When I was a kid of ten or eleven years old, newly returned to New York after a few years living in Chicago, I started accompanying my mother to a church in Harlem, in a shallow, sunlit upper room just south of 125th Street. Every Sunday, service began with a procession. The Hammond organ would start up, and the ministers, carrying their Bibles, trailed by the pastor, would file in in a loose line, singing a song. It went:

This is the Lord’s church, and Jesus is Lord!

This is the church that’s been established on his Word.

This is the church that love is building; the gates of Hell shall not prevail!

This is the Lord’s church, and Jesus is Lord!

It was meant to be a happy song—you could tell by its confident insistence on Christ’s kingship, by the shuffling major key in which it was played, and by the smiles and falsetto ad-libs it elicited from the crowd. But, either there in the sanctuary or later, lying in bed, I sometimes fixated on the bit about the gates of Hell. My father had died recently, and I’d begun wondering where he might be. I’d been assured that he was in Heaven, but I could tell, even then, that he hadn’t been a saint. Sometimes I pictured him enveloped in light, dissolving into the never-ending worship around the throne of God. Other times, helped along by the accounts of my Jesuit schoolteachers, I imagined him waiting, otiose and slightly bored—restless, as he had often seemed to be in life—in the long, cosmic queue of Purgatory. Also possible, I had to concede, was the Bad Place, which, until then, I’d thought of mostly as the un-air-conditioned underside to Heaven.

Here, though, was a different idea. Hell, according to the logic of the song, wasn’t only a place beneath my feet for the lesser of the dead but a force ruling a large portion of the world around me, gathering troops and waging battle against the good. More immediately distressing than the prospect of going there was the idea that it could be headed in my direction, determined to overtake me even before my death. “Satan has desired to have you,” my new pastor sometimes preached, quoting Jesus’ words to the apostle Peter, “that he may sift you as wheat.” Had Hell already occupied me, before I’d even known about the war?

The further from childhood I get, the fewer people I meet who worry about—or even believe in—what Scott G. Bruce, the editor of a new and quite terrifying compilation, “The Penguin Book of Hell,” calls the “punitive afterlife.” But the Hell here on earth—the one that the preachers promised would lose in the end—hasn’t gone anywhere. You might even notice a slight uptick, these days, in its invocation. As a metaphor for global warming, hellfire is almost too on the nose. There are also the grim jokes about how, during our most recent and most wretched Presidential election, we all surely died and boarded the first elevator downstairs, where we are now in permanent residence. (Search Twitter for the phrase “We are literally in Hell” and let the scenarios wash over you.) It’s not only the liberals and the environmentally concerned who are prone to invoking Hell to convey the current state of things. When Donald Trump, during his downbeat Inaugural Address, conjured an “American carnage” that left “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” and “crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential,” what was he describing but a national apocalypse, a Hades in Chicago and at the border? Our ancestors developed their ideas of Hell by drawing on the pains and the deprivations that they knew on earth. Those imaginings shaped our understanding of life before death, too. They still do.

The afterlife is an old room in the house of the human imagination, and the ancients loved to offer the tour. Homer has Odysseus sail through the underworld in search of a way back home, to Ithaca. (As Bruce reminds us in one of his helpful introductory notes, the underworld, according to the cosmological geography of the Odyssey, is “not deep beneath the earth, but on a dark and distant shore.”) “The dead and gone came swarming up around me, each asking about the grief that touched him most,” Odysseus says. Some of the dead, such as Orion, “that huge hunter,” who keeps up his chase on the shadow world’s fields, undergo fates that seem like dim epilogues of their lives. Others suffer extravagantly. Sisyphus can’t get his boulder to keep to the high ground. Vultures peck at the rapist Tityus’ guts. Tantalus stands in a pool of water that flees when he stoops for a drink, and he takes shade under trees whose fruits shy away when he tries to grab a bite. An uncanny mirroring happens when Odysseus encounters Hercules, yesteryear’s great hero, who, in keeping with his half-divine nature, has been split in two after death: the ghost of his mortal side is stuck in the underworld, while “the man himself” lives in bliss on Mt. Olympus. Like an over-the-hill older brother recounting his athletic exploits, Hercules remembers his first turn through the pit. Comparing Odysseus’ deathly journey to his own famous labors, he asks, wearily, “You too?”

The Hades drawn by Homer, and, later, by Virgil, in the Aeneid, is not quite Hell as understood in the post-medieval Christian tradition, but it is one of its ancestors. While all of the dead go to Hades, there are tortures specially designed and individually designated for those who acted badly while alive. (Of course, as in everything Greek and Roman, there’s an unanswered question of agency: just who has done the sorting, and how do we know that this judge has been just?) The “Book of Hell” is determinedly Western and Christian in emphasis: Bruce regards Hades, together with Gehenna—where kings of Judah were said to sacrifice children by fire—and Sheol, the place of darkness awaiting all of us according to the Hebrew Bible, as the forerunners of Christianity’s fire and brimstone. He briefly acknowledges the older and vaguer pagan visions found in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia; Jahannam, Islam’s place of punishment, doesn’t appear in the book at all.

Within this chosen lineage, the meeting between Odysseus and Hercules coaxes a trope into view. From antiquity forward, our stories about Hell often feature some prematurely damned hero—Orpheus or Aeneas, the three Hebrew boys in the furnace or Jesus during his three days dead, the innocent prisoner or the untried detainee—passing through the state of hopelessness, then coming back, blinking, into the light. There’s something practical about this from a storytelling perspective: how better to draw readers or listeners into a godforsaken realm than through the eyes of someone just like them—lost, maybe, but not yet totally toast? (A recent application, and, possibly, a subversion, of this template is the sitcom “The Good Place,” which follows four very flawed individuals—archetypical stand-ins for lots of people you probably know—as they tour a false Heaven, and then the entire cosmos, in a widening rebellion against an overly stringent afterlife.) There is something philosophical in the pattern, too—the idea that the extremities of earthly experience inevitably draw us toward the higher themes of justice, balance, retribution, mercy, and punishment.