That flew over my head so fast it parted my hair.
You lost me on that one Shuggy. I'm not a very intellectual person.
Plato, I'm not.
I wish I could understand it because it sounds very interesting.
Sorry 'bout that. I'll take it in more detail.
injest wondered how primitive people knew it was hot underneath the earth, giving rise to their myth of Hell. I didn't think they were well connected, since New Zealand's indigenous people, the Maori, are familiar with heat coming from the earth and don't have a myth of Hell. (Instead they have an earthquake god, called Ruaumoko, who is a baby suckling at the Earth Mother's breast. He had been taken underground (under her) when her children turned her over to stop her from being tormented by the sight of the Sky Father. She and he had been locked in a (sexual) embrace, but their children didn't like being trapped between them, so they had separated him from her.)
I wondered what the story is in Hawai`i, where molten lava is relatively common. I doubted that myths of Hell were closely connected with actual underground heat. (Hell derives from the Jewish Sheol, and I'm not even sure if that is a hot place.)
"While the magma/lava glows red when it comes out, it doesn't radiate any light anywhere when its in situ." I was thinking that we think of Hell as being an open space, lit by fires (like inside Mt Doom!), but under the earth is hot and dark.
Hell was traditionally thought to be full of lakes of burning sulphur - I think that could be because burning sulphur is sticky, so it gives you very nasy burns. Some skeptical scientist calculated that Heaven was hotter (seven times something or other - going by some biblical verse) than Hell, whose highest possible termperature is limited by the properties of sulphur."
Primitive people very much went by appearances. For example, if anything moved, they thought it must be alive. So when they saw that overhead was something that looked like a dome studded with stars, they decided that what it was. What was on the other side of the shell of the dome? Aha! It must be Heaven! And so they would conclude that Hell was in a diametrically opposite position, under the earth.