“That of all the various nations of antiquity, there never was one which believed in a personal devil more than liberal Christians in the nineteenth century, seems hardly credible, and yet such is the sorrowful fact. Neither the Egyptians, whom Porphyry terms “the most learned nation of the world”, nor Greece, its faithful copyist, were ever guilty of such a crowning absurdity. We may add at once that none of them, not even the ancient Jews, believed in hell or an eternal damnation any more than in the Devil, although our Christian churches are so liberal in dealing it out to the heathen. Wherever the word “hell” occurs in the translations of the Hebrew sacred text, it is unfortunate. The Hebrews were ignorant of such an idea; but yet the gospels contain frequent examples of the same misunderstanding. So, when Jesus is made to say (Matthew 16:18), “… and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it”, in the original text it stands, “the gates of death.”
Never is the word “hell”, as applied to the state of damnation, either temporary or eternal, used in any passage of the Old Testament, all hellists to the contrary, notwithstanding. “Tophet”, or the Valley of Hinnom” (Isaiah 66:24), bears no such interpretation. The Greek term “Gehenna” has also quite a different meaning, as it has been proved conclusively by more than one competent writer, that “Gehenna” is identical with the Homeric Tartarus. In fact, we have Peter himself as authority for it. In his second Epistle, the Apostle, in the original text, is made to say of the sinning angels that God “cast them down into Tartarus.” This expression too inconveniently recalling the war of Jupiter and the Titans, was altered, and now it reads, in King Jame’s version: “cast them down to hell.”
In the Old Testament, the expressions “gates of death” and the “chambers of death”, simply allude to the “gates of the grave”, which are specifically mentioned in the Psalms and Proverbs. Hell, and its sovereign are both inventions of Christianity, coeval with its accession to power and resort to tyranny. They were hallucinations born of the nightmares of the SS. Anthonys in the desert. Before our era, the ancient sages knew the “Father of Evil”, and treated him no better than an ass, the chosen symbol of Typhon, the “Devil”. Sad degeneration of human brains!
As Typhon was the dark shadow of his brother Osiris, so Python is the evil side of Apollo, the bright god of visions, the seer and the soothsayer. He is killed by Python, but kills him in his turn, thus redeeming humanity from sin. It was in memory of this deed that the priestesses of the sun-god enveloped themselves in the snakeskin, typical of the fabulous monster. Under his exhilarating influence, the serpent’s skin being considered magnetic, the priestesses fell into magnetic trances, and “receiving their voice from Apollo”, they became prophetic and delivered oracles.
Again, Apollo and Python are one and morally androgynous. The sun-god ideas are all dual, without exception. The beneficent warmth of the sun calls the germ into existence, but excessive heat kills the plant. While playing on his seven-stringed planetary lyre, Apollo produces harmony; but, as well as other sun-gods, under his dark aspect, he becomes the destroyer Python.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 