would the gods judge your merits.

and decide what your job was in the afterlife. If you died in battle, in sacrifice, in childbirth, or on a trading expedition, good news, you were off to the house of the sun. No working in there, just good times. If you died for some sort of water-related reason, like drowning, had an accident on a mountain, or was struck by lightning, that wasn't so bad either. You'd work a bit, but otherwise live a happy afterlife full of joy in a paradise, called Talalokan

or something equivalent. And what about those kids? Don't worry. Infants that died before they were done breastfeeding would go to somewhere called Chi Chi Walkowoko, which in English means the place of the tree with breasts. Great.

And when they got there, those babies would suckle on that tree's many breasts until they could be sent back to be born on earth, which is pretty good for babies. Well, that's nice. They get a second. can go. Unlike the Catholics, you just keep them in a forest forever with suicides.

Anyway, for most folk with average deaths, their souls were sent to Mitt Klan. I definitely read that in the script as Michigan. From where I was that. Well, pre or post motor city, that could go either way. Do you know, in the 60s, Michigan was the third richest city in the world. Oh, yeah, I believe it. Believe it. Anyway, Mitzklan, not Michigan, is ruled by a blood-spattered skeleton.

Eh, well, maybe still Michigan, wearing a headdress of owl feathers and a necklace made of human eyeballs. And based on your sin levels as a human, that skeleton gives you a job. If you were bad, you got a shit job in the afterlife and you had to do it forever. And any of us who have had a truly shit job, we surely know that it is truly hell. What was your shittest job? I mean, probably working in fucking Bulldog Tesco Cafe, which like in the scale of jobs is not the shittest job, but it was just the shittest job I've ever had.

I just, I never, I couldn't eat a fry-up for like 10 years after that because I just spent three days a week making endless fry-ups for people. And it was just so grim. But, you know, I accept not the worst job in the world. So over in Scandinavia, Norse mythology also had some predictably gnarly visions of afterlife punishments. A lot of the reason that the Vikings did so well boil down to how utterly fearless and berserk they were in battle. And they did that because they knew that if they died an honourable death in battle, they'd get a one-way ticket to Valhalla, Odin's feasting hall.

where the dead can feast with the gods for all eternity. And because they'd grown to love fighting so much, they'd stop the feast pretty often, for you guessed it, some battling. And if they were even more honourable, souls might even be picked by Freya, the god of love, to live in the sweet, sweet meadows, a folk vanger. But not everyone was so lucky.

Way back when the trickster god Loki had a daughter called Hell with one L, whose face was half normal and half blue and rotten like Phantom of the Opera. Loki was so grossed out by his daughter that he cast her away into a dismal, icy world and gave her the responsibility of deciding what to do with those who didn't die honourably in battle. And she named it Helheim,

and it was guarded by a four-eyed hound called Gama and a giant eagle, whose name means corpse eater. That's pretty cool. It was a nine-day journey to Helheim, which the recently deceased did in total darkness, hoping not to run into one of the many monstrous creatures that lived there. The dead would eventually reach Hell's Hall, where they'd just live a dismal, cold life for all eternity. And the worst of the worst!

Oathbreakers, rapists and murderers were sent on to the Hall of Nustrand. This hall is built with the entwined bodies of Vestrond. menomous serpents, who would spit a never-ending flow of burning poison on those below. Then their bodies would be chewed by the feathered dragon, Nithroger. But there's light at the end of the gloomy, gloomy tunnel, because they're not in there forever. Eventually, it'd get to Ragnarok, the end of all things. Then the dead would all jump aboard a ship, called Nagypha, which is built from their own toenails and fingernails.

Then there'd be a lovely big battle in which everyone, including all the gods, would die for good, and the world would be made anew. So the Viking afterlife is very, very true to form. Cold, pretty fucking epic, and full of battles. So next up, we'll move over to the Far East. And whatever you may imagine Chinese hell to be like, you're probably wrong, because actually it's, loads of red tape.

The Chinese afterlife, called Diu, is essentially a massive cosmological bureaucracy. Fucking Christ. After navigating a huge subterranean maze, the dead reach the ten courts of hell, each of which has a presiding judge. And the punishments for the naughty dead can be pretty creative. Some would be skinned alive,

crushed between mountains or boiled in oil, but still the punishment fit the crime. It was just a place of purification, meant to balance your karma. And once you had atoned, you could go on to be reincarnated. It's not a bad system. Yeah. So, of course, speaking of reincarnation, let's start on the first of our major religions and have a look at Buddhism and Hinduism.

And yes, we have lumped these together. Obviously, they're not the same, but their visions of the afterlife are very similar. Because they work on the same idea as the Chinese one. A temporary realm of suffering, where you go to basically flush out all your bad karma before being born again. Buddhism has eight cold hells and eight hot hells. Punishments include sinking into endless pits of human excrement, suffocating over and over again. Buddha woulda shoulda. Is what you scream as you're being boiled.

No, that's what they scream at you. That's what Buddha screams at you. Would you rather go to a hot hell or a cold hell? Cold hell. I run very warm. I'd be all right. Yeah, I'd prefer the cold, but I think I'd go to hot hell. Anyway.

And depending on which book you read, because Hinduism has a lot of them, Hinduism has 28 hells called Narakas. and which one you go to depends on your specific sins if you drank alcohol while you were alive well then you'd be made to drink molten iron I thought you were allowed to drink if you're a Hindu I mean you definitely are these days there's nothing there's nothing against it but presumably

and that's why the Bali's the party island it's the only Hindu one yeah yeah presumably maybe it's like obviously being very very old back in the day they probably did it to be like stop destroying your families and your cities by being a fucking alcoholic Smoke this lovely cush instead. Yeah, no, very, very chill on the alcohol now. So second up, if you cared about your own family's well-being but were hurtful to others, then all of the living things that you'd ever hurt in your life

would come back in the form of serpent-like beasts called Rurus to torture you. And anyone who'd ever cooked an animal, well, that's very bad news. You would be sent straight to Cumberpaca, where you would find yourself being cooked alive in boiling oil and you'd be boiled there for a number of years corresponding to the number of hairs on the bodies of all of the animals you victimised fuck it out do feathers count what if you just ate chicken

yes probably good question they've got a lot of feathers it's like the questions that kids would ask at like the first day of Hindu school but what about if I ate a chicken Chickens don't have hair. Fish? Shut up. And of course it wouldn't be the Hindu section of the show without a brief visitation to the cast system.

A Brahmin or a Kastria or a Vaisha husband who forces his wife to drink his semen out of lust or enforce his control is sent to Lalabashka. There he's thrown into a river of semen which he's forced to drink himself. Wow. I'm surprised. Why is it Hinduism taking the side of the woman in literally anything?

I suppose maybe it's like in the Bible there's a lot of stuff about like wasting your seed. Like that's punishable by death. So don't wank basically. But this is very intense. I'm surprised they were even talking about this. And there's another hell that's reserved only for those who are born into a respectable family but neglected their duties. and this one contains a river of excrement, urine, pus, blood, hair, nails, bones, marrow and fat, where monstrous aquatic beings eat at the person's flesh.

But, worst of all 28, is Avici, yes, like the DJ. And this hell is reserved for those who commit the five very worst sins, killing your father, killing your mother, killing an enlightened being, shedding the blood of a holy person, or creating a schizabeth. in the faith. Evichi, unlike the DJ, is a cube, about 300,000 kilometers on each side, buried deep within the earth.

It's surrounded by iron walls and haunted by iron snakes and iron dogs. And as we said, all the Nakara are temporary. You're not in there forever. But you are still in big trouble. So, the Evichi is thought to last around 3.4 quintillion years before you are released and allowed to live again.

That's very unusual. It feels like, it sounds like something I'm fucking hellraiser. I wasn't educated in any of these, as you can tell. Just stop creating schisms, all right? No, no. But I love it. Now the rest of the world's major religions all come from. the same long tradition. In ancient Greece, it's called Hades. All the dead go to Hades via a series of

rivers. First you cross the river sticks, ferried by the psychopomp called Karen. Or Karen, I think it's maybe correctly pronounced us. Then you go to the gates, guarded by Cerberus, the three-headed dog. Then there were three more rivers, one of fire, one of wailing, then a river of forgetfulness, where the souls drink to forget their past lives. Hades is separated into three regions. The Asphodel Meadows is for the regular souls who just drift about restlessly. Like an heir and Hercules. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then you have the Elysian fields, which is a paradise reserved for heroes and the most virtuous. Then there's a Tartarus, the deepest pit, reserved for sinners and enemies of the gods. and again the punishments are very bespoke they would be tailored to your sin. Some greedy folks were sat next to delicious looking food and drink for a year without being able to touch it. For trying to cheat death, Sisyphus was condemned to roll a massive boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down every time, for all eternity. The Greek one, of course, influenced the Roman one because the Romans nicked everything and then went on to influence basically everyone else.

And you might often hear that Judaism has no hell, but that's not quite true. Early Judaism didn't, but the Greco-Roman version eventually brushed off and they developed shoal. Like the Buddhist, shoal is a place of purification where your soul makes up for the bad stuff before moving on.

And the longest you can be in there is only 12 months. So far, pretty much all of the hells, we've covered are temporary places where your sins equate to a relevant amount of misery after which you've paid your debts and you can move on. But there are two big exceptions to that rule who both agree that disbelievers should burn in hell for literally ever. And they are the big dogs who fight each other all the time to this day, Islam and Christianity. it's called Jahanam and it has seven levels

of increasing severity the top one is for people who were Muslims but did some sort of sinning. It's a huge pit of fire that burns your flesh which Allah renews every time it's burned off. It's generally believed that any part of hell is only

temporary for Muslims because all believers will eventually end up in paradise. They might just have to put up with a certain amount of skin burning before they get there. Then you have the next level, Lada, which is for non-Muslims. And it's also a pit of hell, but this time the fire eats away at your organs one by one, before you're renewed to burn again.

And of course the levels get worse and worse. On one level, you're given clothing of molten copper and shoes of fire. And in yet another, you're forced to drink boiling water that schools your insides. The lowest level of hell is called Al-Hia. from which no sinner is ever released. It's pitch dark down there and souls can be crushed under mountains or have their hands bound to their necks

and their necks bound to their legs. So that brings us to the helliest hell there is, the Christian one. And hell like Madonna has had many versions of itself over time. Have you seen that that girl from Ozark's going to play Madonna? Oh, no. Hmm. Anyway, let's start with a very reasonable question.

What is there about hell in the Bible? Nothing. The Old Testament mentioned Shoal from Judaism as like a shadowy realm of the dead. In the New Testament, there is some talk of burning as a punishment for not believing, but like everything, there's lots of theories about what that actually meant. In the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus talks about a place where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. And then in Matthew, there's a place of outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Hell is also referred to as a more symbolic place where disbelievers are separated from the glory of God and that's punishment enough.

But in none of those examples is it actually called hell. and there's a lot of different theories about there was basically a giant trash fire outside of Jerusalem that was just burning all the time and a lot of people are like he was just talking about that wasn't actually anything to do with sinning or the afterlife but I'm not going to fight with scholars but what's important is that the Christian hell

the touchstone hell that we all think about all the time was made up quite a long time after any of the Gospels were written Now through the first millennium early medieval authors slowly fleshed it out as a place of damnation. Early Christian teachers and theologians said things like They who live wickedly and do not repent will be punished in everlasting fire.

And there is neither measure nor end to these torments. It was only at the start of the second millennium that the church officially weighed in. And when it did, it really ramped up the torment. To control the lives of its followers, the church made the punishments worse and the bar of judgment even higher

and then in the early 14th century hell went mainstream the divine comedy an epic poem by Dante Alighieri is in three parts and you've definitely heard about it the afterlife consists of paradiso, pogatorio and inferno it's considered one of the greatest works of literature

in history and really set the blueprint for Christian hell from then on Dante pulls from all sorts of places, not only conclusions already made by the church, but also Roman and Greek philosophers and pagan beliefs as well. In Inferno, Dante describes himself meeting the Roman poet Virgil, whose account of Aeneas' descent into the underworld was not just a massive influence, you could even say,

Dante just nicked the whole fucking thing because he did. And what happens is that Virgil takes Dante on a tour through nine circles of hell, which descend right into the earth, core. The first circle is called limbo, which is reserved for those who never knew Christ. That means those that died before they were baptized or who came from non-Christian cultures. And there, Dante meets historical figures like Socrates, Aristotle and Julius Caesar. In limbo, these non-Christians get to sit in a nice castle with a great view, but they never get to see heaven.

The next few circles of hell are named after specific sins. Lust is a dark, stormy place where souls are blown about wildly in a big storm with no rest, reflecting on how they were controlled by their stormy passions in life. There, Dante meets most celebrities, this time famously lusty ones like Achilles, Cleopatra and Dido. The circle of hell for wrathful people has people clawing away at each other for a eternity in the river sticks. The seventh circle is called violence. Its outer ring is for those who were violent against people, and it's guarded by centaurs, and Attila the Hun is, of course, there. The middle ring is for those who take their own lives. They are turned into trees,

and eaten at by the harpies. And the inner ring is for blasphemers, sodomites, sorry lads, and also those who are violent against gods or nature. Sinners are boiled in rivers of blood, and if they try to get out, they're shot at by the centaurs. Weirdly, there are two whole circles below violence, and the next one down is fraud, which is where the punishment gets really creative. Some sinners waved through rivers of human excrement.

Others have their heads twisted completely blackwards, forcing them to walk while crying down their spines. Some are forced to march endlessly in cloaks lined with lead. Thieves are bitten by serpents till they burst into flames or change into a weird hybrid snake people. And this is where Dante meets Mohammed, who is endlessly hacked at by a demon with a sword. His body is split from chin to crotch and his entrails spill out.

And then there's the ninth and deepest circle of hell, which is reserved for the treacherous. And the deepest circle is not hot, like you may expect. It's actually a frozen lake, which is constantly cooled off by the wind of Satan's beating wings. There, sinners are frozen in ice, some twisted into grotesque shapes. And then right in the middle is Satan himself. He's got three faces with two huge wings under each. And inside, the three mouths of those three faces are Judas,

who, of course, betrayed Jesus with a kiss, no less, and then Cassius and Brutus who killed Caesar. Clearly, in Dante's mind, these men were the worst sinners in history. It all paints quite the picture, doesn't it? And the divine comedy was, as you can imagine, a big fat hit. These visceral, grotesque and detailed visions of torment bedded into the global Christian imagination.

It introduced pitchforks, demons and hierarchical levels of hell, which, despite not actually being in any scripture, became culturally synonymous with hell. The imagery was so strong that it seeped into sermons, art and literature. It's the pop culture hell we all know and love, where Homer Simpson was forced to eat donuts, and Bill and Ted go on their bogus journey. In about the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation calmed the whole thing down a bit.

And people agreed the hell was probably a bit more abstract. In the Victorian era, with the introduction of science and huge social change, people started to really cast doubt on the mercilessness of eternal agony. These days, though, hell is just considered a state of mind more than anything else. My homeboy Pope Francis reportedly said that a hell doesn't exist, saying that wayward souls were just extinguished. The Catholic Church frames hell as a state of separating yourself from God's love. So you would think that outside of the West Brabaptist Church,

people don't believe in eternal torment as a punishment for the wrong kind of shagging. But in a 2014 survey, 58% of American adults said they believed in the existence of a place, quote, where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished. And from our rapidly increasing temperatures to images of human, suffering everywhere you look you might say we're already there happy halloween god has bleak well there you go that's the end i think it makes sense it's just the human mentality well i think you know the more living you do the more you realize that there are really really bad people and a lot of them get away with it so you want there to be some sort

of eventual absolutely judgment you want them to get what's coming to to them, but perhaps the real hell is that they don't. Yeah, I think the whole thing just tells us more about the cultures and the times in which these hells were created and the fact that a majority of people still believe that, or maybe a majority of people still want to believe that, doesn't surprise me, because yeah, we do live in a world naturally where you see a lot of injustice because that's life. And so, yeah, I get people's desire for that to be the case. So that's it, guys.

That is our little take, our little shorthand on hell from different religions, different cultures. We hope you learn something. And yeah, let's get started. So just week one of October here on shorthand. So we'll see you next week for something else. Bye. Bye. Too many students are packed into overcrowded classrooms in Ontario schools,

and it's hurting their ability to learn. But instead of helping our kids, the Ford government is playing politics, taking over school boards and silencing local voices. It shouldn't be this way. Tell the Ford government to get serious about tackling overcratic classrooms because smaller classes would make a big difference for our kids. Go to Building Better Schools.ca.a. A message from the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario.

It's all a lighthearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid. We're your hosts. I'm Alina Urquhart. And I'm Ash Kelly. And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy. The stories we cover are well researched. Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group. With a touch of humor.

Shout out to her. Shout out to all my therapist out there's been like eight of them. A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing. That motherfucker is not real. And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tail of the paranormal. Or you love to hop in the way back machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes. You should tune in to our podcast. Morbid.

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