Gates to Hell

Gateways to Hell are common features on the mythic landscape, mapped out in fiction and folklore.  It's telling that while there's only one way to get to Heaven, Hell appears to be well served by numerous access points easily accessible to the day hiker or sight-seer.  The countryside is pockmarked with them, whereas it's much harder to pin the location of the Pearly Gates to the map.

Rodin's Gate to Hell

This fascination with the underworld predates Christianity, of course, and much of the modern iconography of the Christian Hell is borrowed wholesale from older religions and myths.  However, the fact remains that humans have always had a deep interest in passages to terrible, otherworldly subterranean realms.  Famous ancient entrances to hell are commonly associated with unusual or spectacular geology, primarily of volcanic origin. Sicily's Mount Etna, for instance, or Mount Hekla on Iceland, both fiery conical stratovolcanoes noted for spectacular displays of pyrotechnics and telluric rumblings.  Similarly, the recently discovered and wonderfully named "Plutonium" of Hierapolis (in modern day Turkey) is closely associated with travertine deposits of an active hydrothermal system, as well as murderously toxic fumes.  This location, complete with temples and state-of-the-art (for the Roman world) tourist facilities was believed to be a conduit directly into Hades.  Animals were sacrificed by driving them into the caves, where they would be asphyxiated by poisonous vapors.  Apparently, they even sold birds to visitors, so pilgrims could chuck them into the caves as see the lethal results of this door to hell for themselves.  One is, of course, also reminded of the Delphic oracle, who was said to breathe subterranean fumes in order to achieve her prophetic visions.

Other Gates to Hell described by ancient traditions are less spectacularly visual than erupting volcanoes or fuming hydrothermal vents, though often equally geological in nature.  As a brief example, to the Romans, Lake Avernus (in the modern day Campania region of Southern Italy) was believed to be the Gate to Hell used by Aeneas, the mythic founder of the Latin people.  Interestingly, Lake Avernus is a crater lake, located in an apparently extinct volcanic cone, although ancient tradition claims that poisonous vapors emitted from the lake killed birds that tried to fly over it.  Today, of course, it is posses no hazard to anybody, though such may not always have been the case.  Active volcanism or the sudden release of built-up carbon dioxide due to lake overturning could be the source of these stories.  Volcanoes, lakes, caves, yawning fissures; all openings into the earth, yonic gates linking two worlds.

Aside from the common linkages of geological and geochemical processes, there is a relationship between these ancient sites of egress into the Underworld and mystical experiences.  Whether these experiences are the biological effects of exposure to vapors or come in the form of more subtle but no less important cultural and social factors, subterranean portals represent liminal spaces between the sunlit "real" world and a shadowy "other place" that is either physically or metaphorically hidden beneath the surface of everyday experience.  Often, this interaction with the otherworld is dangerous or potentially dangerous; toxic fumes, either evident or rumored, serving to remind us that knowledge can be destructive.

A famous medieval Hell's Gate can be found in County Donegal, Ireland, at St. Patrick's Purgatory.  Here, St. Patrick opened a gate to the underworld, using it as concrete proof of Hell's existence in order to convert the Irish to Christianity.  Again, we see how mystical revaluation becomes a major theme of the subterranean gateway, linking our dull and uncertain world to the technicolor marvels of supernormal realms normally hidden from view.  Too, St. Patrick's Purgatory, much like the Plutonium, is a pilgrimage/tourist site, commodifying these spaces of occult knowledge and reveltory gnosis to the masses.

Approaching more modern times, we see an interesting entanglement of Hell Gates with ideas about the Hollow Earth.  Setting aside paradisaical visions of the mundus subterranean, strange gateways into various underworlds were still being mapped out.  For instance, Iceland's Mount Hekla, discussed above, was still described as a gateway to hell in the 1600s, with tales of Eastertime gatherings of witches.  The divergence of stories and ideas about the subterranean world into distinct utopian and distopian threads is interesting, as it maintains the mystical aspects while changing their moral components.  These include the theosophical reimaging of Agartha as an interior "super-terrestrial" command-and-control center inhabited by benevolent Ascended Masters, and can be contrasted with the physically and morally stunted Deros, sadistic mole men with unearthly powers from the the Shaver Mystery mythos.   Detailed discussions of these and other Hollow Earth ideas, however, will have to wait for another article.

Sticking to Hell, we can find plenty of modern gateways in the landscape of urban legend.  These, while common, are noticeably different from previous incarnations of Infernal passages.  First, gone are the erupting volcanoes and smoking fumaroles from the lists, having been replaced almost uniformly by (most commonly) ruined or abandoned buildings and infrastructure or (more rarely) caves and pits.  This is an interesting development, situating these Gateways to Hell in concepts of wilderness, either reclaimed (abandoned landscapes) or "natural" (unexploited caves).  In this way, the mystical associations come to represent Nature, perhaps reflecting the fact that "nature" is now considered as much a part of "otherness" as the underworld.  

A second difference, though still related to the first, is found in the origins of these Hellholes.  Older gateways to hell were, though marvelous, still a part of the "natural" world.  This is partly ascribable to demonstrably real physical and geological phenomena, but must also represent the cultural and religious milieu in which these locales were constructed.  Far from having a secular/sacred dichotomy, the natural world instead represented a cosmic creation where the mundane and the magical intermingled freely as part of the natural order of things.  In such a world, of course there are physical loci for these cosmically important forces. However, in a secular world dominated by a materialist and rationalist worldview, physical access points to "otherplaces" simply become less likely.  More pragmatically, it becomes difficult to accept that a volcano is a door to Hell after hundreds of years of vulcanology and geology have reclaimed these features for the "real" world.

To exist in a world of magma chambers and degassing regimes, modern Gateways to Hell must be situated in modern "mystical" locales.  Almost uniformly, these modern places of mystery and power are found in institutional ruins, particularly in hospitals, asylums, schools, or prisons.  In some cases, the ruins are simply assumed to have been one of these, without any historical evidence; in particular, a perusal of Gateway lists suggests that there was a time when everybody and their brother ran an asylum.  Regardless of the history of a site, the important commonality between these modern Hellholes is their placement in abandoned landscapes of institutional complexes, mysterious places with unclear (or occult?) hierarchies of power and strange practices.  Other than the origin of the location, this is actually fairly similar to volcanic or geological features of the past.  All represent liminal sites dominated by cthonic mystery.

The "Seven Gates of Hell" in Hellam Township, PA is one of the more famous Gateways to Hell situated in the modern landscape, so famous in fact that it is addressed by the Hellam Township's website.  Briefly, the story goes that the director of a suitably rural insane asylum built a series of seven gates to control access to the institution.  Eventually, the asylum burned down, with many of the patients killed in the conflagration or in the immediate aftermath.  As the tale goes, walking through all seven of the gates will result in the stroller getting whisked away to Hell.  As the Hellam Township's website points out, there is much embellishment in this story, including the number of gates (one versus the fictive seven), the presence of an insane asylum (it was actually just a small hospital), and even the name of the road leading to the institution (a suitable romantic but sadly made-up "Toad Road").

However, it is interesting to note that, in this case, the Gateway to Hell in PA is a perfect little microcosm of the whole concept of Gateways to Hell.  A central, uncanny realm sequestered away from the rest of the world, access to which is controlled through mysterious gates, fire and wilderness symbols, and a single mad overseer that built the original gates.  A modern twist is added, however, in the form of a man-made hell, alluded to in the form of barbaric medical practices of the past century and the general "freakiness" of insane asylums as houses of radical transgression.

This man-made aspect is an important attribute of the modern Gateway to Hell, a feature largely absent from their ancient and medieval precursors.  A particularly telling example of this is the "Well to Hell Hoax", which made its rounds in the late 80s and the early days of the internet.  Here, the theme of human and scientific hubris is neatly interwoven with a hidden, supernatural realm below the Earth.  Briefly, Russian geologists were supposed to have drilled a nine mile deep hole into the Earth's crust, as which point they encountered a hollow space with anomalously high temperatures.  They then lowered a microphone down, recording sounds of screaming and torment (later proved to have been cribbed form a horror movie), the idea being that these scientists had literally transgressed into Hell.  Christian broadcast television, particularly TBN, used this story as a modern day St. Patrick's Purgatory, citing it as evidence of the literal existence of Hell and therefore a call to conversion and worship.

Interestingly, and this is pure speculation on my part, this story may have been influenced by the actual, historical occurrence of a natural gas fire at Derweze, Turkmenistan, from the 70s.  Here, a Russian gas drilling operation resulted in a collapse and exposure of an enormous, gaping hole.  Hoping to avoid a release of poisonous gaseous hydrocarbons, they decided to set it on fire, believing it would burn off in a matter of days.  The fire, of course, still burns to this day.

Derweze's Door to Hell, a natural gas fire in a collapsed well

Gateways to Hell are a part of the cultural landscape, though our relationship to them has changed over the years.  Initially they were components of cosmic architecture, accessible through spectacular natural wonders like volcanoes of caverns.  They played a role in linking the actual, physical presence of the gods or God to discrete landscape elements and, therefore, to everyday human existence.  Modern day Hellholes, largely a subset of urban legends and paranormal lore, reflect our changing sensibilities.  Rather than finding them in fire mountains or unplumbed caverns, infernal explorers have situated them in abandoned institutions or ruined architectures, man-made places that are being reclaimed by the natural world.  And, along with the trees and wildlife, story-tellers have brought supernatural elements of a subterranean otherworld, a heterotopia of skewed perspectives and alien morality, perhaps reflecting a return of the Judeo-Christian concept of Satan or Lucifer to his pagan roots as a Horned God of the Wilderness.  Like all myths, there real existence and power lies in exploring how humans view themselves in relation to their surroundings, and how they contextualize concepts of "otherworldlyness" on the landscapes they inhabit.