Heaven

Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious, cosmological, mythological, or metaphysical term for the physical ortranscendent place from which heavenly beings (such as a God, angels, the jinn, and sky deities like King or Queen of Heaven, Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother, Son of Heaven, heavenly saints or venerated ancestors) originate, are enthroned or inhabit. It is commonly believed that heavenly beings can descend to earth or incarnate and that earthly beings can ascend to Heaven in the afterlife or, in exceptional cases, enter Heaven alive.

Heaven is often described as a "higher place", the holiest place, a Paradise, in contrast to Hell or the Underworld or the "low places", anduniversally or conditionally accessible by earthly beings according to various standards of divinity, goodness, piety, faith, or other virtuesor right beliefs or simply the Will of God. Some believe in the possibility of a Heaven on Earth in a World to Come.

Another belief is in an Axis mundi or World tree which connects the heavens, the world, and the underworld. In Indian religions, Heaven is considered as Svarga loka, and soul is again subjected to rebirth in different living forms according to its karma. This cycle can be broken after a soul achieves Moksha or Nirvana.

Etymology

The modern English word heaven is derived from the earlier (Middle English) heven (attested 1159); this in turn was developed from the previous Old English form heofon. By c. 1000, heofon was being used in reference to the Christianized "place where God dwells", but originally, it had signified "sky, firmament"^[1] (e.g. in Beowulf, c. 725). The English term has cognates in the otherGermanic languages: Old Saxon heƀan "sky, heaven", Middle Low German heven "sky", Old Icelandic himinn "sky, heaven", Gothic himins; and those with a variant final -l: Old Frisian himel,himul "sky, heaven", Old Saxon/Old High German himil, Dutch hemel, and modern German Himmel. All of these have been derived from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic form *Hemina-.^[2] In many languages, the word for "heaven" is the same as the word for "sky".