Ugh. Staying at work because it is TOO FRIGGIN' COLD outside to want to walk home and then walk back to my class in Harvard Square.

Why is it that hell is characterized as being hot? I for one wouldn't mind some fires burning under me right at the moment.

Of course I say that now...

Though technically speaking, hell is the absence of God. If God is hope, than the absence of hope would also imply the absence of God. Ergo the absence of hope is also hell. Looking out the dark window...hmm...

In the Buddhist tradition, if I am correct, hell is to fail to be reincarnated and subsequently wander the material plane as a Hungry Ghost, an entity who's infernal hungers and desires can never be satisfied.

Saturn is the lord of Melancholy, and also connected to desire. The greedy god who wants to swallow his children again after he has vomited them up. To reintegrate all the parts of the shattered self in a form, also, of unsatiable hunger. Thus the melancholic is tormented not necessarily by an excess of despair, but rather an excess of desire. The desire to reintegrate the fractured god, the absent God into a formless whole. The idea of God itself as a Hungry Ghost, so hungry it seeks to consume its own children.

The ascetic seeks to be like God: if we take God to be a Hungry Ghost, then said Ghost, the melancholic, is holy. A saint in hell longing to be reunited with the insatiable creature which has spit him out, the host of infinite, unquenchable desire. Thus we are all holy in our human scrabblings, our infinite despair and longing. Thus despair is the divine impetus, the sound of God; the immortal scream of the deity upon regurgitating its children and seeing that they are apart from it.

Cheery, huh?

Don't worry, we're all really just hairless apes who like to tell stories...