On Life and Death

Hell vs the Underworld - A Reflection

Hell and the Underworld are not the same thing.

Various religious traditions have a concept of hell, but in the West the most prevalent version of this tends to come from Christianity. Through this lens, hell is a construct created within a cosmological system rooted in fear as a means of keeping people obedient and disciplined into a narrowed sense of living.

(“Without Jesus Christ You Will Burn In The Lake Of Fire” Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash)

And this makes sense because it is Christianity as a political tool that drove the construction of the West, via colonization and the utilization of the “Doctrine of Discovery” to justify its settler colonialist and imperialist agendas.

While the Vatican recently repudiated its doctrine, those agendas and actions are the foundations of what we now call the modern Western nation-state. NOTE: the Vatican did not take responsibility or apologize in their repudiation, which alleviates them from claims reparations and financial compensation.

The Law of Conservation reminds us that energy is neither created or destroyed, it just is until it is transmuted/converted into something else. When empires “fell” the modern nation-state emerged to take its place.

What does that have to do with hell though you may ask?

Well, one of the main tools AND weapons of colonization in all its forms was spiritual warfare. When I say that I do not mean a Harry Potter type showdown. What I mean is that the spiritual and religious practices of those colonized were the some of the first aspects of indigenous cultures subjugated.

Remember, the Doctrine of Discovery gave “permission” to do so, via God/Yahweh through the Catholic Church. Since the spirit of the human is not meant to be subjugated, one then has to suppress the HUMAN spirit in order to maintain power of that population through space and time.

THIS is spiritual warfare. (Note: I have a collection on my Patreon that goes much more into this concept and how it relates to current situations and abolition praxis).

And this is where “Hell” comes in as an ideological tool of domination over indigenous practices of all kinds through demonization and suppression, especially around ancestral veneration.

The baseline of many land based spiritual/religious practices is steeped in ancestral reverence and veneration. It is an important practice as it is a way cultures and societies remember - who they are, where they come from, and where they are trying to go as a people. It is the literal circle of life.

But the Christian hell says if you talk to anyone other than God (Yahweh) then you are talking with a “negative” entity. This is further reinforced by the practice of needing to go through a religious leader like a priest or pastor to learn about and “hear” God. So ones discernment is placed aside as you are taught to believe an external voice over your own. This is how people begin to fear themselves, because you begin to distrust your body and how you feel which gets you to distrust your own intuition.

Intuition is your natural “knowing”, usually invoked in the body and translated through the mind into words. This is also how our ancestors communicate with us.

This is a way to cut you off from your own source, your own power, and supplement that deep ancestral knowing with the “knowing” of the Church, which is a conduit of colonial thought via that Doctrine. And this knowing was VITAL for the plantation economies that underpinned and funded these colonial projects, because this helped in the justification of the commodification of the body for racial capitalist means.

It’s a process that has worked so well that over 500 years later populations who were brutalized by this doctrine hold tighter to it than those who originally brought it into these lands.

Whether folks realize it or not, the concept of hell has firmly rooted itself into ones sense of self, further cutting people off from a true understanding of Self. Because again how can you know yourself when you are afraid of where you come from? AND when you are told you are only worthy if you are constantly giving UP your labor/service to another?

How can you believe yourself when you are afraid of your own body? Of what your body is telling you? Of allowing your body ease and pleasure because you are afraid of not doing/being/giving enough?

Who told you that? And is it true?

The disconnection from the body in a production focused society keeps one disconnected from their sense of Self, removing them further from their own knowing in favor of privileging the knowing of the state. And that external knowing will always benefit what the state needs from you - your body via your labor - by any means.

This is how we learn to dehumanize ourselves and one another.

This is accomplished through the weaponization of our emotions via fear. Fear is a main mechanism AND emotion associated with hell’s landscapes that maintains control over the population who fall within that state.This is also why I say hell is a political ideological tool of subjugation that has a done good job of maintaining colonial understandings of the human and life within subjugated populations. This teaches people to then surveillance themselves AND one another, which is what Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci calls “hegemony”.

In other words, hell is a hegemonic construct deployed by the modern nation-state, founded upon a Christian white nationalism, that uses fear and a commodification of the body to keep people in a state of obedience and surveillance to structures and systems that constantly take from us.

But this concept of hell DIFFERS from the idea of the “underworld”.

The Underworld is where our dead live, where the ancestors are, and a place we too must venture to at least once in our life as we go through this journey called life.

It is the darkness we must face to find our inner light. And that is why it is demonized because we live in societies that need us to give up our light to others, institutions, and corporations.

The Underworld is the place then you must go to face yourself to meet your Self.

But if you did that, would you then embody the same life you have? Would you move the same? Would you…be the same?

In popular discourse this is also known as “shadow work”. While we can critique the commercialization of this practice (think that damn Tik Tok Shadow Journal), the fact that many Christians will then also say this practice is demonic speaks volumes.

See when you know and can face your SELF then you know who you are. When you are connected to where you come from, able to embed that ancestral knowledge into the present as a way to create futures that are LIFE focused and not production driven, then what you fear changes.

Your relationship to fear changes, which means the hold that the hell induced fear bestowed on you does not have as strong of a grip.

One of those fear based strongholds that loosens and shifts is what death truly is. Hell is used to get you to obey while alive, for if you do not then you are doomed to an eternal place of fire and brimst

(Fire Photo by Maxim Tajer on Unsplash)

What happens instead if we shift that perspective to an Underworld logic. When one dies they are given the opportunity to review their life and face who they were in human form. In doing so that soul is not then damned, but can elevate to be of service to those who are in human form trying to figure out what it means to be human.

There is still a choice as a soul can refuse to review and instead remain in-between worlds. I call this spiritual walking dead. (I will go into this further on another post).

This is what balance between the sacred and mundane means, a balancing of the scales of life and death so that we understand what life TRULY is by having a better relationship with what death ACTUALLY entails.

So when we are afraid to live, to truly explore and express ourselves in our bodies individually and collectively we then can fall into what I call a waking walking dead. This is where we go through the motions of life, preforming a script of what we are “suppose” to do based on the identity markers put upon us and how those markers are meant to show up within the society we are in.

Right now the ideological concept of “hell” has a strong hold on our sense and understanding of death, which is then impacting how we understand life and the living. This creates imbalanced concepts of who is human and what is humane.

As I mention above, there is more than one way to die, and there is more than one type of death. Which means there is more than one way to live…which do YOU choose?

I leave you with these final questions: Are you really living if you are afraid to live? Or is that just a walking death as you wait for your body, your vessel, to return back to the Earth?