Heaven and Hell -- fly up, dig down

[S'mon]

Eskimo Hell is in the sky, as I recall.

Edit: Also qv "Ghost Riders in the Sky". And souls can be welcomed into the bosom of the Earth mother. But Heaven = Up Hell = Down is the Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and various native European approach.

 

[Lidgar]

Adding to what Umbran said, both concepts (heaven/hell) also involve lots of imagery. Viewing the heavens at night was akin to watching TV, albeit in a much more creative sense - people would see patterns in the sky and landscape and associate those with ancestors or spirits. Conversely, the dead were typically either buried or burned, equating to hellish conditions (underground and/or hot).

And yes, I think both Angband and Diablo are great examples of dig deep enough, you'll get to hell. Also check out Lord Dunsany's work for excellent proto-fantasy imagery of heaven and hell.

 

[SnowleopardVK]

My homebrewed setting has a giant tower that's actually a magic item a god once used in battle with a powerful devil. He basically beat the devil and then rammed the tower into the ground straight through to the setting's equivalent of hell. The tower staked right through the demon and has been pinning him there (alive) and stopping him from coming to the surface for centuries.

The only way into the tower in entrances on the 50th level, if PC's fly up there and then decend all the way to the 1st level, they're technically in hell. The lowest levels of the tower are very demonic and warped to indicate it.

No similar route to heaven has appeared yet in the setting, but there is a legend that at the highest point of land in the world a god once dropped his sword and couldn't find it. It's supposedly still there today, but the setting's religious experts theorize that any mortal who actually managed to get a good look at it would be overwhelmed by its power and would be retroactively erased from existence (unless they were powerful enough themselves to fight gods, i.e. a decent way into epic levels).

 

[wrecan]

Heaven, up; Hell, down, originates with the Sumerians. The sky was where the gods dwelled, probably because the smoke from the burnt offerings would proceed skyward.

Hell was down because you buried your dead and that's where the dead spirits would go to. The lady of Hell was Ereshkigal, or the "Chief Lady of the Great Earth". Hell was called "Kur", which was naother name for mountains.

Hell was also populated by demons because when Ea vanquished the demons, he had to tick them somewhere, and no place was as impenetrable as the afterlife. Sumerian Hell wasn't a place of torment though. It more closely resembled Greek Hades, where the spirits lived as mere shades. (More accurately, Hades resembled the Sumerian Kur.)

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Along the same vein, I've used the Greco-Roman gods and the planets named after them.

Rather than planes, they lived on each planet, with Earth being the realm of mortals.



So to "go to heaven" your soul literally did leave the earth and travelled through the sky and beyond.

 

[SkidAce]

In my campaign, Ancient dragons can fly high enough to breach the barrier around the world and reach the Astral (heaven).

Haven't done anything with down yet, although digging into the elemental chaos is interesting.

 

[Nymrohd]

Dragons routinely fly across the different world in my campaign setting. I have the feywild and the shadowfell as different planets not that far from the main world and dragons often fly between the main world and the feywild.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In my campaign world that draws from monotheistic imagery, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory are indeed physical places connected to the Earth that one can travel to (the model is largely taken from Paradise Lost, with The Divine Comedy making up the middle ground).

Heck, all Dante had to do to get into hell was to get lost in a forest, and BAM, there was Hell.

The concept of heaven being up and hell being down is tied to a LOT of things, but one of those things is volcanic activity (fire, brimstone, lava, poison gas, all that) and weather and celestial activity (rains, fertility, the sun, moon, and stars moving according to fixed patterns, etc.). If you're an agricultural society, especially around the active tectonics in the Mediterranean, you know well that bad stuff comes from deep underground, chaotically, and good stuff comes from the sky, lawfully.

 

[Jhaelen]

First: When and where did the concept that Heaven is up and Hell is down come from?

Has anyone used this concept in D&D? Has there been a dungeon that was so deep that it had levels literally in Hell? Has anyone flown so high that they literally entered Heaven?

Maybe not in D&D but Runequest's Glorantha setting works like that:
The world is basically flat but infinite; traveling far enough in any direction (including up and down) and you end up in the Hero Realms where the gods dwell.

There's no direct equivalent to 'Heaven' and 'Hell', though. That's pretty much a Christian idea, I think. Most religions postulate the existence of several 'Hells', IIRC.