Meaning of harrowing of hell | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Christ's freeing from the underworld of those souls of the dead who were to go to Heaven.
2. A raid into the underworld by a heroic figure.

Equivalents

Examples

“Not the direct vision of the harrowings of hell as reported, for example, by many Christian visionaries, but accounts given by the departed souls themselves are more frequent and typical features of Jewish moralist writing.”

“Of the four harrowings of hell that are cornerstones of Western literature […], we can eliminate the oldest.”

“[…] the Hero Twins go on to defeat Xibalba and its ghastly denizens, a true Harrowing of Hell.”

“The source of the Harrowing of Hell tradition is, of course, the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, the oldest manuscripts of which date back to the fifth century, and that work was tremendously popular in England from the earliest days of Christianity there.”

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