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HELL. 805
Warnung 547 and Wernher v. Niederrh. 40, 10; die pechwelle,
Anegenge 28, 19. It is a fancy widely scattered over Europe;
the Mod. Greeks still say iricrcra, for hell, as in a proverb of Alex.
Negri : e^eu nria-crav /cal irapdSeia-ov, putting
by side. This pitchy
hell and heaven side
hell the Greeks seem to have borrowed
from the Slavs, the 0. SI. peMo meant both pitch and hell (Dobr.
instit. 294), so the Boh. peklo, hell, Pol. piehlo, Serv. pakao,
Sloven, pekel, some masc., some neuter; Lith. pekla (fern.), 0.
Pruss. picJmllis .(pickullieTL in the Catechism p. 10 is Ace.), the
devil himself is in Lith. pyculas, 0. Pruss. pickuls, conf. Rausch
p. 484. The Hungarians took their pokol, hell, from the Slavic,
as our ancestors did gaiainna and (
infern from Greek and
Latin. And the smela, hell, of the Liineburg Wends seems
allied to the Boh. smola, smula, resin or pitch. With the heat
of boiling pitch was also combined an intolerable stench; E-eineke
5918 : it stank dar alse dat helsche pek Conf. generally En.
2845. 3130 (see Suppl.).
Since the conversion to Christianity therefore, there has clung
to the notion of hell the additional one of punishment and pain :
kvollheimr, mundus supplicii, in Solarl. 53 (Sasm. 127 a
) is unmis
takably the Christian idea. The OHG. hellawizi, OS. helliwiti,
Hel. 44, 17, AS. hellewite, expresses supplicium inferni, conf.
Graff 1, 1117 on wizi, MHG. wize, MsH. 2, 105 b
; upon
it are
modelled the Icel. helviti, Swed. helvete, Dan. helvede, which
mean simply our hell; from the Swedes the converted Finns
received their helwetti (orcus), the Lapps their helvete, and from
the Bavarians the Slovens in Carniola and Styria got their vize
(purgatorium), for the Church had distinguished
between two
fires, the one punitive, the other purgative, and hanging midway
betwixt hell and heaven. 1
But the Christians did not alter the position of hell, it still was
down in the depths of the earth, with the human world spread out
above it. It is therefore called abyssus (Ducange sub v.), and
forms the counterpart to heaven: f
a coelo usque in abyssum.
From abyssus, Span, abismo, Fr. abime, is to be explained the
MHG. aUs (Altd. bl. 1, 295; in abisses grunde, MsH. 3, 167),
later obis, nobis (en abis, en obis, in abyssum). OS. helligrund,
1 Of one in purgatory the Esthonians say: ta on kahha ilma waliliel, he is be-
ticeen two worlds.