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Heaven, the heavens or seven heavens, is a common religious, cosmological, or transcendent place where heavenly beings such as gods, angels, jinn, saints, or venerated ancestors are said to originate, be enthroned, or live. 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", and universally or conditionally accessible by earthly beings according to various standards of divinity, goodness, piety, faith, or other virtues or 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 terrestrial world, and the underworld. In Indian religions, Heaven is considered as ''Svarga loka'', and the 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''. Any place of existence, either of humans, souls or deities, outside the tangible world (Heaven, Hell, or other) is referred to as ''otherworld.'' ==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 about 1000, ''heofon'' was being used in reference to the Christianized "place where God dwells", but originally, it had signified "sky, firmament"〔The Anglo-Saxons knew the concept of Paradise, which they expressed with words such as ''neorxnawang''.〕 (e.g. in ''Beowulf'', c. 725). The English term has cognates in the other Germanic 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'', Old Saxon/Middle Low German ''hemmel'', Dutch ''hemel'', and modern German ''Himmel''. All of these have been derived from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic form *''Hemina-''.〔Barnhart (1995:357).〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Heaven」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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