The Devil’s Atlas
Jay Vickers
An Explorer’s Guide to Heavens, Hells and Afterworlds
Edward Brooke-Hitching
Simon & Schuster 2021
Hb, 255pp, £25, ISBN 9781398503557
Following on from The Phantom Atlas and The Madman’s Library, Edward Brooke-Hitching takes us on a guided tour of the afterlife: Hell and Heaven, with a brief glance at Purgatory.
It’s full of delightful details. Hell is a town in Michigan; it’s also a village in Norway whence came a Miss Universe contestant calling herself “The beauty queen from Hell”. The 17th-century Tobias Swinden said that Hell is in the Sun; dark sun spots are “glimpses of the darkness in which the souls were imprisoned”; while more recently US televangelist Jack Van Impe said that Hell was located in black holes.
Hell is always more interesting than Heaven; portraying souls in torment is more inventive than a happy afterlife. So we have ancient Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, the Greek, Norse and Mesoamerican underworlds – and then we get on to Christian and Muslim visions of Hell. It’s good to see the 13th-century mural in the church at Chaldon, Surrey, with its terrifying scenes of souls being tormented by demons.
The text is fascinating; BrookeHitching has an eye for the quirky. But it’s the illustrations on almost every page that make this book a joy. The glee with which the Devil devours limbs in a painting from the c. 1775 Compendium of Demonology and Magic is enough to make the most hardened non-believer think again.
The section on Heaven follows the same trawl through the world’s faiths, but neither the artwork nor the text inspires as much enthusiasm; the author mentions that there is not only no sex in Heaven, but no laughter either. But what about Paradise on Earth? Did the Garden of Eden ever physically exist, and if so, where? The book finishes with Zion, “an attempt at creating a real utopia”, a small town north of Chicago founded in 1901. Today’s brutal theocracies in Afghanistan and Iran are nothing new; Zion’s owner and prophet John Alexander Dowie banned, among much else, gambling, dancing, football, theatres, circuses, alcohol “and, for some reason, tan-coloured shoes”. The police “carried a billy club in one holster and a Bible in another”. Nice...
★★★★