I saw you reply to a person still fearing hell as a ex-Christian, can you help me too in another question about afterlives? It’s something I obsess about for years. I’m very attached to my family especially my parents but I’m the only pagan so I keep wondering if is it possible to afterlives to be connected or people not be bound by faith? Of course I know nobody has the answer but is there any basis for it? Any clue you can remember? I know many mythologies have more than one world.

themodernsouthernpolytheist:

Hi, Anon! This is a great question and goes hand in hand with the ask you’re referring to. There’s no real lore, as best I know, about this in particular and it’s one of the things that I think about a lot, too. This answer is gonna be totally UPG, but that’s kinda what happens when there are holes, I guess. 

So, my opinion is that all (or most) afterlives are interconnected. Kinda like how I mentioned in the previous ask that the various names of the Otherworlds might be alternate names for the same place or might be various spheres within the Otherworld. Sometimes I also conceptualize it like a forest of Yggdrasils, if that makes sense, each culture’s cosmology contained in its own tree, but all part of the same ecosystem. In that way, it would be possible to travel from one to another. So when I think of my family, who are all Christian afaik, I think it would likely be like it’s been in this life: I live several hours away and have for all of my adult life, but I can hop in the car and go home. To some degree, I think our afterlife is what we make it—a point I didn’t really touch on in the last ask. Of course, this contradicts many Eastern teachings that view hell as another realm of rebirth where the soul has somethin to learn and I’d be lyin if I said that didn’t stick with me. 

In that vein, I think it’s possible that some people go to “hell,” but it’s because they believe they deserve it. I think one of the things I’ve had trouble lettin go of most from Christianity is the idea of hell in that there are some people I have trouble believing won’t face some sort of punishment. I don’t mean the average asshole, but people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Mussolini, etc. and the idea they get to enjoy the afterlife like everyone else sounds like some bullshit. Maybe they go to a hell, maybe it’s permanent, maybe it’s not. Maybe souls like that cease to exist or maybe they never had a soul and that’s how they were able to enact such evil. I don’t know and I don’t know exactly what I think about it, but these are things I muse about, too. 

But part of the issue for me, personally, is that I study religion professionally, so there tends to be a lot of bleed-over. And at the same time, it goes back to the fact that we Know™ so little about the Gaelic view of the afterlife. So really, these are all just musings of a religious scholar and religious person. I know that’s probably frustrating and I totally wish I had a more concrete answer, but until we discover the Emerald Isle Scrolls or invent time travel, scholastic musings is likely all we have. But ultimately, I think most afterlives are interconnected in some way because for me, as it seems for you, an afterlife without family would be a hell and I don’t think that’s what most of us are destined for.