The old religion of the profound attempt of man to harmonize himself with
nature, and hold his own and come to flower in the great seething of life,
changed with the Greeks and Romans into a desire to resist nature, to
produce a mental cunning and a mechanical force that would outwit Nature
and chain her down completely, completely, till at last there should be
nothing free in nature at all, all should be controlled, domesticated, put
to man's meaner uses. Curiously enough, with the idea of the triumph over
nature arose the idea of a gloomy Hades, a hell and purgatory. To the
peoples of the great natural religions the after-life was a continuing of
the wonder-journey of life. To the peoples of the Idea the afterlife is
hell, or purgatory, or nothingness, and paradise is an inadequate fiction.
-- D.H. Lawrence. Etruscan Places (1932)