Biomedical neuroengineers have recently noticed that when visitors to the Prado in Madrid pause in front of Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights they make short work of paradise and instead opt for perdition. The panel on the left depicts a blithe, bucolic Eden, where the average museum-goer spends only 16 seconds. The central section, which shows a polymorphous orgy that is about as shocking as a weekend of suburban wife-swapping in the 1960s, detains viewers for 26 seconds. But when reaching the far end, they spend 33 seconds exploring a perverse inferno in which people copulate with birds, a pig dons a nun’s wimple, and a set of bagpipes mimics a wilting penis and a bloated sac of testicles.
Instinctively, almost automatically, the average pair of eyes swipes right. Hell is irresistible, despite Bosch’s man-eating rabbits and defecating demons; certainly it is too attractive a place to be the exclusive preserve of religious fanatics, who designed it as a pit into which they could fling all those of whom they disapproved. We grow up when we outgrow such notions – and when we stop believing in hell, we probably acknowledge that in our dreams and fantasies we spend many agreeable hours there, especially after dark.
The first angel to fall into the flames was a liberator. Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost rejects the hereditary monarchy of heaven and convenes a parliament in hell, summoning his horned brethren to a custom-built debating chamber which he calls Pandemonium. The democratic experiment does not end well, but only because Christ, fighting to defend the principle of primogeniture that our creaking constitution still enshrines, prevails on the third day of the war by going nuclear: God’s heir menaces the devils with “ten thousand thunders” and sends them scurrying for cover.
The setback was only temporary. Although heaven remains out of sight and hazily incredible, hell is all around us. In the rear of Bosch’s hellscape, explosions concuss the earth, furnaces seethe and entire cities blaze all night long. By the 19th century, this infernal vista could be seen anywhere in the English Midlands. William Blake called industrial mills satanic; in Dickens’s Hard Times a worker tumbles into a disused mine, gobbled up – although his only sin is to protest against conditions in Coketown – by an “Old Hell Shaft”.
Dickens railed against factories, but he was fascinated by nature’s homegrown versions of the abyss, and when visiting Naples he indulged in a spot of infernal tourism. After a perilous climb up the crater of Vesuvius at nightfall, he gloated as he looked into “the Hell of boiling fire below”. His clothes and those of his guide were scorched and singed by the volcanic flames: “you never saw such devils,” he chuckled to a friend.
The hell so meticulously mapped by Dante in The Divine Comedy grades its victims and sends them to suffer in nine concentric subterranean circles, the most populous and popular of which is the one to which the lustful are dispatched. William Blake drew the entwined pairs of condemned lovers endlessly circulating through what looks like an intestinal tube. Among them are Francesca da Rimini and her brother-in-law Paolo, Dante’s most celebrated adulterers, who succumb to temptation and drop the book they are reading in countless 19th-century paintings and go on to be sublimely tossed about in an aerial bed by an orchestral storm in Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poem.
For them and others, damnation is not without its hot delights. On his wedding night, Byron allegedly awoke, saw the fire in the hearth glowing through the bed curtains, and cried out: “Oh I am surely in hell!” Marital sex, however, was not quite as hellish as he wished: he soon deserted his wife, who according to rumour would not comply with demands that were quite literally – the etymology gives the game away – preposterous.
Deadly sins like Byron’s had by then been redefined as expensive vices, available to those who could pay. Aristocratic rakes in the 18th century patronised Hellfire Clubs where the menus included dishes called breast of Venus or devil’s loin. Those establishments have a contemporary offspring: in his television series Hell’s Kitchen Gordon Ramsay – seen on the poster wearing diabolically leathery wings and brandishing a pitchfork – makes trainee chefs sweat over hot stoves into which he threatens to hurl them. Ramsay’s joking sadism is a reminder that hell was invented to make us mistrust and fear our own perfectly healthy appetites.
Others gain access to an elective hell through the use of machinery, not by eating spiced-up meals. Squadrons of fighter pilots in both world wars called themselves Hell’s Angels, and the title was taken over by the outlaw riders of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series imagines a new race of demons called Cenobites, who with the aid of “super-butchers” have re-engineered their bodies, stitching their eyelids, implanting jewels in their skulls and puncturing every inch of flesh with needles. These would once have been the kind of exquisitely evil torments meted out to sinners; they have become caste marks that bestow a new kind of glamour on those who scarify and mutilate themselves.
Post-human monsters more grotesque than Barker’s worst imaginings now preen and pose on the red carpet every year at the Met Gala, with Anna Wintour as mistress of the infernal revels. Cher once went as a plucked chicken, and Katy Perry as a chandelier and later as a hamburger: both would have been instantly at home in Bosch’s madhouse.
Not all hells are so optional and ostentatious. The three strangers locked together for eternity in a bare room in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit expect to find instruments of torture among the furniture. Instead their punishment is simply having to coexist: yes, “hell is other people”, which means more than a complaint about noisy neighbours.
Sartre’s play was written in 1944, and its sour existentialist aphorism was prophetic. Within a year, evidence emerged of hells that had been constructed for people whose crime or sin was to be “other” – religiously, racially or sexually alien. Concentration camps with their gas chambers and crematoria were cold infernos, exercises in gratuitous cruelty. In their epic installation Fucking Hell, Jake and Dinos Chapman survey this panorama of what they call “ultra violence”, with 30,000 charred skeletons in Nazi regalia doing their damndest to exterminate humanity in a rehearsal of the final battle to which Christian evangelists still look forward to with such vile zeal.
Manmade hells continue to proliferate. Think of Russia’s penal colonies and the courts where prisoners are sealed – for their own safety of course – in glass boxes; last week Alexei Navalny’s parents were allowed to travel to the prison where he was put on trial, but were only permitted to see him on a videolink which the judge disconnected. Closer to home there are the barbed-wire cages on the Mexican border in which the children of refugees were penned during the Trump administration, or the unseaworthy vessels crammed like sardine cans with economic migrants, who pay smugglers a small fortune for the privilege of drowning.
God died long ago, but the hell that his propagandists imagined has outlived him and is currently run as an official facility or a profitable private enterprise. Hell is not other people but what we do to them; it is the malevolent world in which we all live.
