I posted earlier about a place in Turkey where there are miraculous healing pools. Very close to these healing pools is a slightly different place, a place known as the Gates of Hell. Documentaries have explained how animals were sacrificed by walking them into the gate. The animals soon died, but the humans did not. The picture above shows how the gate looks now, but here’s an idea of what it looked like in ancient days.
The ‘steam’ coming from the mouth is sulfurous gas, which is what killed the animals. The sulfur generally stayed close to the surface of the water, which was effective in killing the smaller animals and sparing the humans. Of course, if you were short statured, you were out of luck. And this explains at least one of the reasons giraffes were not used as sacrificial animals here.
One last observation. There are a number of other places in the world where there are gates to hell. One is the Flaming Door to Hell in Turkmenistan, a crater that has been burning for 40 years. Another is at Erta Ale in Ethiopia, which is called the “Gateway to Hell.” To put it in spiritual terms, there are many ways to hell on our planet.
