I think the painting was an attempt by the artist to depict a world that began with Genesis but, whilst culminating in the last judgement, it essentially had no end as the fires and torments of hell burned for the fallen and unworthy for eternity. It is a fantasy world, the age of innocence, the unrealised paradise and the eternal fires of damnation all depicted in the three main panels

When the triptych is closed, we see God, in the blackness of space, looking down on his creation – a flat earth encased in a glass bubble of atmosphere. This is the third ‘day’ of creation, according to Genesis in which land, seas, plants, and trees had all been brought into being, but before the creation of the sun and moon, and the first animals

A quotation from Psalm 33 runs along the top – “Ipse dixit, et facta sunt: ipse mandāvit, et creāta sunt” – “For he spake and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.”. This is an allusion to the account in Genesis of God’s work of creation – meaning all depended on the command or the word of God.

The left panel, ‘day six’ of the creation myth in Genesis, is our introduction to paradise. Adam and Eve in a marriage like pose being joined in together by God depicted here in the form of a renaissance Jesus Christ his son. Although Adam and Eve are shown in this image of innocence before their fall – Eve has not yet eaten the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge – their fall is suggested by the serpent coiled around the tree beside the water. The small owl in the centre of the fountain of life is also there to suggest the overturning of God’s paradise

The paradise depicted in the painting, particularly in the central panel, was in contrast to the normal lives of the viewers of the 15^th Century. It showed the fictional perfect life of freedom that man could have had, had Adam and Eve not fallen to temptation in the Garden of Eden. Beauty, eroticism, lust and pleasure are all depicted in this land of plenty before a backdrop of the four corners of the (known) world, a world man could now never have and where pleasures became sins.

Man did fall. Eve did eat the apple and so man was damned to an eternity of torment in the fires of Hell. Individual sins are shown in this panel being punished in extreme ways. In Bosch’s vision of eternal damnation this was overseen by the lord of hell depicted here with a bird’s head – strangely eating the sinners before shitting them out into some kind of glass bubble. It’s worth mentioning that this vison of Hell is sometimes called ‘The Musical Hell’ showing, as it does, many musical instruments and musicians – including a recorder in the rectum of one – and the unplayable music on the sinner’s arse and in the book he is lying on. Bosch takes the view that musicians are sinners in the world, their music leading foolish souls to perdition; or they are sinners in hell, hence their instruments turned on them as weapons of torture.

Because religion was so integral and dominant in society of the period, paradise, heaven, hell were all thought of real places, but it was a time of change, of exploration, as more of the world was discovered and it was (eventually) accepted the earth was round not flat, Eden, paradise and, in time, Hell all became a fantasy. It was this fantasy that Bosch depicted in GOED.

Bosch used some of the accepted iconography of the day but the painting is particularly intriguing because so much of it comes from the imagination of the artist. His vision of creation, paradise and hell is unlike anything else from the period.