UNDERWORLD. The term underworld refers to the subterranean region inhabited by the dead. It is often the place of punishment of the wicked, the unrighteous, the unredeemed, the unbelieving, or the lost. The concept of an underworld is an ingredient in most belief systems in the history of religions, but there is no definite evidence indicating that the idea was present in the earliest stages of human culture. In the oldest strata of Egyptian and pre-Vedic Indian cultures, however, there exists a rich store of archaeological material suggesting that the aristocratic segments of society, at least, believed in some kind of an afterlife. But even in these early records of postmortem existence, there does not seem to have been a distinction between heaven, the realm of the blessed, and hell, the realm of the damned.

Later, when the two realms came to be differentiated, each religion appealed to...