What do you picture Hell as being like?

And now I beheld afar off great masses of inky black smoke, which seemed to hang like a pall of gloom over the land to which we were approaching.

As we floated on and down, these great black clouds became tinged with lurid sulphurous-looking flames, as from myriads of gigantic volcanoes.

The air was so oppressive, we could scarcely breathe, while a sense of exhaustion, such as I had never experienced before, seemed to paralyse my every limb.

In his expedition into the enemy's country, Spirit Franchezzo remarks that the thick clouds of smoke and leaping tongues of flame in that awful lurid country were contrary to what he had pictured Hell as being like.

In his wanderings, Spirit Franchezzo had seen dark and dreary countries and unhappy spirits, but he had seen no flames—no fire of any sort.

Franchezzo had totally disbelieved in material flames in a palpable form and had deemed the fires of Hell to be merely a figure of speech to express a mental state.

Many have taught that it is so—

The torments of Hell are mental and subjective, not objective at all.

This great bank of smoke and flame―ten thousand Vesuviuses in one―surrounded the country, and was created by the spiritual emanations of the unhappy beings who dwelt within that fiery wall—

The coarse emanations of these degraded spirits possessed a more dense and solid appearance.

 

Anyone who seeks to enter or leave this mass of fire must pass through its wall.

Many weak-willed or timid souls who attempted to pass through were driven back by the force of these flames, which were propelled outwards by a current of strong will-force set in motion by the fierce and powerful beings who reigned there, and who, as they imagined, protected themselves from intrusions from the higher spheres.

However, to more spiritualised spirits, these flames and walls and rocks are no more impenetrable than the solid material of earthly doors and walls, and they can pass at will through them.

This wall of fire is, nonetheless, sufficiently solid to imprison the dark spirits who dwell in this country.

Spirit Franchezzo's companion, Faithful Friend, explained that the more ethereal a spirit is, the less it is bound by matter―the less power it can direct in moving matter without the aid of the physical material supplied by the aura of certain mediums.

This land of night extended through the whole of this vast and dreadful sphere.

In some parts, there were great tumbled jagged mountains of black rocks—

In others—

Long and dreary wastes of desert plains—

Yet others were mighty swamps of black oozing mud, full of the most noisome crawling creatures, slimy monsters, and huge bats.

Again, there were dense black forests of gigantic, repulsive-looking trees—almost human, in their power and tenacity, encircling and imprisoning those who ventured among them.

As Spirit Franchezzo's sight gradually adjusts to the darkness, enabling him to perceive the surrounding objects dimly, he sees before him a plain covered with dust and ashes, as though all the blighted hopes―the dead ashes of misused earthly lives―had been scattered there.

He arrives at a great archway of black stone hewn into large blocks rudely piled one on the other.

He sees an immense curtain—

On going nearer, sees to his horror that it is made from spirits' hair, with the eyes strung like beads on it—

Most horrible of all—

The eyes were alive and seemed to look at them imploringly—to follow their every movement, as though striving to read their intentions in coming there.

Spirit Franchezzo asks―

Are these eyes endowed with life?

Faithful Friend replies that the eyes are not endowed with soul life, but with astral life—

They would continue to live, while the souls to which they belonged continued in the spirit bodies from which those eyes had been torn.

He went on to explain that this was one of Hell's gates—

Its custodian had a fancy to decorate it in this way—wth the eyes of his victims.

In this place, there are none who have not themselves been guilty during their earthly lives of the most awful cruelties—

The most absolute defiance of the laws of mercy and justice.

In coming here, they are only intent on finding fresh means to gratify their lust for cruelty, and thus expose themselves to becoming, in their turn, the victims of beings more ferocious than themselves—

Stronger in willpower—

Cleverer in intellect.

This is the City of Cruelty—

Those who reign here do so by virtue of their very excess of that vice.

The wretched spirits to whom those eyes belonged, with their degraded, stunted soul germs still imprisoned in their mutilated bodies, wander through the desolation of this land or labour as helpless slaves, for their spiritual tyrants, deprived even of the limited power of sight possessed by others in this dreary land—between the eyes and their owners, there yet exists a connecting link of magnetism, which keeps them living and animated by a reflected life until the soul=germ casts off its present envelope and rises to a higher state of life.

While studying this horrible gateway, the curtain of living eyes drew aside and two strange dark beings―half-human and half-animal―came out.

The guardian of the gate—

A gigantic and horrible creature—misshapen―distorted in every limb―sprung out with a frightful laugh and horrible language on the two spirits who fled from him in abject terror.

Are these beings soulless? 

Were they ever on earth? 

Faithful Friend answered in the affirmative and explained that they were of a very low type of savages, scarcely above the wild beasts, and quite as cruel.

He added that, in all probability, their means of progression would come from being reincarnated in a slightly higher form of life, and that their short experience in hell would give them the sense that there was a retributive justice somewhere, although they would be apt to form their ideas of a God from their dim recollections of the powerful beings who reigned in this place.