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. The Hellmouth never bites the damned, remaining wide open, ready for more. In general the motif had fallen from favour in Italy and the Netherlands by the late 14th century, and is rarely seen in the many Last Judgements in Early Netherlandish painting, but 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. It continued in use in Germany and France. The Hellmouth appears, swallowing a bishop, at bottom left in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a famous woodcut by Albrecht Dürer (c. 1497–98). Gallery Citations General references Hofmann Petra (2008). Infernal Imagery in Anglo-Saxon Charters. PhD thesis. St Andrews, Fife, Scotland: University of St Andrews. . Further reading Schmidt, G. D. The Iconography of the Mouth of Hell: Eighth-Century Britain to the Fifteenth Century, 1995, Selinsgrove, PA, Susquehanna University Press, 1995, Simmons, Austin. The Cipherment of the Franks Casket (PDF). Hellmouth (or the whale as constituting Hell) is inferred in the inscription on the front side of the Franks Casket. External links Stage terminology History of theatre Christian iconography Hell (Christianity) Anglo-Saxon art Leviathan