The Underworld as Presence | Foundations

The English word "hell" has been used to translate several different words. Each of them names a different place, in a different century, held by a…

Six words that are not synonyms

The English word "hell" has been used to translate several different words. Each of them names a different place, in a different century, held by a different people. They are listed here before any argument, because the argument depends on not merging them.
• Sheol (Hebrew, she'ol). In the Hebrew Bible, from the early first millennium BCE onward, it is the place beneath the earth where all the dead go: righteous and wicked, Israelite and foreigner. It is a place of weakness and silence. In most of its biblical uses it is not a place of punishment. Sheol is not Hell.
• Hades (Greek, Haidēs). In the Homeric poems, composed in the eighth or seventh century BCE in the Greek-speaking Aegean, Hades is first a god and then, by extension, his house: the dwelling of the dead "ghosts." The Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible later used hadēs for Sheol, and that is how the two words became confused. Hades is not Sheol. The two traditions had different gods, different rites, and different ideas of what survives.
• Duat (Egyptian, dwꜣt). In Egyptian funerary literature, from the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom through the New Kingdom and later, it is the region the sun crosses at night and through which the dead pass toward judgment and renewal. The Duat is not Hades. It is mapped, hour by hour, in texts no Greek poet knew.
• Hel (Old Norse). In Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (Iceland, c. 1220–1230), Hel is both a realm and its ruler, a daughter of Loki whom Odin gives authority over those who die of sickness or old age (Gylfaginning 34). Snorri was a Christian writing about pre-Christian myth. Hel is not a Christian hell, although the English word descends from the same Germanic root.
• Gehenna (Greek geenna, from Hebrew gê hinnom, the valley of Hinnom). Originally a real valley outside Jerusalem, condemned by Jeremiah as a place of child sacrifice. In later Jewish texts and in the Gospels it becomes the name of a place of fiery punishment. Gehenna is the nearest ancestor of "hell" in the punitive sense, and it is not Sheol.
• Xibalba (K'iche' Maya). In the Popol Vuh, a K'iche' text written down in the Latin alphabet in highland Guatemala in the 1550s, Xibalba is the realm of the lords of death, a place with rulers, houses of trial, and a ballcourt. Xibalba is not a mood. It is a named place in a particular book with a particular history.

If a figure cannot be given a source, it does not appear below.

From event to presence

In April 2026 this archive published The Face Given to the End. Its thesis is worth keeping. A culture can stop speaking of death only as something that happens and begin to treat it as something that is there: present, organized, waiting, governing. The essay put it this way: "when a culture stops speaking about death as an event and begins to treat it as a presence." Death given a face, it argued, "becomes something that can be approached."

That essay made its case through a tour of images it did not name: a jackal-headed figure in the Nile Valley, a South Asian goddess hung with bone, a Mesoamerican realm of trials, a crowned skeleton with a scythe or a globe. It gave no texts, no dates, and no sources. This essay keeps the thesis and puts it on a source footing. It reads five named traditions, one text or object each, and then asks what, if anything, can be carried into this archive.

Stated plainly, the thesis has two parts. The first is historical. Many cultures have given the dead a place, a ruler, and rules. The second is a correspondence, and it is labelled as one. What has ended can remain present in a life and organize it, and these places of the dead offer a language for that experience. The second part is not what the ancient texts were about. It is what a modern reader may learn by reading them carefully. The essay does not assume there is one "underworld archetype" behind all of them. The figures differ too sharply for that, and the differences are the point.

Sheol: the weak dead and the pit

The Hebrew Bible's place of the dead is Sheol. The Jewish Encyclopedia article on the word (Emil G. Hirsch, 1906) notes that it sits in a cluster of near-synonyms: bor (pit), shaḥat (pit or destruction), abaddon (destruction). Its etymology is uncertain. Its location is below: one "goes down" to it.

The first thing to notice is that everyone goes there. When Jacob is told that Joseph is dead, "he refused to be comforted, and said, 'No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son, mourning'" (Genesis 37:35, NRSV). Jacob does not think his son is being punished. He expects to join him in the common place of the dead, and he expects to arrive there grieving.

The second thing is that the dead there are weak and cut off. Psalm 88, the darkest psalm in the collection, speaks from the edge of it:
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. (Psalm 88:3–5)

Then come the psalmist's questions: "Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the shades rise up to praise you? … Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?" (88:10–12). The dead are "shades," rephaim. Sheol is "the land of forgetfulness." Job states its finality: "As the cloud fades and vanishes, so those who go down to Sheol do not come up; they return no more to their houses, nor do their places know them any more" (Job 7:9–10). Ecclesiastes draws the practical conclusion: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going" (Ecclesiastes 9:10).

What do the dead do in Sheol? Very little. They do not praise. They do not work. They do not know. In a taunt against a fallen king, Isaiah imagines the shades rising from their thrones only to say, "You too have become as weak as we are! You have become like us!" (Isaiah 14:10). What do they not do? They do not undergo moral sorting. In these passages Sheol is not a courtroom with separate rooms for the righteous and the wicked. Nor is it simply beyond God's reach. Another psalm says, "If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there" (Psalm 139:8). But Psalm 88 can only ask whether God's love is declared there, and it expects the answer no.

One episode shows that the dead can be called up, and at what cost. Saul, abandoned by every lawful oracle, has a medium at Endor bring up the dead prophet Samuel. Samuel's first words are a complaint: "Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?" (1 Samuel 28:15). Israel's law forbids this outright. Among the practices Deuteronomy bans is that of anyone "who consults ghosts or spirits, or who seeks oracles from the dead" (Deuteronomy 18:11). The story does not end well for Saul. The dead in Sheol can still be present, but bringing them back is a trespass.

Gehenna has a separate history and should be kept separate. Jeremiah condemns those who "go on building the high place of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire" (Jeremiah 7:31). This is a real valley associated with a real crime. Centuries later, after the Book of Daniel, written in the second century BCE, introduced the expectation that "many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (Daniel 12:2), the name of the valley became a name for the place of that shame. In Mark's Gospel, Jesus warns of being "thrown into hell" (the Greek is geenna), "where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched" (Mark 9:47–48). Moral judgment after death came late and arrived beside Sheol. It did not grow out of it. Not every underworld is a moral afterlife, and the oldest stratum of the Hebrew Bible's is not one.

Odyssey 11: the dead who must drink to speak

The Greek witness is a single book read closely: Odyssey 11, the nekyia or "rite for calling up the dead." It is quoted here in Samuel Butler's prose translation (1900). Odysseus has been told he must consult the dead prophet Teiresias before he can find his way home.

Odysseus does not go down in this book. He sails to the edge of the world, digs a trench, pours offerings, and cuts the throats of two sheep, "and let the blood run into the trench, whereon the ghosts came trooping up from Erebus—brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil, maids who had been crossed in love, and brave men who had been killed in battle, with their armour still smirched with blood." He is afraid. He sits "with my sword drawn and would not let the poor feckless ghosts come near the blood till Teiresias should have answered my questions."

Teiresias explains the rule when Odysseus asks why his own mother, sitting near the blood, does not know him: "Any ghost that you let taste of the blood will talk with you like a reasonable being, but if you do not let them have any blood they will go away again." The dead are present, but they are not fully themselves. Blood, the living substance, briefly gives them back speech and memory.

The brief asks whether the dead in this text can be helped, questioned, or only met. The book gives all three answers, each with a limit.

They can be questioned, under a rule the living did not make. Teiresias prophesies only after he drinks.

They can only be met, not held. When Odysseus's mother, Anticleia, has drunk and recognized him, he tries three times to embrace her, "but each time she flitted from my embrace as it were a dream or phantom." She explains that this is not a trick of the gods: "all people are like this when they are dead. The sinews no longer hold the flesh and bones together … and the soul flits away as though it were a dream."

They can be helped, in one way. The first ghost Odysseus meets is his companion Elpenor, who fell from a roof and was left "unwaked and unburied." Elpenor asks for exactly one thing: "burn me with whatever armour I have, build a barrow for me on the sea shore, that may tell people in days to come what a poor unlucky fellow I was, and plant over my grave the oar I used to row with." Odysseus promises. Burial, a marker, and a story are what the living can give the dead.

Two other encounters show what the dead keep. Achilles, honoured as "a great prince among the dead," rejects the consolation: "I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead." Ajax, who killed himself after losing the contest for Achilles' armour to Odysseus, refuses to speak at all. Odysseus pleads, "will you not forget and forgive even in death, but must the judgement about that hateful armour still rankle with you?" Ajax "would not answer, but turned away to Erebus." Among the shades who cannot even recognize their own sons without blood, one grievance still holds its shape.

The book also describes Minos "sitting in judgement on the dead" and the endless labour of Sisyphus. Readers since antiquity have argued about whether parts of this later section belong to the original poem, and this essay does not settle that. It notes only that judgment and punishment appear in Odyssey 11 as particular cases, not as a general sorting of all the dead.

The metaphysics this sets out is precise. In the Homeric picture, the dead are real, present, and weakened. They speak only when the living lend them life. They cannot be embraced. Some of them can still refuse. The crossing is controlled by rite and by the living person's sword over the blood. The living person cannot control what the dead will say.

Hunefer's heart on the balance

The Egyptian witness is a single object: frame 3 of the Book of the Dead papyrus of the royal scribe Hunefer, British Museum EA 9901,3, from the Nineteenth Dynasty. Sety I is named in its inscriptions. "Book of the Dead" is a modern name for a corpus of spells, of which each owner's papyrus contained a selection, written and illustrated for that person. It was never a single book with fixed contents. The British Museum's catalogue notes that such papyri "are first found in the early New Kingdom c.1450 BC."

The museum's description of the vignette is exact enough to quote:
Below, the jackal-headed Anubis leads Hunefer towards the balance of judgement, where Anubis is depicted again, kneeling to adjust the plumb-weight on the balance. On the left scale-pan is Hunefer's heart, and on the right the feather hieroglyph which symbolises Maat. Below the balance crouches Ammit, the 'Devourer of the Damned' … To the right, Thoth, ibis-headed, holds a pen and scribal palette to record the outcome of the weighing. Horus then conducts Hunefer to a shrine in which Osiris sits enthroned.

The text written above the scene is from spell 30B, a spell concerned with the heart, the organ that might testify against its owner at the weighing.

In this vignette Anubis has a particular task, and it is not that of a generic "guide of souls." He leads the deceased to the scale and adjusts its plumb-weight. He makes sure the measurement is true. Thoth writes the result. Ammit waits for the heart that fails. Maat, the order of truth and right, is the counterweight. The judgment that follows is closely associated with spell 125, the "Hall of the Two Truths," in which the deceased declares before divine judges the wrongs they did not commit. Its long list of denials is often called the "negative confession." This essay does not quote spell 125 directly, because no specific translation was read in full for this piece. John H. Taylor's Journey through the Afterlife (British Museum, 2010) is the door for readers who want the spell itself.

It also matters who is examined, and how. The heart on the scale is Hunefer's own. It is not a scribe's report about him or a neighbour's testimony against him. Spell 30B, as it is usually summarized, asks the heart not to testify against its owner. The danger it names is self-accusation at the decisive moment. The tradition prepares for that danger with a written text. The person's history is weighed against a standard that is neither the person's mood nor the judges' whim. The procedure is formal, and that formality protects the person being judged.

What is present here is not Sheol's silence or Homer's thirsting shade. It is a procedure: a passage that is organized, measured, recorded, and survivable. The dead are not "lost." They are examined. The archive essay was right that in this tradition "death was not treated as chaos. It was regulated." It was wrong to leave the jackal unnamed, because the name carries the function. The figure in the Hunefer vignette is Anubis, and his job there is to keep the scale honest.

Inana goes down

The Mesopotamian witness is the Sumerian composition known in English as Inana's Descent to the Nether World. It is quoted from the translation of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL, University of Oxford, text 1.4.1). The surviving manuscripts are mostly from the Old Babylonian period, the early second millennium BCE. A shorter and different Akkadian poem, The Descent of Ishtar, belongs to a later stage of the tradition. Stephanie Dalley's Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford, 1989) translates it. The two should not be merged.

The poem opens with Inana's decision: "From the great heaven she set her mind on the great below." She "abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, and descended to the underworld." She abandons her temples one by one, city by city. The poem does not say directly why she goes. Its action makes the stake clear: Inana, goddess of a great sphere of power, enters the one domain that is not hers, the realm of her sister Ereshkigala.

At each of seven gates she is stripped of one emblem of her office: crown, beads, breastplate, measuring rod, garment. Each time she protests, "What is this?" and each time the answer comes: "Be satisfied, Inana, a divine power of the underworld has been fulfilled. Inana, you must not open your mouth against the rites of the underworld." Naked, she takes her sister's throne, and the judges of the underworld turn on her:
The Anuna, the seven judges, rendered their decision against her. They looked at her — it was the look of death. They spoke to her — it was the speech of anger. They shouted at her — it was the shout of heavy guilt. The afflicted woman was turned into a corpse. And the corpse was hung on a hook.

Her minister Ninshubur, following the instructions Inana left, laments for her and goes from god to god. Only Enki helps. He fashions two small beings who slip into the underworld "like flies," win Ereshkigala's favour, and revive the corpse with the plant and water of life. Even then, Inana cannot simply leave. The judges ask: "Who has ever ascended from the underworld, has ascended unscathed from the underworld? If Inana is to ascend from the underworld, let her provide a substitute for herself."

The rest of the poem is about the substitute. Demons follow Inana up. She refuses to give them those who mourned her. Then she finds her husband, the shepherd Dumuzid, "clothed in a magnificent garment and seated magnificently on a throne," not mourning. "She looked at him, it was the look of death," the same words the judges used of her. "Take him away." Dumuzid appeals to the sun god Utu for escape. Parts of what follows are broken in the manuscripts. In the end a compromise is decreed: "You for half the year and your sister for half the year." Dumuzid and his sister will alternate below.

The brief asks what the actual stake of the descent is. The text marks two stakes plainly. One is power: a goddess's attempt on a domain not her own, and that domain's refusal to recognize her offices. The other is substitution: the underworld does not release what it holds without an exchange. The alternating half-year is in the text. A seasonal or agricultural meaning is a modern scholarly inference, possible but not stated. The poem keeps Mesopotamian cosmology firmly in place. The underworld has its own queen, its own judges, and its own "rites" that cannot be argued with. Even the queen of heaven is a corpse on a hook there until an exchange is made.

Xibalba in the Popol Vuh

The archive essay described a Mesoamerican "terrain governed by its own laws, its own rulers, its own trials." A scholarly translation is available, so a Mesoamerican witness can enter here under its own name. Allen J. Christenson's translation and commentary of the Popol Vuh (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003; electronic edition, Mesoweb, 2007) is used throughout. Christenson dates the K'iche' text, written in the Latin alphabet by members of the K'iche' nobility, to between 1554 and 1558. It survives only in a copy made by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez around 1701–1704. It is a colonial-period book recording older K'iche' tradition. It is not a pre-Columbian codex, and it is not a guide to Mesoamerica as a whole.

Xibalba is ruled by two lords whose names are dates on the highland Maya calendar: One Death and Seven Death. When the brothers One Hunahpu and Seven Hunahpu play ball noisily "on the path leading to Xibalba," the lords take offence. "They have neither honor nor respect. Certainly they act arrogantly here over our heads." The lords of Xibalba have dominions, and those dominions are the ways people die. Flying Scab and Gathered Blood "sicken people in their blood." Pus Demon and Jaundice Demon swell and yellow them. Bone Staff and Skull Staff "skeletize people until they are truly bones and skulls."

"Xibalba is crowded with trials," the text says, and it names them. There is the House of Darkness, "where nothing but darkness exists within"; Shivering House; Jaguar House; Bat House; and Blade House. The first pair of brothers is tricked and killed. The second pair, the hero twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, passes the trials through cunning and defeats the lords. Their sentence on Xibalba is the turning point:
"Hearken all you of Xibalba; for never again will you or your posterity be great. Your offerings also will never again be great. They will henceforth be reduced to croton sap. … No longer will you be given the children of the light, those begotten in the light. … Only the sinner and the malevolent, the wretch and the molester who clearly have sinned, will be given to you."

The archive's paragraph needs two corrections. First, the trials in the Popol Vuh are faced by particular heroes in a narrative. The text does not present them as a route every dead person walks. Second, the story's outcome is the limitation of death's lords: their dominion is reduced and bound to rules. Xibalba is present and organized, and in this book the living defeat it and set the terms on which it may take. The archive did not name the realm, so this essay cannot be sure it meant Xibalba rather than another Mesoamerican realm of the dead, such as the Nahua Mictlan. Only the Popol Vuh's Xibalba enters here, because only it has a source on the desk.

How a punishment geography grew

Christian hell is one development among these, not the key that unlocks the others. Its history is short to state and has been told at length elsewhere.

Within the Bible, three Greek words lie behind English "hell." Hadēs translates Sheol and keeps much of its neutrality. Geenna names the place of fiery punishment, as in Mark 9. Tartaroō, "to cast into Tartarus," occurs once, at 2 Peter 2:4. The King James Version's habit of rendering Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna alike as "hell" did much to blur them for English readers. From the second century onward, early Christian apocalypses such as the Apocalypse of Peter describe tours in which punishments are matched to sins. Martha Himmelfarb's Tours of Hell (1983) traces this Jewish and Christian genre. Augustine's City of God, Book 21 (early fifth century), argued at length for the eternity of punishment. Dante's Inferno (early fourteenth century) gave the punitive geography its most famous architecture: nine circles, ordered by the gravity of the sin. Alan E. Bernstein's The Formation of Hell (1993) is a scholarly door into the earlier history.

The point of this section is difference, not a tour of torments. A courtroom with separate destinations is a late, specific, and morally motivated development. Read back into Sheol, it falsifies Psalm 88. Read into Hades, it overstates Odyssey 11. Read into the Duat, it turns a measured passage into a threat. Read into Xibalba, it misses that the Popol Vuh's heroes reduce death's lords. Hell is one answer to the question of what remains after an ending. It is not the meaning of the other answers.

The ended that still acts

What follows belongs to the correspondence stratum. It is a modern reading, offered for modern readers. None of the texts above is about grief in a psychological sense, and none of their authors intended what follows.

With that label in place, the texts offer a precise vocabulary for something many people know. What has ended does not thereby stop acting. A death, a divorce, a betrayal, a lost vocation, or a childhood that cannot be lived over can be finished as an event and remain present as a structure. It can shape speech, organize a household, and set the terms of new relationships. The texts give that presence different shapes, and the differences are useful.
• Sheol's shades are present as weakness and silence: "the land of forgetfulness." Some endings act this way, as a dimming, an absence of praise, a place where "there is no work or thought."
• Homer's dead are present but cannot speak until the living lend them blood. Some pasts are mute until we feed them attention, and then they speak with a borrowed vividness that can feel like the whole truth. Ajax shows the other case: a grievance that keeps its shape when everything else has faded.
• Hunefer's passage is present as measurement. Some endings ask for an honest accounting, and the danger lies in a false scale.
• Inana's underworld is present as a rule of exchange. Some endings do not release us until something is given up in their place, and the poem warns how easily a substitute is chosen in anger.
• The Popol Vuh's Xibalba is present as a power that can be limited. Its lords are not abolished. They are reduced and bound to rules.

The resemblance stops where the texts stop. None of these cultures thought of grief as an inner "underworld." The dead in these texts are real persons, not metaphors for memory. A reader who uses the comparison should keep the difference in view.

One research source is used here, and it is kept apart from the ancient material. In bereavement research, Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut's "dual process model" (Death Studies, 1999) describes healthy grieving as an oscillation. The bereaved move between "loss-oriented" coping, which faces the loss, and "restoration-oriented" coping, which attends to the changed life, new roles, and distraction and rest. Neither mode is meant to be permanent. This is a clinical research model with its own evidence and its own critics. It is not an ancient teaching, and the ancient texts do not confirm it. It is mentioned because it states in modern terms something the correspondence also suggests. Facing the ended matters. So does coming back. Odysseus speaks with his mother and then is told, "go back to the light of day as soon as you can."

Where the metaphor helps, and where it traps. An underworld image can help a grieving person name an experience: this ended, and it is still here. It traps when it turns into a story a person lives inside instead of a description they use. It traps when the "descent" becomes an identity, when the darkness is treated as a curriculum that must be completed, or when the image stands in for care. This essay says plainly what the ethics of this archive require. Depression, trauma, and suicidal pain are not an initiatory realm and are not a spiritual curriculum. They are conditions that ordinary help can address: a physician, a licensed therapist or grief counsellor, a trusted person who will stay. Grief that remains intense and disabling for a long time is now recognized clinically as prolonged grief disorder. Recognizing that is not a failure of spiritual courage. Anyone in danger should contact local emergency services. In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. No reading on this site replaces that help. As the site's own footer says, these essays "are not medical, legal, financial, psychiatric, employment, or emergency advice."

What a presence asks of the living

If an ending remains present, what does it ask of those who are still alive? The texts agree on four things, though they disagree about almost everything else.

Acknowledgment. In the Hebrew Bible, Jacob says out loud where he expects to go and how: "to my son, mourning." In the Sumerian poem, Ninshubur "made a lament" and "beat the drum" in the sanctuaries. The ending is named, not managed in silence.

Offering. Elpenor asks for burial, a barrow, and his oar planted on it. The offering is particular and modest: his own armour, his own oar. It is not a temple.

Story. Elpenor wants a marker that will "tell people in days to come what a poor unlucky fellow I was." Anticleia tells Odysseus to note what he has seen "that you may tell [it] to your wife hereafter." The Popol Vuh exists because a people wrote down what they could no longer see in the old book. Presence is kept truthful by being told.

Limit. Odysseus holds his sword over the blood. The Inana poem's gatekeepers say "you must not open your mouth against the rites of the underworld." The Popol Vuh's heroes bind Xibalba to rules. Sheol is a place the living do not enter, and the law forbids calling up its dead. In every case the living have a boundary. The dead are met, not moved in with.

Mystic Sage does not invent a ritual from these, and it does not invite anyone to "work with" Anubis, Ereshkigala, the lords of Xibalba, or any other figure named here. These belong to other people's religions, some of them living, and their rites are not raw material. What can be carried into this archive without theft is the structure: an ending that remains present has to be faced under a name, inside a limit, by the living who still have bodies. Death becomes thinkable when a culture gives the ended a place and a rule. Anything beyond that is either someone else's cult or a mood.

The brief asks a harder practical question: what would it mean to treat a finished event as still present without building a shrine to one's own injury? The texts suggest a test. A shrine keeps the ended at the centre of the house. It is visited, tended, and enlarged, and the living arrange their lives around it. A presence handled under a limit is acknowledged at its proper place, and then the living go home. Ajax is the warning. His grievance is so faithfully kept that he cannot hear the apology he was owed. Elpenor is the alternative. He asks for one marker and one story, and then he lets Odysseus go. The difference is not between remembering and forgetting. It is between remembering inside a limit and letting the memory set the limits.

The practice is ordinary on purpose. Name one ended event that still governs your speech or your household: something finished as an event and still active as a structure. Then choose one act of ordinary acknowledgment that does not make it beautiful. Have a conversation you have postponed. Make a restitution you owe. Or choose a day on which you stop pretending it is over, or stop pretending it is still happening. Do not build an altar to it. Elpenor asked for an oar on a grave, not a shrine to his fall. The living person then goes back, as Odysseus was told to, to the light of day.

Source transparency and further reading

Hebrew Bible. Genesis 37:35; Psalm 88:3–5, 10–12; Psalm 139:8; Job 7:9–10; Ecclesiastes 9:10; Isaiah 14:9–10; 1 Samuel 28:15; Jeremiah 7:31; Daniel 12:2; Mark 9:47–48 (NRSV). Dictionary: Emil G. Hirsch, "Sheol," The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906). For current scholarship, Philip S. Johnston, Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament (InterVarsity/Apollos, 2002).

Greek. Homer, Odyssey 11, trans. Samuel Butler (1900), Project Gutenberg.

Egyptian. Book of the Dead of Hunefer, British Museum EA 9901,3 (Nineteenth Dynasty), museum catalogue description; spell 30B. John H. Taylor, ed., Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (British Museum, 2010).

Mesopotamian. Inana's Descent to the Nether World, ETCSL 1.4.1 (University of Oxford). Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford, 1989), for the Akkadian Descent of Ishtar.

K'iche' Maya. Popol Vuh, trans. and commentary Allen J. Christenson (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003; Mesoweb electronic edition, 2007).

Norse (glossary only). Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, Gylfaginning 34.

Christian development. Martha Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell (1983); Alan E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell (1993); Augustine, City of God 21; Dante, Inferno. Named as doors, not quoted.

Grief research (correspondence stratum, quarantined). Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut, "The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement," Death Studies 23 (1999).

What the archive essay claimed that this essay could not verify. The Face Given to the End identified none of its figures. Two can now be named from their description and from sources. The jackal-headed figure of the Nile Valley is most plausibly Anubis, whose function in a specific papyrus is given above. The Mesoamerican realm of "trials" is consistent with the Popol Vuh's Xibalba, although the archive may have meant another realm. Two images are retired, not named. The bone-garlanded South Asian goddess fits more than one deity's iconography, and no South Asian text was read for this essay. The crowned skeleton with scythe or globe fits a modern devotion this essay did not research. The archive essay also claimed that personal devotion to death figures "corresponds with periods of social strain, economic uncertainty, and institutional failure," and that the animals around death figures (vultures, crows, wolves, reptiles) are "instructional." This essay found no source for either claim and does not repeat them. Its opening account of the "earliest human settlements" is likewise unsourced and is not carried forward.

Status of the synthesis. The claims that what has ended does not thereby stop acting, and that an ending must be faced "under a name, inside a limit," are Mystic Sage synthesis. They draw on the texts above as correspondence, not as those texts' meaning.