[f. Gr. Τάρταρο-ς TARTARUS + -LOGY.] A doctrine as to Tartarus; hence, a doctrine of hell and future punishment.
1867. Kingsley, Water of Life, etc., vi. 93. The Middle Ages, when men really believed in that same Tartarology, with the same intensity with which they now believe in the conclusions of astronomy or of chemistry.
1868. Contemp. Rev., VII. 158. The ordinary Tartarology flows far more directly from the sixth book of the Æneid than from anything in Holy Scripture.
1907. J. Masson, Lucretius, I. xvii. 402. He speaks of the terrors of the Roman Tartarology; the dread of ‘being delivered over to the nether pit and black Tartarus, and those torments fabled to exist in the abyss of Acheron;… Cerberus and the Furies and the sunless gloom of Hell’; of ‘Tartarus belching forth dread fires from its throat.’
