Other documented realms

System function Realms attested in tradition, myth, or esoteric literature beyond the ten heavens and Earth.

Primary inhabitants Varies by tradition (intermediate beings, other orders).

Entry permission required —

Notes

Including purgatorial, liminal, or other realms referenced in biblical, apocalyptic, or mystical texts.

The category above names a set without listing it. These are the realms in it — grouped by what each one is for rather than by which religion describes it, so that the parallels are visible: several traditions with no shared texts independently describe a prison for bound spirits, a waiting place for the dead, and a store for things not yet released.

Every entry names the primary text that attests it. Standing says what kind of claim it is, not whether it is true — the same convention used on Named Giants and Theories of Everything.

Scripture Named in a canonical text of at least one tradition.
Scrolls Second Temple, apocryphal or pseudepigraphal literature.
Doctrine Defined later by a religious authority rather than described in a text.
Tradition Myth, folklore or classical literature.

Holding places for bound spirits (4)

Not places for human dead. These are described as custody for rebel angels or spirits, with a stated sentence and a release or judgement date. The distinction matters: a text that says spirits are bound until judgement is not describing the same place as one that says the dead go down to Sheol.

Tartarus

Scripture Greek, adopted in the New Testament

The only place in the New Testament that is explicitly not Gehenna or Hades: 2 Peter uses the verb tartaroō, “to cast into Tartarus”, and does it to angels who sinned, not to people. They are held in chains of darkness “unto judgement” — custody with an end date, not a sentence being served.

Attested in 2 Peter 2:4; 1 Enoch 20:2

The Abyss (the bottomless pit)

Scripture Biblical

A sealed place with a shaft and a key. The demons in Luke beg not to be sent there, which tells you it is a confinement rather than a destination. Revelation gives it a resident ruler — Abaddon, or Apollyon in Greek — and has the dragon shut and sealed in it for a stated term. What comes up the shaft in Revelation 9, where the text puts it, and when — worked through in full below.

Attested in Luke 8:31; Revelation 9:1–11; 20:1–3

Dudael

Scrolls Second Temple (1 Enoch)

Named with unusual precision: Raphael is told to bind Azazel hand and foot, cast him into the darkness at Dudael, place rough and jagged rocks on him, and leave him there until the great day of judgement. A specific being, a specific place, a specific term.

Attested in 1 Enoch 10:4–6

The prison of the spirits

Scripture Biblical

The spirits “in prison” who were disobedient in the days of Noah — the passage that ties the New Testament directly to the Watchers material, since it dates the offence to the Flood generation. What the preaching to them accomplished is disputed in every direction; that they are held is not.

Attested in 1 Peter 3:19–20

Chambers of the human dead (3)

Waiting places for people between death and judgement — separated by moral condition, but not yet the final state. This is the category most often collapsed into “hell” in English translation, which loses the waiting.

The four hollow places

Scrolls Second Temple (1 Enoch)

Enoch is shown a mountain with four hollow places where the souls of the dead wait, separated by moral condition — one bright with a spring of water for the righteous, others for classes of sinner including those whose murder was never avenged. An explicit architecture for the intermediate state, three centuries before the Gospels.

Attested in 1 Enoch 22

Abraham’s bosom

Scripture Biblical

In the Lazarus parable the righteous dead and the tormented are both conscious, both located, and separated by a fixed chasm — yet in sight and speech of one another. Whatever else it is, it is not a description of a final state, because the rich man is still arguing about his brothers who are alive.

Attested in Luke 16:19–31

The chambers of the souls

Scrolls Second Temple (4 Ezra)

Souls are kept in promptuaria, storechambers, and the resurrection waits until the appointed number is full — the dead themselves ask how much longer. The chamber is compared to a womb: it holds, and then it must give back.

Attested in 4 Ezra 4:35–42; 7:32

Intermediate states (5)

Conditions rather than locations in several of these traditions: a stage a soul passes through, sometimes with a duration and an exit. Grouped together because the shape recurs across traditions that share no texts.

Purgatory

Doctrine Roman Catholic

A state of purification for those who die in grace but not yet cleansed. The scriptural argument rests on a book that is not in the Protestant canon, which is exactly why the doctrine and the canon dispute are historically inseparable — remove 2 Maccabees and the main proof text goes with it.

Attested in 2 Maccabees 12:43–45; defined at Lyon (1274), Florence (1439), Trent (1563)

Limbo

Doctrine Medieval scholastic

Two of them: the limbus patrum, where the righteous of Israel waited before Christ, and the limbus infantium for unbaptised infants. Worth including precisely because it shows a realm can be withdrawn — it was never dogma, and the modern church has let it lapse.

Attested in Not defined dogmatically; set aside in a 2007 study by the International Theological Commission

Barzakh

Scripture Islam

The barrier or isthmus between death and resurrection. The word is also used for the divide between two seas that do not mix, which is the sense being carried over: a partition that holds two things apart without joining them.

Attested in Qur’an 23:100; 25:53; 55:20

Al-A’raf (the heights)

Scripture Islam

An elevation between the garden and the fire, with people on it who can see both sides and are recognised by their marks. A third position in a system usually described as having two.

Attested in Qur’an 7:46–49

Bardo

Tradition Tibetan Buddhist

The intermediate state between death and rebirth, described as a sequence of stages with a duration and specific experiences at each. Included because it is the most procedurally detailed intermediate state in any tradition — the text is written to be read aloud to the person going through it.

Attested in Bardo Thödol (Liberation Through Hearing), c. 14th c.

Cosmic storehouses (2)

Treasuries where phenomena are kept before release — snow, hail, wind, light, and in some texts the unborn souls. A distinctly Enochic and wisdom-literature idea, and the reason Enoch’s tour reads like an inventory.

The treasuries of snow, hail and wind

Scripture Biblical and Second Temple

God asks Job directly whether he has entered the treasuries of the snow and the hail — the question assumes they are places. Enoch then claims to have done exactly that, and describes the chambers for wind, hail, mist and dew as an inventory with keepers.

Attested in Job 38:22–24; Jeremiah 10:13; 1 Enoch 41:3–7; 60:11–21

The chambers of the luminaries

Scrolls Second Temple (1 Enoch)

Sun and moon are described as going out from, and returning to, chambers — with gates, portals and an accounting of which gate each rises through in each month. This is the material behind the app’s zodiac and dimension structure.

Attested in 1 Enoch 41:5–8; 72–82 (the Astronomical Book)

Gardens and sacred places still standing (3)

Places described as real geography that has been removed from access rather than destroyed — on the earth in some accounts, taken out of it in others.

Eden, as a place still standing

Scrolls Second Temple

Genesis does not say the garden was destroyed — it says the way to the tree of life was guarded, which presumes there is still something to guard. Enoch is shown the tree of wisdom on his eastward journey, and Jubilees ranks Eden as the first of four sacred places and calls it the holy of holies of the Lord.

Attested in Genesis 2:8–14; 3:24; 1 Enoch 32:3–6; Jubilees 4:26; 8:19

The four sacred places

Scrolls Second Temple (Jubilees)

Eden, the mountain of the east, Sinai and Zion — named together as a set, which turns scattered holy sites into a deliberate structure. Jubilees also places Eden at the centre of the earth in its geography.

Attested in Jubilees 4:26; 8:19

The New Jerusalem

Scripture Biblical

A city that descends — it exists before it arrives, which makes it a present realm in the text’s own terms and not only a future condition. Hebrews speaks of it in the present tense for the living: “you have come to” the heavenly Jerusalem.

Attested in Revelation 21:2, 10–27; Hebrews 12:22

Underworlds by tradition (5)

The named underworlds of neighbouring cultures, listed so the parallels and the differences are both visible. See Realm: Hell for the biblical Sheol / Gehenna, which is documented on its own page rather than repeated here.

Duat

Tradition Egyptian

Not a pit but a route, divided into twelve hours the sun traverses each night, with gates, guardians and passwords at each. The judgement is a weighing of the heart against a feather, with a named consequence for failure — the most administratively detailed afterlife of the ancient world.

Attested in Pyramid Texts; Coffin Texts; Book of the Dead; Amduat

Irkalla / Kur

Tradition Sumerian and Akkadian

The “land of no return”, entered through seven gates at each of which something is surrendered. Bleak and undifferentiated — the dead eat dust, and rank there depends on how many survivors keep your offerings, not on how you lived. See Kingdoms & Rulers for the texts.

Attested in Descent of Inanna; Epic of Gilgamesh VII, XII

Hades, Elysium and the Asphodel Meadows

Tradition Greek

A single underworld that acquired internal divisions over time — Elysium for the favoured, the Asphodel Meadows for the ordinary, Tartarus below for the punished. The Septuagint’s translators used Hades to render Sheol, which is how Greek geography entered the biblical vocabulary.

Attested in Homer, Odyssey XI; Hesiod; Plato, Gorgias 523–527

Hel and Niflheim

Tradition Norse

One of nine worlds on the world-tree, ruled by a named being rather than being merely a location — Hel is both the ruler and the realm. Reached by a long downward road and a bridge, and distinguished from the halls that receive the battle-dead.

Attested in Prose Edda (Gylfaginning); Poetic Edda

Naraka and Svarga

Tradition Hindu, with parallels in Buddhism and Jainism

Both are temporary, which is the structural difference from the Abrahamic pair: a soul exhausts the merit or demerit that placed it there and returns to rebirth. The Puranas enumerate the hells by name and assign a specific offence to each.

Attested in Garuda Purana; Bhagavata Purana; Manusmriti

Revelation 9 — what comes up the shaft

Armoured, crowned, human-faced, scorpion-tailed, and released from a locked shaft in the ground under a five-month operating window with explicit rules of engagement. Revelation 9 is the passage behind every “buried craft” reading, so this panel does the text first, the confinement traditions second, and the technological reading third — each labelled.

Exactly what Revelation 9:1–11 says

Verse	Text	The detail that matters
9:1	“A star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit”	A “star” that is a him. The key is given — he does not hold it by right. Release authority sits elsewhere.
9:2	“He opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke … as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened”	Gk. phrear — a well or shaft, a narrow vertical access, not a cavern. It has a lock. It is opened from outside.
9:3–4	Locusts come out of the smoke, with the power of scorpions — commanded not to hurt grass, greenery or trees, “but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads”	The single most anomalous line in the passage. These are locusts that eat no vegetation and discriminate targets by a mark. That is not a swarm; that is a rule of engagement.
9:5–6	Not to kill, but to torment five months; men will seek death and not find it	Five months is the active season of a real locust swarm. A stated, bounded operating window.
9:7	“Like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men”	Note as it were, like, as. John is describing resemblance, not making an identification.
9:8–9	Hair as women’s, teeth as lions’; “breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron”; the sound of their wings “as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle”	Armour and engine-noise, in the vocabulary available to a first-century writer.
9:10	“Tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails”; power to hurt five months	The weapon is at the rear, and it is non-lethal by instruction.
9:11	“They had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon”	Proverbs 30:27 says flatly: “The locusts have no king.” John gives these one, by name, in two languages. The inversion is deliberate.

The literary source is Joel. Joel 1–2 has a locust army that darkens the land (2:2, 2:10), runs “like the noise of chariots” (2:5), has “the appearance of horses” (2:4), climbs walls, keeps ranks and does not break formation (2:7–8). John is writing with Joel open. Whatever he saw, Joel supplied the words he reached for.

Where in the earth, and when were they put there?

The honest answer first: Revelation gives neither. No country, no mountain, no coordinates, no date of confinement, no duration served. It gives a shaft, a lock, a key held by someone else, and an occupant with a name. Anyone offering a location or a burial date is getting it from somewhere other than Revelation 9 — which is fine, provided they say where.

Here is every text that supplies any part of it, and what each is worth:

Source	Standing	What it adds
Luke 8:31	Scripture	The demons of the Gerasene beg Jesus not to send them into the abyss. It is a confinement they can be sent to while the world is still running — and they fear it.
Jude 6	Scripture	Angels that left their estate are “reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.” A sentence with a release date attached.
2 Peter 2:4	Scripture	God “cast them down to hell” — the verb is tartaroō, to consign to Tartarus — “and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.” Applied to angels, never to people.
Revelation 20:1–3	Scripture	The same shaft, used again: an angel with the key and a great chain shuts and seals the dragon in it for a thousand years, “and after that he must be loosed a little season.” The abyss is a timed facility with scheduled releases.
Revelation 11:7; 17:8	Scripture	The beast “ascendeth out of the bottomless pit.” The locusts are not the only thing stored there.
1 Enoch 6:6	Scroll	The descent is dated and located: two hundred Watchers come down “in the days of Jared” onto Mount Hermon. That is the only geography in the whole tradition given as a place you can still walk to.
1 Enoch 10:4–6	Scroll	The one text that names a burial site. Raphael is told to bind Azazel hand and foot, cast him into the darkness, “make an opening in the desert which is in Dudael”, place rough and jagged rocks on him, cover him with darkness, and leave him there until the day of judgement.
1 Enoch 10:11–12	Scroll	Semjaza and the rest are bound “in the valleys of the earth” for seventy generations, until the judgement. A stated term of confinement.
Mishnah, Yoma 6:8	Tradition	The Day of Atonement scapegoat — the goat “for Azazel” — is led to a cliff called Beth Ḥadudo in the Judean wilderness, roughly twelve mil from Jerusalem, and pushed off. The name is the same family as Dudael. The one tradition that points at a real place points at the scapegoat cliff east of Jerusalem.

Putting only what the sources actually say together: the confinement tradition is pre-Flood — the descent in the days of Jared, the binding before the deluge, a term of seventy generations or “until the great day.” The one named site is Dudael, plausibly the Judean desert cliff the scapegoat was driven over. And the abyss of Revelation is a different and unlocated facility, accessed by a shaft, that still has occupants and a release schedule.

What no source anywhere provides: a location for the abyss of Revelation 9, a date on which its occupants were placed in it, or any statement that what emerges from it was ever placed there at all rather than belonging to it.

The technological reading — stated fairly, then weighed

This app catalogues UAP reports and non-human intelligence claims, so the reading gets a hearing rather than a dismissal. It is a reading. It is not what the text says.

What is offered in support:

Metal armour (“breastplates … of iron”) on a flying thing, plus engine-like noise (“the sound of chariots of many horses”).
Composite anatomy assembled from unrelated animals — horse body, human face, lion teeth, scorpion tail — which is what a describer without vocabulary produces when looking at manufactured shapes. Compare how the app scores composite creatures on the limb-count axis.
Precise target discrimination by a mark, with a no-kill order and a fixed five-month window — operational parameters, not animal behaviour.
A command structure with a named commander.
Subterranean staging behind a sealed vertical shaft with a lock, opened from outside by a key held by a third party — storage under access control.
Smoke “as of a great furnace” venting from the shaft before anything emerges.

What argues against it, and should be said with equal clarity:

The simile chain. John writes like, as, as it were in nearly every clause. He is telling you these are comparisons. A reader who converts “breastplates as it were of iron” into “a metal hull” has silently deleted the qualifier the author put there on purpose.
They are moral agents, not equipment. They are commanded, they obey a restriction, and they have a king who is an angel. Craft do not receive rules of engagement about whom they may not harm; crews and creatures do.
Joel already contains the imagery — horses, chariot-noise, ranks, darkness — four centuries earlier, describing an actual agricultural catastrophe. The vocabulary needs no other explanation.
The passage’s own logic is judicial. The seal on the forehead in 9:4 refers straight back to the sealing in Revelation 7. The episode is about who is under protection, which is a legal question, not a military one.

Where this app comes down: Revelation 9 describes agents with a described appearance released from a locked underground facility on a timed, restricted mandate. The facility, the lock, the external key-holder and the schedule are all in the text and are genuinely strange. The hull is not in the text. Treating the passage as an inventory of buried craft requires overwriting the author’s own qualifiers, and this app will not do that quietly.

Questions the text leaves open

Where is the shaft? Never located. Not in Revelation, not in 1 Enoch, not anywhere.
When were the occupants confined, and by whom? Revelation never says they were confined at all — only that they came out.
Who holds the key before it is given? 9:1 uses the passive: it “was given.” In 20:1 an unnamed angel has it. The custody chain is never set out.
Who is the fallen star of 9:1? Identified with Satan (Luke 10:18; Isaiah 14:12), with Abaddon of 9:11, and with a neutral commissioned angel — by different readers, on the same verse.
Is Abaddon the commander of the locusts or the warden of the pit? “The angel of the bottomless pit” reads either way, and the two roles imply very different things.
Why five months? It matches a locust season exactly. Whether that is the reason, or a coincidence John is exploiting, is not stated.
Are these the bound Watchers of 1 Enoch? The app carries the Grigori as bound until judgement, and the timing invites the link — but no text makes it. It is inference across two documents.
Is the abyss the same place as Tartarus, Dudael and the “valleys of the earth”? They do the same job. Whether they are one facility under four names is exactly the kind of question the Other documented realms grouping is arranged to expose rather than to answer.

Sources

Scripture: Revelation 7:2–4; 9:1–11; 11:7; 17:8; 20:1–3 · Joel 1:4–2:11 · Proverbs 30:27 · Luke 8:31; 10:18 · Isaiah 14:12 · Jude 6 · 2 Peter 2:4. Quotations are KJV.
Post-biblical: 1 Enoch 6:6; 10:4–12 · Mishnah, Yoma 6:8 (the scapegoat and Beth Ḥadudo).

Documented elsewhere in the app rather than repeated here: Hell (Sheol / Gehenna), Paradise (heaven 3), Dimensions, and the ten heavens.

All non-heavenly realms · Heavens Portal · Mission & realm management