Dante’s “Inferno” or Part I of “The Divine Comedy”

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here…”

Good Friday, 1300

Dante is lost in the woods. He tries to climb the sunny mountain but is blocked by 3 beasts---a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf.

The ghost of Virgil (author of the “Aeneid”), comes to show him how to get to the top of the mountain (Heaven) where Dante’s true love, Beatrice, waits for him.

9 Circles of Hell

Anti-Inferno (just before the entrance to Hell)…reside the souls of the uncommitted: people who lived their lives without making conscious choices between good and evil.

First Circle: Limbo

Contains the souls of the virtuous, but who were born before the advent of Christianity or were never baptized (therefore could not properly honor God)

Admitted to Heaven--Noah, Moses, etc.

Not admitted--Virgil, Homer, Horace, Aristotle, Socrates, etc.

The Gate of Hell: “through me you enter then into the city of woes…”

Hell is portrayed as a city

Second Circle: The Lustful

Dante feels sympathy because they are essentially damned by love.

(Helen, Cleopatra…)

Sins of the flesh Francesca tells her

story

This is the most natural sin and the one associated with love, so it’s punishment is lightest.

They are whirled around by a gigantic gale, symbolic of their earthly passion.

Third Circle: The Gluttons

The gluttonous must lie on the ground while the sewage and filth rain down upon them.

Fourth Circle: The Hoarders/Wasters

They lacked all regulation in moderating their expenses and gave up their souls in the pursuit of wealth.

Plutus: In Greek Mythology, Plutus was the god of wealth.

Fifth Circle: The Wrathful and the Sullen

Last station of “Upper hell”

Souls attacking one another in putrid slime

The Sullen: Refuse to accept Divine Illumination and are forever doomed to lie in the stinking mud beneath the river Styx.

Sixth Circle: The Fallen Angels

City of Dis: The Capital of Hell

Rebellious Angels; Creatures of ultimate evil

Refuse to let the poets pass

Incapable of human reason

Phlegyas: The Boatman of Styx

In a fit of rage, Phlegyas set fire to the temple of Apollo because the god had raped his daughter. Apollo promptly slew him. Phlegyas, whose own father was Mars , appears in Virgil's underworld as an admonition against showing contempt for the gods.

Circle Seven: Round OneThe Violent against Neighbors

The Descent into Lower Hell

Marked by a boiling river of blood

Great Warmakers, tyrants, highwaymen, and all who waged violence against their fellow man.

As they shed blood in their lifetime, so must they wallow in the boiling river of blood for all eternity.

Circle Seven

Round Two: The Violent Against Themselves (The Suicides)

The Souls are encased in trees whose leaves are eaten by the Harpies (overseers of the damned). Thus, they who destroyed themselves are denied a human form.

Round Three: The Violent Against God, Nature, and Art. (The Blasphemers, the Sodomites, and the Usurers)

Plain of burning sand and an eternal rain of fire.

Symbolism is sterility and wrath. All three are unnatural actions.

Circle Eight

Malebolge (The Evil Ditches)The upper half of the Hell of the

Fraudulent and the MaliciousMalebolge is a great

amphitheatre within are 10 circles, each containing sinners of Simple Fraud

Circle EightRound One: The Panderers and Seducers

Driven on an endless walk by horned demons to represent the way they goaded others on in life to serve their own purposes.

Circle EightRound Two: The Flatterers

Sunk in excrement, the true equivalent of their false flatteries on earth.

Circle EightRound Three: The Simoniacs

People who have tried to buy/sell ecclesiastical favors or offices

They are doomed to remain upside down in a mockery of the baptismal font…they are baptised by fire.

Simon Magus: Simon the Samarian magician (Acts VIII; 9-24) Upon his conversion to Christianity he offered to buy the power to administer the Holy Ghost and was rebuked by Peter.

Circle EightRound Four: The Fortune Tellers and Diviners The souls of all those

who attempted by forbidden arts to look into the future.

Tiresias: the ancient Greek prophet

Doomed to forever walk backwards…their heads are turned around and their eyes are blinded by tears.

Circle eightRound Five: The Grafters

Unscrupulous use of one's position to derive profit or advantages; extortion.

Money or an advantage gained or yielded by unscrupulous means.

The Grafters are stuck in boiling pitch which represents the sticky fingers they used in their life. It also serves to keep them out of sight the way their unscrupulous deeds were kept out of site.

Circle EightRound Six: The Hypocrites

The Hypocrites are weighed down by leaden robes as they eternally walk around a circle. The robes are brilliantly guilded on the outside, but serve to hide the terrible weight of their deceit in life.

Circle EightRound Seven: The Thieves

A pit full of monstrous reptiles who curl themselves around the thieves, binding their hands which had done so much evil in their lifetime.

Circle EightRound Eight: The Evil Counselors

Their crime was to abuse the gifts given to them by the Almighty.

Ulysses (Odysseus) and Diomedes

Ulysses narrates a tale of his last voyage and death.

Ulysses crimes were: The Trojan Horse

Persuading Achillles to sail to Troy wherein his lover died of grief at his departure.

The theft of the sacred statue of Pallas, which was believed to protect Troy, thus resulting in Troy’s downfall.

Circle EightRound Nine: The Sowers of Discord

Just as their sin was to rend asunder what God had meant to be united, so they are hacked and torn through all eternity by a great demon with a bloody sword. After each mutilation, the souls drag their bodies around the pit and return to the demon, only to be hacked again.

Circle EightRound Ten: The Falsifiers

Class I: The Alchemists

They are punished by afflictions of every sense: darkness, stench, thirst, filth, loathsome diseases, and a shrieking din.

Classes II-V: Evil Impersonators, Counterfeiters, False Witnesses

They represent what society would be if all falsifiers succeeded—a place where the senses are an affliction, rather than a guide.

The Ninth and Final Circle: The Central Pit of the Malebolge

The giants They are symbols

of the earth-trace that every devout man must clear from his soul (base human natures) ; the unchecked passions of the beast.

Circle NineRound One: Caina, the treacherous to kinRound Two: Antenora, the treacherous to country

Caina: Named for Cain

Here lie those who were treacherous against blood ties.

Antenor: named for Antenor, the Trojan who was believed to have betrayed his city to the Greeks.

Circle NineRound Three: Ptolomea, treacherous to guests and hosts

Ptolomeaus of Maccabees, who murdered his father-in-law at a banquet.

Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, who are in Antenora for treason. In life, they had plotted together. Then Ruggieri betrayed Ugolino and caused his death by starvation, along with Ugolino’s four sons.

Ninth CircleRound Four: JudeccaThe Center: Satan

Judecca: Judas Iscariot

The treacherous to their masters

They lie completely sealed in ice, twisted and distorted into every conceivable posture. It is impossible to speak to them.

Satan: Fixed into the ice at the center to which flow all the rivers of guilt; and as he beats his great wings as if to escape, their icy wind only freezes him more surely into the polluted ice. He has three faces and in each mouth he clamps a sinner whom he rips eternally with his teeth.

The EndThe poets now climb through the

center, grappling hand over hand down the hairy flank of Satan himself---a supremely symbolic action---and at last reach the next level---Purgatorio