The Hell Realm appears in the depth-psychology corpus as a site of remarkable theoretical convergence across Buddhist, Jungian, mythological, and psychodynamic traditions. Its most sustained psychological elaboration emerges through the Buddhist six-realm cosmology, where—as Epstein demonstrates most rigorously—the Hell Realm is read not as literal eschatology but as a precise phenomenology of aggressive and anxiety states: the being tormented by forces it cannot recognize as projections of its own rage. This psychodynamic translation, with its echo of Freudian projection and Kleinian paranoid-schizoid dynamics, gives the Hell Realm a clinical utility far exceeding its doctrinal origins. Evans-Wentz and the Tibetan Buddhist sources treat it as a karmic destination whose smoke-colored light paradoxically attracts the hatred-dominated consciousness at the moment of death, inverting the intuitive assumption that one flees suffering. Zimmer's Yogācāra reading further radicalizes the concept: hell is 'nothing but a notion of hell, inflicted on us by our peculiar style of imagination.' A complementary strand in Campbell and Huxley approaches the Hell Realm as a phenomenological counterpart to Heaven—structurally necessary, phenomenologically real when inhabited, and releasing the soul only through recognition. The Taoist I Ching offers the most compressed formulation: hell and heaven are interior states generated moment-to-moment by the quality of mind.
In the library
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the Hell Realms are vivid descriptions of aggressive and anxiety states; beings are seen burning with rage or tortured by anxiety. They do not recognize their torturers as products of their own minds
Epstein provides the definitive psychodynamic reading of the Hell Realm as a phenomenology of unrecognized projection, where rage and anxiety are experienced as externally inflicted tortures rather than self-generated states.
Epstein, Mark, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995thesis
Freud and his followers insisted on exposing the animal nature of the passions; the Hell-ish nature of paranoid, aggressive, and anxiety states
Epstein maps Freudian and post-Freudian clinical categories onto the Buddhist six realms, positioning the Hell Realm as the psychological territory illuminated by psychoanalytic work on paranoia and aggression.
Epstein, Mark, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995thesis
Hell is nothing but a notion of hell, inflicted on us by our peculiar style of imagination. There are no infernal ministers... yet sinners, owing to their sins, fancy that they see the infernal ministers
Drawing on Vasubandhu's Yogācāra epistemology, Zimmer argues that the Hell Realm is a subjectively conditioned mental projection, with no objective infernal architecture apart from the karmic imagination of the sufferer.
Zimmer, Heinrich, Philosophies of India, 1951thesis
Due to the power of hatred you will be frightened by the radiant white light and desire to flee, while you feel attracted by the dull, smoke-coloured light of the hells
Govinda transmits the Tibetan Bardo teaching that hatred as a karmic force paradoxically attracts the dying consciousness toward the hell realms precisely by making the wisdom-light intolerable.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis
The realms of animals, ghosts, and hell beings are regarded as places of great suffering, whereas the godly realms are abodes of great bliss.
Evans-Wentz situates the Hell Realm within the Tibetan cosmological framework of samsāra, where karma as moral cause-and-effect drives rebirth into states of intensified suffering.
Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
One moment of evil in the mind, and the human mentality acts; this is hell. Hell and heaven do exist in the world
The Taoist I Ching collapses the Hell Realm into a moment-by-moment interior event, making it a function of the quality of mental activity rather than a post-mortem destination.
Thomas Cleary, Liu Yiming, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
Heaven entails hell, and 'going to heaven' is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point
Huxley treats the Hell Realm as the structurally necessary counterpart of heavenly visionary experience, arguing that both remain within the realm of opposites and neither constitutes genuine liberation.
Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception, 1954supporting
every sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire, and is not plunged into a fire which has been previously kindled by someone else
Edinger, citing Origen, offers an early patristic proto-psychological reading in which hellfire is internally generated from the soul's own harmful desires, prefiguring the depth-psychological internalization of the Hell Realm.
Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985supporting
the point about Hell—as of Heaven—is this: when there, you are in your proper place, which, finally, is exactly where you want to be
Campbell proposes that the Hell Realm, like Heaven, is the soul's authentic location of desire, collapsing the distinction between punishment and belonging.
Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By, 1972supporting
Hell contains nine precincts, which are reached after crossing a bridge... The descent is dangerous, for demons block the bridge; the dto-mba's mission is precisely to 'open the road.'
Eliade documents the shamanic parallel to the Buddhist Hell Realm as a structured infernal geography requiring guided navigation, establishing the cross-cultural depth of the descent motif.
Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
You can see the hell-tortures: people being chopped to pieces, others being dragged to a freezing hell, some who are boiling.
Campbell describes the iconographic Hell Realm of Tibetan cosmology as visualized in tanka imagery, emphasizing the weighing of deeds and assignment of souls to differentiated infernal states.
Campbell, Joseph, Transformations of Myth Through Time, 1990supporting
Language too undergoes a descent into hell and the realm of the dead, which divests one of speech even as it renews the capacity for utterance.
The Liber Novus commentary treats the Hell Realm as the necessary initiatory terrain through which language, psyche, and self must pass in order to be renewed, linking depth-psychological descent to creative regeneration.
Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner... it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever
Campbell quotes Joyce's Father Arnall sermon to represent the Christian Hell Realm as theological apparatus of permanent punitive torment, the literary expression of what Edinger analyzes as projected psychological fire.
Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
there are no visions of gods or of demons, of heavens or of hells, other than those born of the hallucinatory karmic thought-forms constituting his personality
Evans-Wentz's doctrinal gloss on the Bardo Thödol presents hell realms as hallucinatory projections of karmic thought-forms, aligning the Tibetan teaching with a broadly constructivist psychology.
Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927supporting
the six realms of the samsāric world... the endless cycle of rebirths takes place... conditioned by the illusion of separate selfhood, which craves for all that serves to satisfy
Govinda provides the broader cosmological context of the wheel of life within which the Hell Realm functions as one of six existence-modes driven by greed, hatred, and delusion.
Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960aside
There are also seven nether regions or lower realms below the earth, as well as seven hells where
Bryant notes the Purāṇic Hindu cosmography of seven hell-realms as context for the yogic samyama practice on the sun, providing comparative cosmological background to the Buddhist Hell Realm concept.
Bryant, Edwin F., The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009aside