The Greeks believed that when they died, they went to the Underworld. They believed that your destination in the Underworld was determined by who you were as a human being - when you were alive.
Hades ruled the Underworld.
Of course, there were also death entities down in the Underworld; there was a giant, three-headed dog, Cerberus, and Hades had captured Persephone, who came to be the goddess of spring, to his subterranean kingdom to live with him during the winter. There were furries that caused harm to people, but for the most part, the Underworld didn’t seem all that bad.
Now Hell was bad. It was very bad.
I came to wish that the Greeks were right when it came to their beliefs, and I wished that Christianity was what a lot of people believed down there on Earth, in their own little perfect world where they can make up what they want to believe in. I wished Christianity was wrong.
But it wasn’t.
See, Christianity had it’s good side.
It had its side with God and Jesus where you were to love everyone around you and to strive to make a difference; where even in the darkest of times, there was still that glimmer of hope, that small light in the darkness that prevented people from truly giving in, even when it all seemed futile.
But sadly, it also had its bad side.
And its bad side seemed to have so many other sides. It wasn’t as simple as being good; the bad side included everything you could possibly think of, but the most prevalent thing was pain. Torture. Relentless suffering.
And to me, when you compared Lucifer to Hades, well, honestly, if you think about it, Hades wasn’t a necessarily bad guy as movies tended to portray him. Yes, he was the God of the dead, but he was the dead’s keeper, their protector. He took care of people once they died. And he also caged the Titans down in the Underworld and kept them from escaping, because if the Titans did ever escape, the world would be in great danger. I always believed that Hades was greatly misunderstood, and that he was just a sober guy with a serious attitude when it came to life after death. But that didn’t necessarily make him an angry villain, like Disney showed in Hercules.
Lucifer, on the other hand, was pure, rotten evil. He had no characteristic of being good like Hades did. He was the purest form of evil one could ever find, and evil had many branches, as shown in the punishments in Hell.
And Lucifer was all of them, which made him even more worse than anything imaginable.
I had yet to meet Lucifer, but I hoped I would never meet him. I didn’t know what he looked like, I didn’t know what he sounded like, and I didn’t care to know.
Today, Harry took me around to visit several parts of Hell. I would much rather remain in his domain, even though he would only continue to torture me, than to see more of Hell, because I’ve come to learn that Hell is something I did not want to explore.
The first place he took me was apparently the second level of Hell, and it was where the lustful spent eternity. It was like a giant blizzard, and it was a good thing Harry had carried me on his back when we got here, because even with the collar around my neck, I wouldn’t have been able to stand, nonetheless walk.
