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| A journey today through ancient mystery |
“You will have to face your own
personal demons that guard each doorway,” my mysterious Egyptian guide said. “You must guess the
guardians’ names to identify them first so that they show themselves and then face
and conquer them, one by one.”
My interest and misgivings
grew.
“Or what?”
“You fail.”
“And?”
“Failure means you don’t
survive.”
“My life depends on it.”
“Exactly. It’s either you – or
your personal demon. Only one can survive.”
It was a startling thought.
Imagine if it were true and hell was a not a place of impersonal tormentors as
traditional Christianity painted it, I thought, but rather one where the demons
were those of your own making. Did the ancient Egyptians have a glimmer of this?
“Face my demons? I’ve got plenty
of those, but I wasn’t quite expecting a tour of hell,” I heard myself say on
the surface, while underneath I was thinking: ‘Am I dead already and don’t know it? Surely I would know if my
dream trip to my dream place of Egypt had suddenly turned from a dream into a
nightmare?
Hell had always been a
troubling idea to me. As a writer with a childhood love of Egypt and a later
leaning towards a faith, I had wrestled with hell as much as I’d wrestled with
faith. Hell was exactly that to a thinker. Hell. And I wasn’t alone in my feelings,
I learnt. Celebrated Cambridge
University Don C.S. Lewis, ‘England’s must reluctant convert’ and author of the
Narnia books had issues with hell and
had surrendered only reluctantly to biblical authority. “There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from
Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of
Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own words...”
There was no dodging it. The Apostles’ Creed, recited by millions in
church every Sunday, hammered the stake firmly into the sand: Christ ‘descended into hell’ and on the third day he
rose again.
But if there were a hell, could
it be anything like the Egyptian hell with its gateways and guardians?
