Afterpants: Nether Regions Pt 11 (Barzakh)

So...a couple of things.

1. The next on wiki's list was the Greek Underworld (Hades) but I'm such a not-fan of Greek myth I chose to give it a pass.

2. After that was Hamistagan which was yet another entry with very little description

except that it is Zoroastrian and essentially similar to Limbo

However! The good news is that bottom of the page had a link to...Barzakh! So I clicked that one and remembered that we should have done Barzakh weeks ago!

Oh noze!

Well fortunately for us...there's internet and plenty of modern and antique writers have stuff to say about THAT place!

So anyway...we're doing Barzakh instead.

But Barzakh isn't all about coolness and comfort. Barzakh is the term in Islam for Purgatory.

It is, in no particular order, a place for souls to hang out before they are born, a place for spirits to go after they die, a place where spirits who were neither too good nor too evil to wait for the end of time AND an intermediate state between worlds.

(I won't hesitate to mention the etymology here in comparison to the Bardo of Buddhism

which definitely suggests that "bar" is the root word AND that the "b" in "bar" evolved from the "K" of "Kar" from Ancient Sumeria...but what do I know? I mean I've only been studying this stuff for 25 years...but hey...if all these different religions want to go on thinking only they have the right way and that their cosmologies are all unique...by all means, let them!)

Shia author Husain Dastghaib had this to say about Barzakh "This world of ours, along with its vast lands and skies, if compared with the realm of Barzakh, is like a tiny spot in an endlessly big forest."

In the Hadith (the 'further teachings' of Islam) Figh-us-Sunnah volume 4 it says "

that the abodes of the souls in barzakh vary considerably. Some of them are in the highest reaches of the heavens...some souls will be locked out at the gate of Paradise. Some souls are in the form of green birds who roam around freely in Paradise."

So, we know that Barzakh is enormous, contains all kinds of different people and is neither heaven nor hell. Kind of like long johns...one size fits all.

In Sufism...it has yet another meaning...they believe that Barzakh is also the place you go when your dream! That's certainly interesting! It is the bridge between this wolrd and the Spirit world.

There's really a lot to work with here. The different interpretations and purposes of Barzakh make it almost...but not quite...a satisfying ideal of the afterlife!

My issue, of course, is the dichotomy and the patriarchal/phallocentrism of it. As with most major religions, even when they try to make a statement of ideological neutrality, they fall short.

One more interesting (but dichotomous) thing about Barzakh is that, if you go there, while you are waiting for the end of time, you receive a temporary spirit body which is (of course) a "bright body" or a "dark body"...apparently this is just meant to give you a heads up as to where you'll be spending eternity.

This spirit body doesn't age or get sick, but it can feel pain. This pain is caused by a fire

(that follows you around??) which is the spiritual manifestation of your minor sins.

That is quite a story!!

Anyway, taking all this into consideration, we'll give Barzakh a pass for it's dichotomousness and award it 4 Hellbriefs out of 5!