Quotes from Alice K. Turner

Snakes in the ancient world, because of their skin-shedding ability, often symbolized immortality or eternal youth.

One of the less savory notions of the early Church was that of the abominable fancy, the idea that part of the joy of the saved lay in contemplating the tortures of the damned.

No other religion ever raised Hell to such importance as Christianity, under which it became a fantastic underground kingdom of cruelty, surrounded by dense strata of legend, myth, religious creed, and what, from a distance, we might call dubious psychology.

The landscape of Hell is the largest shared construction project in imaginative history, and its chief architects have been creative giants- Homer, Virgil, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Bosch, Michelangelo, Milton, Goethe, Blake, and more.