Origins of hell?

[The Grand Nudger]

Hades, in general, was quite a bleak place so wasn't a good place to be. However, Tartarus (the deepest realm in Hades in Greek Mythology) would have been the closest in terms of harshness to the mainstream Christian hell (though there was no eternal fire in Tartarus, if I remember correctly). This is where the infamous Sisyphus was sent to for punishment.

It's always been sort of astonishing to me that the Greeks imagined the afterlife -- for everybody -- as being so horrible. The scene where Odysseus does his katabasis is like a horror movie. 

If we assume that most of religion, especially life-after-death scenarios, is based on wishful thinking, it's a very strange thing.

Perhaps..so long as we come at it from a distinctly christian perspective.  When we realize that the greeks followed a life affirming rather than life denying religion, it becomes clearer why they imagined afterlives that way.  Because life was better.  In the afterlife, good deeds could be rewarded and bad deeds punished, making this life the determinitive one, not the next. There were exceptions to general bleakness with respect to this life, the important one, ofc, people very loved by some god or another might find a favor in the afterlife.  Paradise even, for heroes. This is how we often imagine Odysseus, failing to remember that he was being punished by the gods. We read him as a hero in a story about how the gods read him for filth.

The wish, in each case, is simply that life isn't over. To see our loved ones again, to feel that those who we failed to hold accountable (or get revenge against) would be dealt with, and the comforting idea that good people dealt shitty hands in life would someday be repaid. None of this is true, and the difference between it being a quaint superstition and a contemptable lie lies in who's telling it, and for what.