Wikipedia
Hellmouth is the entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art, and then spread all over Europe, remaining very common in depictions of the Last Judgment and Harrowing of Hell until the end of the Middle Ages, and still sometimes used during the Renaissance and after. It enjoyed something of a revival in polemical popular prints after the Protestant Reformation, when figures from the opposite side would be shown disappearing into the mouth. A notable late appearance is in the two versions of a painting by El Greco of about 1578. Political cartoons still showed Napoleon leading his troops into one.
Medieval theatre often had a hellmouth prop or mechanical device which was used to attempt to scare the audience by vividly dramatizing an entrance to Hell. These seem often to have featured a battlemented castle entrance, in painting usually associated with Heaven.
The oldest example of an animal Hellmouth known to Meyer Schapiro was an ivory carving of c. 800 in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and he says most examples before the 12th century are English. Many show the Harrowing of Hell, which appealed to Anglo-Saxon taste, as a successful military raid by Christ. Schapiro speculates that the image may have drawn from the pagan myth of the Crack of Doom, with the mouth that of the wolf-monster Fenrir, slain by Vidar, who is used as a symbol of Christ on the Gosforth Cross and other pieces of Anglo-Scandinavian art. In the assimilation of Christianised Viking populations in northern England, the Church was surprisingly ready to allow the association of pagan mythological images with Christian ones, in hogback grave markers for example.
In the Anglo-Saxon Vercelli Homilies (4:46-8) Satan is likened to a dragon swallowing the damned:
"... ne cumaþ þa næfre of þæra wyrma seaðe & of þæs dracan ceolan þe is Satan nemned." - "[they] never come out of the pit of snakes and of the throat of the dragon which is called Satan."
The whale-monster Leviathan (translated from Hebrew, Job 41:1, "wreathed animal") has been equated with this description, although this is hard to confirm in the earliest appearances. However, in The Whale, an Old English poem from the Exeter Book, the mouth of Hell is compared to a whale's mouth:
The whale has another trick: when he is hungry, he opens his mouth and a sweet smell comes out. The fish are tricked by the smell and they enter into his mouth. Suddenly the whale’s jaws close.
Likewise, any man who lets himself be tricked by a sweet smell and led to sin will go into hell, opened by the devil — if he has followed the pleasures of the body and not those of the spirit. When the devil has brought them to hell, he clashes together the jaws, the gates of hell. No one can get out from them, just as no fish can escape from the mouth of the whale.
Later in the Middle Ages the classical Cerberus also became associated with the image, although it is hardly likely that the Anglo-Saxons had him in mind.
Satan himself is often shown sitting in Hell eating the damned, but according to G.D. Schmidt this is a separate image, and the Hellmouth should not be considered to be the mouth of Satan, although Hofmann is inclined to disagree with this. Equally the Hellmouth never bites the damned, remaining wide open, ready for more.
In late medieval works by Hieronymous Bosch and his followers, where the wide interior of Hell is shown, there is often a Hellmouth leading to some special compartment.
In the fictional universe established by the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, the Buffyverse, a Hellmouth is an area fraught with massive supernatural activity.
Hellmouth is a Hardcore punk band from Detroit, Michigan, founded by former Suicide Machines singer Jay Navarro, guitarist Alex Awn (from Coalition, Varsity), bassist Jeff Uberti (from Left In Ruin, World of Hurt), and former Fordirelifesake drummer Justin Malek.
Hellmouth may refer to:
- Hellmouth, an image in art depicting the entrance to hell
- Hellmouth (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), a fictional concept in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Hellmouth (band), a punk rock band from Detroit
- Hellmouth (film), a 2014 horror film starring Stephen McHattie
Hellmouth is a 2014 horror movie that was directed by John Geddes, based on a script written by Tony Burgess. The film had its world premiere on 17 October 2014 at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival and stars Stephen McHattie as a grave-keeper that finds himself traveling to hell to save the soul of a beautiful woman. Funding for Hellmouth was partially raised through an Indiegogo campaign.
Usage examples of "hellmouth".
Anaconda Copper bought out all the other small mills and set up their big Bonner unit, obviously a lot more efficient than these little one-saw outfits up in the sticks, the Hellmouth Finns stuck.
Down there where it was always warm and balmy, my father would suck his pipe and talk endlessly about Hellmouth, about how hard the winters were, but how he wanted to go back.
Doc, Dad got so wrapped up talking about Hellmouththe Hellmouth he knew when he was a kidthat I could visualize every rock in the road.
He used to tell me that, if he never made it back to Hellmouth, I was to go in his place.
When I asked questions about the mill and how come Hellmouth showed no change, I got nowhere.
Swenson, the canny Swede who had dreamed up Hellmouth, had picked well.
Steve thought about the Hellmouth town pump and how that dipper drink Art had taken must have tasted.
That Hellmouth River country is pretty spectacular and he wanted to paint a picture of it.
Anaconda offered to buy his Hellmouth mill outright, but Swenson was too stubborn to give in.
Communications broke down during the holocaust and, without the modern fire jumpers and lookout advance warnings we have today, Hellmouth was doomed.
And what of Hellmouth, higher, wilderthe very place where these terrible storms originated?
And Art said the villagers in Hellmouth still went to the town pump for water, using kerosene lamps to light their shake-roofed houses.
It was as if he was straining something deep inside of him to make Hellmouth what Art Mackey had said it was on the tape.
Bathed in white moonlight, Hellmouth lay spread out comfortably along the steep bank of the river with an inevitability that made Steve grin.
It was the only brick building in Hellmouth and right now it was locked up like a fortress.