Why did the ancients think the next world was up in the sky? Did they think people flew around up there? What held up this paradise? Or did they hypothesize that the dead lived up there (and the gods) on a metal sphere that was concentric with the earth (and thus was on solid “ground.”) And what about the Egyptians? Was their next world under ground or up in the sky or to the north in the sky? I’ve heard all three.
3) Did anybody ever really think that there were actually these certain gods that had falcon heads and so forth; that the world hatched from an egg; that a big monster or giant (Ymir for the Norse, Pan-ku for the Chinese) fell apart at the beginning of time and the parts of the world came from him? Or did people think these were metaphors or figurative language?
Probably has nothing to do with anything, but I did hear once time that that’s where smoke from a fire goes. Spirits must have been seen as something like smoke.
Not always the sky, but any place inaccessible to living humans would do nicely. A very deep hole in the ground was also popular with fertile crescent cultures, not to mention the Greeks and the Romans.
The sky is a reasonable place because it’s the abode of “divine” phenomena like the sun, moon, planets, and stars.
Well, there’s a very old idea that the sun, moon, and planets were all mounted on concentric glass spheres. The closest sphere to the earth contained the moon. In medieval theology, everything below the moon was changing and imperfect. Everything above the moon was eternal and perfect. So it’s not too great a leap to imagine that the ground in heaven would be the outermost sphere, but I don’t know if that was ever church doctrine.
I don’t know about that one. That would probably depend on which pharaoh you asked, as they had a range of different ideas concerning their own divinity.
Both. Aztecs believed that Quetzalcoatl could appear as a feathered serpent. OTOH, I believe the appearence of most eastern deities is explicitly symbolic. I don’t know about whether the Egyptians really thought Anubis had the head of a jackal, but I’m guessing that most of the time - especially earlier - they probably did.
I fear this thread may drift into Great Debates territory, so let’s make it clear that we are discussing the historical development of certain ideas, not whether or not we agree with those ideas.
Agreed. The only reason the sky seems odd to us is that these places are accessible.
Let’s begin with the premise that Heaven and Hell were understood to be places “above” us and “below” us.
The accessibility of the sky and planets, and of the depths below us as well, forces us moderns to reinterpret the locations of Heaven and Hell as being spiritually above and spiritually below (whatever that might mean). Those with a scientific (or science-fiction) bent can easily understand these as other dimensions.
This reinterpretation strikes us as very natural, partially because we’ve grown up with it, and partially because the things which we associate with Heaven and Hell (eternal anything, for example) are things which modern science has taught us to be inconsistent with this physical world.
But to those who grew up in a world where the skies and depths were truly inaccessible, and to whom magic was as real as science, it is totally reasonable that a spiritually high place would be in a physically high location, and a spiritually low place would be located in a physically low location. It is we moderns who have separated those concepts. We have excellent reasons for doing so, but we should not lose perspective: The OP suggests that the pre-moderns were odd for thinking that Heaven and Hell existed in the physical world, and my point is that the modern view (that they exist on some other plane) is no less odd.