Transcripts:
Heaven, the vision of light, peace, and eternal reunion we know from Christianity. But what if I told you it didn't begin that way? The first afterles weren't paradises. They were shadowlands ruled by terrifying gods filled with dust, endless hunger, and silence. Long before clouds and angels, heaven wasn't a promise. It was a prison.
And across 4,000 years, from the deserts of Mesopotamia to the cathedrals of medieval Europe, its meaning would change beyond recognition. This is the forgotten story of heaven and the dark origins it came from. Welcome back, Darklings. The story of heaven begins 4,000 years ago. When the people of ancient Mesopotamia, the world's first great civilization, looked to the sky, they didn't see a paradise of fluffy clouds.
They saw a prison of stone. They imagined the heavens as a series of domes covering the flat earth. Each one made of a precious stone. The lowest dome made of jasper, glittered with stars. Above that, a dome of Sarielmoot stone housed the mighty gods known as the Aiji. And highest of all was a dome of Lulu Denonu stone, home to Anne, the great god of the sky.
The sun, moon, and Venus weren't just lights in the sky. They were gods themselves moving across the stone vault. But here's the unsettling part. These domes were not for us. Ordinary mortals had no place in heaven. It was the realm of the gods alone. For humans, the afterlife was not up in the stars, but down below the earth in a place called Kur, later known as Irkala.
It was a shadow world. All souls went there, kings and slaves, heroes and villains alike. Once you descended, your spirit lived on as a dim ghost eating clay in a world of dust. So the very first heaven was not a reward for the righteous. It was a stone vault above our heads. A home for the gods. Beautiful but unreachable.
While the dead slipped into darkness below. No matter how you lived, your fate was the same. But across the world, other cultures were asking the same question. Where do we go when we die? And their answers were just as strange and just as bleak. In ancient China, the soul descended into the yellow springs.
a shadowy underground realm. Death was seen as a continuation of life just beneath. The departed dwelled in this dim world parallel to our own, but remained dependent on the living. Families fed their ancestors with incense, food, and prayers because a neglected spirit could grow hungry, bitter, even dangerous to the living.
In this vision, remembrance was salvation. And it's why ancestor worship remains so deeply rooted in Chinese culture. A sort of heaven known as Tan did exist, but not as a paradise. It was a cosmic principle, the impersonal natural order that governed the universe. Only emperors or deified sages might symbolically join it, not as souls seeking comfort, but as beings absorbed into the very rhythm of existence itself.
In early Vadic India, the soul might ascend to Spaga loca, a heaven of golden light, music and pleasure. But this was no eternal reward. When good karma was spent, the soul would fall back to earth, born again in another body. The ultimate goal was not this gilded paradise, but mokshar, liberation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
So here, heaven was a temporary detour, not a destination. In Meso America, the Aztecs imagined death as a perilous voyage. The soul set out on a 4-year descent through Miklan, the land of the dead. It faced mountains that crashed together, rivers of blood and winds filled with knives. Only when the journey was complete could the spirit rest, not in paradise, but in stillness.
Only warriors, or those sacrificed to the gods, were spared the journey, reborn as hummingbirds alongside the sun. In the Norse world, the afterlife was divided. Brave warriors who died in battle were chosen by Valkyries to enter Valhalla, a golden hall where they feasted, fought, and drank until the end of days.
Everyone else drifted to hell, a cold, misty realm ruled by a corpse queen of the same name. There, the dead continued a quiet shadow of earthly life, eating, sleeping, and going about their days. It wasn't a place of punishment or reward, but more like a distant echo of the world they'd left behind. Among Aboriginal Australians, there was no heaven or hell, only a return.
The soul followed the song lines back to the dreaming. The eternal sacred time that shaped the world and still pulses through it. Ancestors became stars or were folded back into the land, not gone, but transformed. So all across the ancient world, the afterlife was not a reward. It was a shadow, a cycle, a silence.
But 3,500 years ago, in the desert sands of Egypt, something changed. For the first time, paradise could be earned. But it came at a price. To the ancient Egyptians, death wasn't an ending, but a journey through the duat, a perilous underworld of gates, guardians, and riddles. Every traveler had to give the correct spells and passwords to pass unharmed, and at the end waited the greatest trial of all, the weighing of the heart.
In the hall of Maart, each soul's heart was set upon the scales and weighed against the feather of truth. A heart heavy with sin tipped the balance and was immediately devoured by a monstrous creature called Amit, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus. This was the second death, total annihilation of the soul.
But if your heart was pure, light as the feather, you were declared ma a karu, true of voice, and granted entry to the field of reeds. The field of reeds was the very first paradise for the righteous. It wasn't clouds or harps. It was a perfected Egypt where the crops grew as tall as men, the trees hung heavy with fruit, where you could live forever in the prime of life, reunited with loved ones.
Their heaven looked exactly like home, only without hunger, pain, or decay. But there was a catch. To reach this paradise safely, you needed more than a pure heart. You needed knowledge. And knowledge in ancient Egypt came at a high cost. The collection of spells and instructions we now call the book of the dead was meant to guide the soul safely through the duat, naming every gatekeeper, every demon, every peril along the way.
But every copy had to be written by hand and carefully personalized with the owner's name. At a time when most Egyptians were illiterate, hiring a trained scribe to create such a work could cost months, even years of an average laborer's wages. In short, only the wealthy could afford a map to paradise. The rest were buried with amulets or short prayers instead, hoping the gods would take pity.
The ideal of the afterlife was open to all, but the path to get there was for most unreachable. Still, Egypt's vision changed everything. For the first time in history, morality mattered. What awaited you after death was no longer decided by how you died, but by how you'd lived. And in the east, another great shift was coming.
A civilization that placed heaven not just in the stars, but inside the soul. At first, the ancient Greek afterlife was every bit as bleak as Mesopotamia's. In Homer's Odyssey, the hero Adysius descends into Hades. Not a place of fire or punishment, but a joyless twilight where all souls drift as shadows. There he meets the ghost of Achilles who tells him, "I'd rather be a slave on earth than a king among the dead.
" It's a line that captures how the earliest Greeks saw death, not as peace or reward, but as the tragic loss of everything that made life worth living. Later myths would flesh out the Greek underworld with ferrymen, judges, and a three-headed hound guarding its gates. But at its heart, Hades remained a place of absence, not torment.
Yet even in those early tales, there were whispers of something better. The bravest heroes or those especially loved by the gods were said to go to Alyssium, a land of eternal spring, where the air was sweet and the fields always green. But around the 6th century BC, a new idea began to spread.
One that would completely reshape how the Greeks thought about life and death. In the secretive Orphic and Pythagorean traditions, the idea of an immortal soul took root. Every person was said to carry a divine essence trapped in the body as punishment. After death, the soul would be judged and reborn as a human, animal, or even a plant, depending on how they had lived.
There was no final realm for the dead in these beliefs. The punishment was the rebirth itself. Plato took these ideas further, teaching that those who lived with reason and harmony could rise at last to the realm of forms, the true eternal reality beyond this one. To live with virtue was to tune the soul like a musical instrument, and when perfectly in harmony, it could finally ascend to the highest reality, never to be born again.
In essence, only those who had cultivated wisdom and selfmastery could escape the cycle. These ideas arose at roughly the same time as Buddhism in India, which taught a strikingly similar truth. Both the Greek mystics and the followers of the Buddha believed that rebirth itself was the punishment and that only through knowledge and inner purity could the soul finally break free from the wheel of suffering.
But the idea that the soul is formless, eternal, and can rise would soon collide with Persian judgment and Hebrew prophecy. And in that collision, the heaven we know today would finally begin to form. Around 3,000 years ago in ancient Persia, a prophet named Zarathustra or Zoroastaster began to teach that the universe was locked in a cosmic battle between Ahora Mazda, god of light, truth, and wisdom, and Angra Mayu, spirit of deceit and destruction.
Life itself was their battleground, and every human thought, word, and deed tipped the scales toward good or evil. After death, the soul faced the Chinvat bridge. For the righteous, the bridge widened into a radiant path led by the Diana, a maiden made of one's own good deeds, into the house of song, a realm of sweet scent, brilliant light, and celestial music.
This paradise was placed beyond the stars in the uppermost realm of light ruled by Ahura Mazda himself. But for the wicked, the bridge narrowed to a razor's edge, and they fell screaming into the house of lies, a pit of smoke, stench, and torment. Not every soul was purely good or evil, though.
Those whose deeds balanced evenly found themselves in Hamistagen, a shadowy middle realm of waiting. Neither joyful nor painful, it held them in limbo until the final renewal of the world when evil would be destroyed and every soul made pure. If this all sounds familiar, a heaven of light, a hell of torment, and a middle place for the uncertain, that's because this is where the heaven we know truly begins.
It was in exile under Persian rule that the ancient Hebrews first began to adopt these strange new ideas of judgment, reward, punishment, and resurrection. And soon their vision of the afterlife would change forever. In early Hebrew texts, all souls went to Shol, a shadowland beneath the earth. There was no judgment, no reward.
Death was simply sleep. Kings, prophets, beggars, all shared the same fate. Morality had nothing to do with it. Death was the great equalizer. But everything changed after the Jewish people came under Persian rule in the 6th century BC and encountered the Zoroastrian vision of cosmic justice. The book of Daniel written during this period declares, "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
It was a dramatic shift. For the first time in Jewish thought, the afterlife included resurrection, judgment, and the promise of eternal reward or punishment. By the 2 century BC, Jewish thought was deeply divided on the afterlife. The Sadducees, a conservative priestly elite, clung to the old view that the soul perished with the body.
The Pharisees, however, taught that the soul endured beyond death and awaited divine justice. The righteous would rise again in the Olam Harbar, the world to come, a perfected earth under God's eternal rule. This hope was born from centuries of exile, oppression, and persecution. Heaven became a promise that suffering would not last forever and that goodness would not go unrewarded.
And it was into this world, torn between shol and salvation, that a new teacher would arrive. a man who promised that the kingdom of heaven was not only real but already at hand. According to the Bible, Jesus of Nazareth taught that the coming world under God's rule wasn't a distant dream. It was imminent, breaking into the present moment.
The Bible's final book, Revelation, describes that vision vividly. A transformed world, gates of pearl, streets of gold, God dwelling among humanity. No more death, no more sorrow. Entry into this heaven, Jesus taught, could not be bought by wealth, birth or sacrifice. It was opened by the heart through compassion, humility, and faith.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, he said, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. It was a radical inversion of power. Heaven once imagined for kings, heroes, and scholars, was now promised to the meek, the merciful, and the pure of heart. And that was dangerous. In this period, Judea was under brutal Roman occupation.
To many early Christians, heaven meant a coming reversal, the overthrow of oppressive systems, and the restoration of justice on earth. That's why both Roman and temple authorities found it so threatening. This message of heaven on earth directly challenged the legitimacy of earthly power.
It implied that God, not Caesar, was the true ruler of the world. So the heaven Jesus spoke of was far from the one we picture today. It was God's own realm. But rather than souls ascending to it after death, it was promised to one day come to us, descending upon and renewing the earth. Even then, the glimpses were given a vague.
A throne, a voice, a blinding light. But there was once a mysterious text that claimed to describe heaven in remarkable, unsettling detail. This lost work is known as the Book of Enoch, one of the most mysterious and influential texts ever written about heaven. It was among the most widely read religious works of the ancient world.
Once read alongside the scriptures that would later form the Bible, it tells of a time before the flood when Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, was taken up into the heavens and shown their secrets by angels. His human body was stripped away, and he was clothed in what is described as a garment of glory like the angels themselves.
Guided by shining beings, he rose through a vast layered cosmos described in different versions as either seven or 10 heavens, each with its own purpose and inhabitants. In the first heaven, Enoch saw the storehouses of snow, wind, and rain, tended by angels who command the weather. In the second, he found a realm of darkness, a prison where the fallen angels, the watchers, hung in chains, waiting for judgment.
The third heaven was a place of opposites. One side a garden of radiant light and the tree of life. The other a desolate abyss for the wicked. In the fourth, the sun passed through 12 great gates, marking the seasons and keeping the rhythm of the world. The fifth was the domain of the Gregori, the rebellious angels bound in sorrow for their defiance.
The sixth heaven was filled with archangels, phoenixes, and cherubim who observed all that happened upon the earth. In the seventh, choirs of angels sang unending praise to God, their manyeyed forms blazing with light. The eighth heaven, called Muzaloth, governed the movement of the stars and constellations.
The ninth, Cuchevim held the celestial homes of those constellations, the architecture of the night sky itself. And finally, the 10th heaven, Aravoth, the highest realm. Here, God sat upon a throne of living fire, surrounded by rivers of flame in a place of blinding, terrible glory. But no mortal could remain there.
As swiftly as he had risen, Enoch was sent back to Earth, forbidden to reveal all that he had seen. This vision of heaven is unlike anything found in the Bible. It is not a place of comfort or clouds, but of unimaginable power, radiant, alive, and terrifying in its majesty. In Enoch's vision, heaven and hell were not separate realms, but part of a single cosmic order of light and punishment.
In time, the book of Enoch was declared non-cononical and excluded from the Bible. Though attributed to Enoch, linguistic evidence shows it was written much later between roughly 300 and 100 BC. Still, its influence lingered. Its vast ordered heavens and hierarchies of angels would echo through centuries of art, theology, and imagination.
And it's there in the medieval mind that the heaven we know today was truly born. The early Christians had imagined a new earth, God's kingdom descending upon the world after the final resurrection. But as the centuries passed, that vision began to change. Influenced by Greek ideas of the immortal soul, death came to be seen not as sleep, but as scent.
Thinkers like Origin and later Augustinine merged Plato's vision of the immortal soul rising into the realm of forms with the Christian promise of resurrection. Suddenly, heaven was no longer only a promise for the end of days. The soul could ascend to God immediately after death. Heaven had become an interim home. An artist began to imagine what that heaven might truly look like.
And in doing so, they reshaped it. The book of Revelation had spoken of God's kingdom in symbols, trumpets, harps, radiant choirs. But medieval painters took those metaphors literally, transforming poetry into vision. Artists like Jotto and Fry Angelico filled chapels with golden halos, radiant skies, and winged angels.
Heaven, once a vague and spiritual concept, became something tangible, a physical realm of dazzling light and divine order we could picture. and even step into. In art, heaven now resembled a divine royal court, Christ enthroned like a medieval king, surrounded by choirs of angels and saints instead of nobles and courtiers.
Alongside this, perhaps echoing ideas first seen in the book of Enoch, grew the concept of angelic hierarchies, first outlined by the mysterious fifth century writer Pseudoius and later refined by scholars like Thomas Aquinas. Angels were arranged into nine ranks, each closer or farther from God, each with a sacred duty in the celestial order.
As the church grew in wealth and power, it came to mirror that heavenly structure, building its own hierarchy of popes, bishops, and priests on earth. But over time, the influence reversed. Heaven itself began to be imagined and painted in the image of the church. The idea of three realms, heaven, hell, and a purgatory in between, took hold.
It became a moral map of the universe, reward, punishment, and the long road of redemption between. In the 14th century, Dante's divine comedy crowned this transformation, mapping the afterlife into concentric spheres of sin and virtue, order, and ascent. From then on, heaven was seen and accepted as having an intricate architecture.
And that heavenly design began to shape our architecture, too. Gothic cathedrals with their soaring arches, stained glass, and echoing choirs were built to evoke heaven itself. And nowhere was that vision more fully realized than in Michelangelo's cyine chapel. His heaven wasn't gentle or sentimental.
It was majestic, muscular, and apocalyptic. Here, God and angels were not distant spirits, but living forms, physical, dynamic, and utterly real. It bridged the medieval sense of terrifying divine order with the Renaissance belief that beauty itself could be holy. Heaven rendered through the perfection of the human form. Most of the population were illiterate, and Bibles were rare.
For ordinary worshippers, these painted ceilings and frescoed walls made heaven feel close, reachable. For those who looked up from the dark stone floor, it wasn't just art. It was a promise. This is what awaits the faithful. But in the 16th century, that vision would fracture. The Reformation swept through Northern Europe.
England broke from Rome, and with it, the vision of heaven changed, too. Protestantism stripped away the complex architecture of the afterlife, removing purgatory and limbo, leaving only heaven and hell. It placed new emphasis on the final judgment and on each soul's direct relationship with God. While Catholic traditions still spoke of prayers for the dead and the hope that saints could plead on their behalf, Protestant faith centered on personal salvation through faith alone.
As religion softened, artists began painting a more sentimental vision of heaven, a place of comfort, reunion, and peace rather than awe and terror. And in the Victorian age, that tenderness deepened. Before the 1800s, children were often seen as miniature adults, but romantic and Victorian writers like Werdsworth and Dickens began to portray childhood as pure, innocent, and closer to the divine.
That ideal soon bled into religion. With child loss heartbreakingly common, heaven was reimagined as a gentler, more tender place safe enough to hold them. A realm where angels watched over lost children until the day their families could join them once more. Children's Bibles, funeral cards, and Victorian prints fixed the visual shortorthhand we still recognize today.
White robes, wings, harps, clouds, and halos. By the early 20th century, this fluffy cloud heaven had replaced the fiery cosmic heaven of earlier centuries in popular imagination, and it stuck, reinforced by Hollywood and cartoons. Across 4,000 years of belief, heaven has risen and fallen, changing shape, color, and meaning from a stone vault above the world to a paradise of clouds and choirs.
Each age has built its own version of eternity, reflecting not just what people hoped to find after death, but what they longed for in life. Order in chaos, light in darkness, justice when none could be found. And perhaps that's the truest story of heaven, that it has always been less about the sky above us and more about the world we find ourselves in below.
