<P> The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates several All Souls' Days in the year, but in the West only one such annual commemoration is celebrated . The establishment, at the end of the 10th century, of this remembrance helped focus popular imagination on the fate of the departed, and fostered a sense of solidarity between the living and the dead . Then, in the 12th century, the elaboration of the theology of penance helped create a notion of purgatory as a place to complete penances unfinished in this life . </P> <P> By the 12th century, the process of purification had acquired the Latin name, "purgatorium", from the verb purgare: to purge . In that same century, around 1128, Diego Gelmírez, then Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela, berated his enemy, Arias Pérez, saying to him, "I fear, therefore, that if such that you are you leave this world, you will lose eternal life and incur the perpetual condemnation of your soul ." These words make no mention of an intermediate state, but deny its existence no more than does the Catechism of the Catholic Church, when it says: "Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell,' eternal fire' . The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs ." </P> <P> Medievalist Jacques Le Goff defines the "birth of purgatory", i.e. the conception of purgatory as a physical place, rather than merely as a state, as occurring between 1170 and 1200 . Le Goff acknowledged that the notion of purification after death, without the medieval notion of a physical place, existed in antiquity, arguing specifically that Clement of Alexandria, and his pupil Origen of Alexandria, derived their view from a combination of biblical teachings, though he considered vague concepts of purifying and punishing fire to predate Christianity . Le Goff also considered Peter the Lombard (d . 1160), in expounding on the teachings of St. Augustine and Gregory the Great, to have contributed significantly to the birth of purgatory in the sense of a physical place . </P> <P> While the idea of purgatory as a process of cleansing thus dated back to early Christianity, the 12th century was the heyday of medieval otherworld - journey narratives such as the Irish Visio Tnugdali, and of pilgrims' tales about St. Patrick's Purgatory, a cavelike entrance to purgatory on a remote island in Ireland . The legend of St Patrick's Purgatory (Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii) written in that century by Hugh of Saltry, also known as Henry of Sawtry, was "part of a huge, repetitive contemporary genre of literature of which the most familiar today is Dante's"; another is the Visio Tnugdali . Other legends localized the entrance to Purgatory in places such as a cave on the volcanic Mount Etna in Sicily . Thus the idea of purgatory as a physical place became widespread on a popular level, and was defended also by some theologians . </P>

Where did the idea of purgatory come from