Applied tortures beyond the A series

Most of hell's punishments either have their analogues in the medieval and late imperial courts or were creative uses for devices of daily life, especially farm equipment. As with other hell traditions, victims never totally succumb to their torture, a revitalizing wind resurrecting their bodies to ready them for more. But what was the pedagogical purpose of displaying such a morbid spectacle?

Christian Lange in his Justice, punishment and the medieval Muslim imagination offers a possible explanation for such horrific justice:

This, I submit, was a key function of the medieval Muslim imaginaire of hell: to put at the believers' disposition an arsenal of categories of thought. To borrow a much-used phrase of Levi-Strauss, depictions of punishments in hell were not merely useful in arousing extreme fear, or in reassuring a chilled audience with promises of future justice, but, rather, they were "good to think with." By offering a structured setting for the unsettling phenomenon of violence, descriptions of the tortures in hell helped people think about their everyday lives in a society over which hung ... the constant spectre of extreme punishment.

As the "imaginaire of hell" is by no means limited to Islam, the question for us is whether people in other cultures also had to grapple with how to think about violence.

	Applying the bastinado in scroll C05 (left) and J10 (above), in the former case for not listening to good words.
Most of hell's punishments either have their analogues in the medieval and late imperial courts or were creative uses for devices of daily life, especially farm equipment. As with other hell traditions, victims never totally succumb to their torture, a revitalizing wind resurrecting their bodies to ready them for more. But what was the pedagogical purpose of displaying such a morbid spectacle? Christian Lange in his Justice, punishment and the medieval Muslim imagination offers a possible explanation for such horrific justice: This, I submit, was a key function of the medieval Muslim imaginaire of hell: to put at the believers' disposition an arsenal of categories of thought. To borrow a much-used phrase of Levi-Strauss, depictions of punishments in hell were not merely useful in arousing extreme fear, or in reassuring a chilled audience with promises of future justice, but, rather, they were "good to think with." By offering a structured setting for the unsettling phenomenon of violence, descriptions of the tortures in hell helped people think about their everyday lives in a society over which hung ... the constant spectre of extreme punishment. As the "imaginaire of hell" is by no means limited to Islam, the question for us is whether people in other cultures also had to grapple with how to think about violence.

	The torture of pouring boiling water on the head, from scroll L04.
	The torture of hanging people upside down and spreading their legs, from scroll I07.
	The torture of hanging people from hooks and suspending weights from them, from scroll J04.
	The torture of being speared, from scroll B02, the only machine-produced set of scrolls in this collection.
	The torture of being crushed by carts, from scroll C05. (This application is probably the most common torture not found in the A series.)
	The torture of the cage, from scroll S14. Here the victim is Qin Gui's gossipy wife, Lady Wang. In this case, there is a similar torture in the A series, namely at the bottom of scroll A03.
	With regard to the cage in which Lady Wang is transported, this box may be related to a kind of torture in which the criminal can neither sit nor stand while his or her head is trapped in the box's roof. Other hell scrolls indeed depict such boxes such as B05 and E03. This image is from Harper's Weekly, 4 April 1857.