Inferno by Dante Alighieri is a poem published in 1472 that has come to define the modern concept of the Christian Tartarus (the corresponding Purgatorio and Paradiso, the 2nd and 3rd parts of the Divine Comedy, clearly define the locations of Purgatory and Paradise), thereby making it a work of great influence. Powerful, descriptive, and graphic, Inferno is a classic which should be read by those interested in mythology and creative works.
To begin, the Inferno is made up of 34 total sections (Cantos). The poem begins with Dante stating that he found himself in a dark, strange forest when he was halfway through his life (which can be read as a potential midlife existential crisis): “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” He can’t remember how he entered the forest, but he knew that he was quite afraid. He soon came across a panther covered with spotted skin (“And lo! Almost where the ascent began, / A panther light and swift exceedingly, / Which with a spotted skin was covered o’er!”), a large lion (“He seemed as of against me he were coming / with head uplifted, and with ravenous hunger, / So that it seemed the air was afraid of him”), and a lupa/female wolf (“And a she-wolf! that with all hungerings / Seemed to be laden in her meagerness, / And many folk has caused to live forlorn!” Dante soon comes across the poet Virgil (it should be noted that Dante admired him greatly, so his including him in the poem is the medieval equivalent of a piece of fan-fiction where a person meets someone whom they ardently respect in one way or another). Virgil quickly establishes himself as an authoritative, capable figure, as he protects Dante from the beasts, and takes him towards Hell to show him its various compartments: “I entered on the deep and savage way.” Furthermore, before Dante and Virgil reached the opening of Hell, Virgil informed him that Beatrice (his fiance who had died) had requested for God (to finalize, when I say “God,” I refer to the Abrahamic god which appears in texts like the Bible) to show Dante the afterlife for him to express what he had seen into writing (as well as to improve himself, of course). Upon reaching the entrance of Hell, he saw that a message was inscribed above, which read: “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!” Virgil tells Dante that those inside made terrible mistakes in their life, hence their damnation. He tells Dante to not talk to any of the damned souls he comes across for his safety, and Dante, upon entering, sees people and entities being bitten by flies and wallowing in their misery (in a place known as the Ante-Inferno) for not definitively choosing a side to stick to in life: “These miscreants, who never were alive, / Were naked, and were stung exceedingly / By gadflies and by hornets that were there. / These did their faces irrigate with blood, / Which, with their tears commingled, at their feet / By the disgusting worms was gathered up.” Dante soon sees Charon, the ferryman of the underworld, “An old man, hoary with the hair of eld, / Crying: ‘Woe unto you, ye souls depraved!’” Charon, after seeing Dante, tells him that he’s still living, which means he can’t cross the river Styx on his boat, seeing he was only meant to ferry the deceased. Virgil tells Charon that Dante’s an exception to the rule. At the same time, the damned souls waiting to be ferried across mourn after learning of their eternal damnation, with each cursing their birth. Some tried to leave, but failed (it is mentioned that divine justice forces the souls to go to the place which they deserve to go to after their respective deaths, even if they don’t wish to do so. As Virgil put it: “‘All those who perish in the wrath of God / Here meet together out of every land; / And ready are they to pass o’er the river, / Because celestial Justice spurs them on, / So that their fear is turned into desire. / This way there never passes a good soul.”), seeing how Charon would beat with his oar those who resisted: “Charon the demon, with the eyes of glede, / Beckoning to them, collects them all together, / Beats with his oar whoever lags behind.” Dante, suffering from sensory overload from the terrible environment around him, faints.
Dante, after awakening, is taken to the first circle of Hell: Limbo. This concept shows how stupid, evil, and hostile the Christian God is: he sentences numerous individuals to an eternity of melancholy and despair just for being born before Christ. That is, Limbo contains Virgil himself, as he was unlucky enough to have been born long before the birth of Christ. As he put it himself, those in the circle have “‘sinned not; and if they merit had, / ‘Tis not enough, because they had not baptism / which is the portal of the Faith thou holdest; / And if they were before Christianity, / In the right manner they adored not God; / And among such as these I am myself. / For such defects, and not for other guilt, / Lost are we, and are only so far punished, / That without hope we live on in desire.’” Again, this shows the utter immorality of the Abrahamic god: why on earth would his planning be so stupid as to involve the eternal torture of those who were merely unlucky? Limbo includes Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Electra, Hector, Aeneas, Julius Caesar, Camilla, Penthesilea, King Latinus, Lavinia, Brutus the Elder, Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, Cornelia, Saladin, Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Anaxagoras, Thales, Zeno, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Dioscorides, Orpheus, Tully, Livy, Seneca, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, Hippocrates, Avicenna, Averroes, and numerous others. Virgil and Dante proceed to the second circle of hell, where they meet Minos, the judge of the underworld. Minos’s bottom half is that of a snake, and he wraps his body with his tail in numerous circles: each circle which he completes around his body signifies the circle the damned soul will be sentenced to (ex. seven circles around his tail mean that the soul will be sent to the seventh circle of Hell; furthermore, there are a total of nine circles in Hell, with the ninth circle being the innermost and worst). Virgil tells Minos that Dante has divine permission to see Hell, and Minos allows him the opportunity. The second circle of Hell is for those who were lustful in life. Dante sees within this circle a large storm that blew countless bodies around: “I came into a place mute of all light, / Which bellows as the sea does in a tempest, / If by opposing winds ‘t is combated. / The infernal hurricane that never rests / Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine; Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. / When they arrive before the precipice, / There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments, / There they blaspheme the puissance divine. / I understood that unto such a torment / The carnal malefactors were condemned, / Who reason subjugate to appetite.” That is, those who were lustful surrendered their higher faculties (logic and self-control) to immediate sensory pleasures, which was an abomination. Furthermore, the wind which mercilessly blew them around was meant to represent the feeling of lust within them: in life, they allowed lust to dominate the course of their actions, to blow them restlessly around (into other people, of course); they are likewise being punished in the afterlife by being blown by actual wind into hordes of actual people. Those who were in the second circle included many who were good-looking, including Cleopatra. Dante speaks to a woman named Francesca, who was a princess: she was married to a noble, and she was seized by a fit of passion when she was alone with her tutor. Unfortunately for her, her husband was secretly there, and stabbed them both to death upon seeing them make love, sentencing them to an eternity of damnation: “‘When as we read of the much-longed-for smile / Being by such a noble lover kissed, / This one, who ne’er from me shall be divided, / Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating. / Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it. / That day no farther did we read therein.’” After hearing of this, Francesca is blown away by the winds, and Dante faints yet again (and who can blame him?). It should also be noted that the theme of contrapasso is extremely prevalent in this work: contrapasso is the inflicting of punishment that resembles the crime, which is exactly what many of the souls of Dante’s Hell go through.
Upon awakening, he and Virgil go to the third circle of Hell, which is for the gluttonous. Cerberus the three-headed dog is present here, and his primary task is torturing the victims of the third circle: “Red eyes he has, and unctuous beard and black, / And belly large, and armed with claws his hands; / He rends the spirits, flays, and quarters them. / Howl the rain maketh them like unto dogs; / One side they make a shelter for the other; / Oft turn themselves the wretched reprobates.” As expected, the rain which was mentioned before was so heavy that it caused the gluttonous to be scarcely able to move, making them pressed into the ground (the mud), as well as rendering them more vulnerable to the ferocity of Cerberus. When Virgil and Dante saw Cerberus, Virgil dealt with the issue by taking mud from the earth and throwing it into Cerberus’s mouths: “Such as that dog is, who by barking craves, / And quiet grows soon as his food he gnaws, / For to devour it he but thinks and struggles.” Dante comes across a man he knows, Ciacco of Florence, who tells him that some of the enemies of Dante were being tortured in the further recesses of Hell (as stated before, Inferno is basically a fan-fic, and Dante’s inclusion of the torture of his enemies can be seen as catharsis: while he can’t avenge himself against them in real-life, he can imagine their unimaginable pain and suffering in his writing). Virgil and Dante soon see Plutus, a being consumed by rage. They enter the fourth circle of Hell, which is for the greedy, who are punished by being forced to roll great boulders (bags full of money) against each other unceasingly: “Here saw I people, more than elsewhere, many / On one side and the other, with great howls, / Rolling weights forward by main force of chest. They clashed together, and then at that point / Each one turned backward, rolling retrograde.” Some of those in the fourth circle of Hell included religious authorities like popes and cardinals who betrayed their vows of poverty by making large sums of money for their own personal satisfaction. Virgil tellingly tells Dante of the uselessness of money for them now: though they were rich in life, for all the gold they have now, they’ll never be able to rest for a single moment, not to mention the fact that greed is technically endless, seeing how it is often a substitute for emotional satisfaction and is thereby an unnatural desire. That is, since the root of the problem (emptiness) isn’t solved, those who are greedy will try to cure themselves by making even more money, all in a vain attempt to feel whole. In Virgil’s own words, “‘For all the gold that is beneath the moon, / Or ever has been, of these weary souls / Could never make a single one repose.’” Virgil and Dante soon come across the fifth circle of Hell, which is for those who allowed wrath to dominate their lives. Those who were there were submerged in Styx: Dante “Saw people mud-besprent in that lagoon, / All of them naked and with angry look. They smote each other not along with hands, / But with the head and with the breast and feet, / Tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth.” To specify, there were two kinds of punishment for the wrathful: those who were openly violent in life attack and assault each other. On the other hand, those who kept their anger to themselves - those who were sullen - are forced to remain under the water forever, as that represents their inability to communicate with others due to their frustration. Dante and Virgil cross the river on a boat: said boat is quickly attacked by those in the water. However, they still managed to make it to their destination.
Virgil and Dante eventually reach the city of Dis, the hellish city which contains the sixth-ninth circles of hell (basically for the worse elements of the souls in Hell - it should also be mentioned that the sixth-ninth circles of hell involve intellectual/sophisticated crimes, not just acts of passion and irrationality). Dante and Virgil see the three Furies who are visually terrifying: “The three infernal Furies stained with blood, / Who had the limbs of women and their mien, / And with the greenest hydras were begirt; / Small serpents and cerastes were their tresses, / Wherewith their horrid temples were entwined.” Virgil points out each individual Fury: there’s Megaera, Alecto, and Tisiphone. Dante also described that “Each one her breast was rending with her nails; / They beat them with their palms, and cried so loud, / That I for dread pressed close unto the Poet.” He and Virgil neared the gates of Dis, and an angel unlocked it so that they may enter. Upon entering Dis, they entered the sixth circle of Hell: it was reserved for heretics, who each were confined in a coffin full of fire. As Dante wrote, “The sepulchers make all the place uneven; / So likewise did they there on every side, / Saving that there the manner was more bitter; / The flames between the sepulchers were scattered, / By which they so intensely heated were, / That iron more so asks not any art.” Some of those within the sixth circle of Hell include Epicurus (he and his followers were sentenced to this circle because they focused on bodily pleasures: Virgil says that when one focuses on the body, one makes their soul mortal. In my opinion, though, souls probably don’t exist in the first place - do you, after all, think ants and caterpillars have afterlives? In the end, what makes humanity unique among other animals? We’re more related to other animals than one may initially think). They soon come across Pope Anastasius, who was in an especially large flaming tomb. Virgil then outlines the reasoning behind the city of Dis and the particular orders of the circles of Hell: “Of every malice that wins hate in Heaven, / Injury is the end; and all such end / Either by force or fraud afflicteth others. / But because fraud is man’s peculiar vice, / More it displeases God; and so stand lowest / The fraudulent, and great dole assails them. / All the first circle of the Violent [seventh circle of Hell] is; / But since force may be used against three persons, / In three rounds ‘tis divided and constructed. / To God, to ourselves, and to our neighbor can we / Use force; I say on them and on their things, / As thou shalt hear with reason manifest./ As death by violence, and painful wounds, / Are to our neighbor given; and in his substance / Ruin, and arson, and injurious levies; / Whence homicides, and he who smites unjustly, / Marauders, and freebooters, the first round / Tormenteth all in companies diverse. / Man may lay violent hands upon himself / And his own goods; and therefore in the second / Round must perforce without avail repent / … Violence can be done the Deity / In heart denying and blaspheming Him, And by disdaining Nature and her bounty.” The eighth circle of Hell, as described by Virgil, is for those who practiced fraud, which includes hypocrisy, flattery, the practice of magic (magic probably doesn’t actually work in reality though, as there’s inadequate empirical evidence), falsification, theft, simony, and usury. The ninth circle of Hell is for those who betrayed their friends, family, countries, benefactors, and God, thereby making it the most severe: one has to gain the trust of the betrayed before turning on them.
Virgil and Dante eventually spot the Minotaur, a creature that is half-man, half-bull. They soon come across a river full of boiling blood full of the damned: this punishment is for the conquerors who have spilled blood in their quest for glory and power. The condemned are submerged in the lake according to the amount of bloodshed they were each responsible for: the more blood one has been responsible for shedding, the more one will be covered constantly in blood. To prevent the damned from leaving, centaurs with bows and arrows patrol the perimeter of the body of water: these centaurs include Nessus, Chiron, and Pholus. Chiron provides Virgil and Dante with some of the names of the condemned: they include Alexander the Great, Dionysus, Azzolin, Obizzo, Attila the Hun, Pyrrhus, and Sextus. Virgil and Dante eventually enter the wood of the suicides: those who have taken their own lives become the trees of the forest, are fully conscious of their predicament, and are also tormented by harpies and hellhounds which continuously damage them, causing them immeasurable suffering. Dante writes the following of the woods: “Not foliage green, but of a dusky color / Not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled, / No appletrees were there, but thorns with poison. / ...I heard on all sides lamentations uttered, / And person none beheld I who might make them, / Whence, utterly bewildered, I stood still / I think he thought that I perhaps might think / So many voices issued through those trunks / From people who concealed themselves from us.” When Dante broke off a branch of a tree, the tree screamed back at him, asking him “‘Why dost thou mangle me?’” Blood issued from the wound, and it was definitely proven that the trees were indeed people. One of the trees tells Dante of the fate of those who had committed suicide in an Abrahamic world: “‘When the exasperated soul abandons / The body whence it rent itself away, / Minos consigns it to the seventh abyss. / It falls into the forest, and no part / The body whence it rent itself away, / Minos consigns it to the seventh abyss. / It falls into the forest, and no part / Is chosen for it; but where Fortune hurls it, / There like a grain of spelt it germinates. / It springs a sapling, and a forest tree; / The Harpies, feeding then upon its leaves, / Do pain create, and for the pain an outlet. / Like others for our spoils shall we return / But not that any one may them revest, / For ‘tis not just to have what one casts off. / Here we shall drag them, and along the dismal / Forest our bodies shall suspended be, / Each to the thorn of his molested shade.’” Virgil and Dante eventually come across a plain full of writhing people: fire rained from the sky, causing them much anguish. It is revealed that those who are suffering that fate are those who were violent towards God. After that, the four rivers of Hell are named (basically copied from Greek and Roman mythology): the Acheron (a river that generates intense pain due to its properties), the Styx (basically toxic waste: you need to cross it to reach the underworld), the Phlegethon (the river of molten lava), and the Cocytus (formed by the tears of the damned). There is also the Lethe (a river which erases memories), but it isn’t for punishment. On the contrary, it is for those who have repented of their misdeeds (this isn’t elaborated on any further - is the punishment of Hell in the Inferno for eternity, or is it only temporary?).
Virgil and Dante soon meet the creature Geryon, which appeared as an “uncleanly image of deceit / Came up and thrust ashore its head and bust, / But on the border did not drag its tail. / The face was as the face of a just man, / Its semblance outwardly was so benign, / And of a serpent all the trunk beside. / Two pays it had, hairy unto the armpits; / The back, and breast, and both the sides it had / Depicted o’er with nooses and with shields / With colors more, groundwork or broidery / Never in cloth did Tartars make nor Turks, / Nor were such tissues by Arachne laid.” Virgil and Dante ride Geryon, and they come upon Malebolge, a part of Hell within Dis that contains the eighth to ninth circles of Hell within its various circles. Dante writes that it is “Wholly of stone and of an iron color, / As is the circle that arounds it turns. / Right in the middle of the field malign / There yawns a well exceeding wide and deep, / Of which its place the structure will recount. / Round, then, is that enclosure which remains / Between the well and foot of the high, hard bank, / And has distinct in valleys ten its bottom. / And where for the protection of the walls / Many and many moats surround the castles, / The part in which they are a furious forms, / Just such an image those presented there; / And as about such strongholds from their gates / Unto the outer bank are little bridges, / So from the precipice’s base did crags / Project, which intersected dikes and moats, / Unto the well that truncates and collects them.” Those within the circles were completely nude (like the rest of the victims in Hell), and were being beaten terribly by demons. Those who were being flogged were those in the eighth circle of Hell (for clarification, the Eighth Circle of Hell contains eight subsections, known as “Bolgias”): they were guilty of fraud, maliciousness, seduction, pandery, and flattery. The First Bolgia is for seducers and panders: one of those souls in this section had seduced women to gain power, and a demon ironically struck him with a whip, telling him that there were no women to deceive in Hell. Dante comes across Jason of the Argonauts (also being whipped, though he was stoic about it), who exploited, flattered, deceived, seduced, and abandoned numerous women. In his own words, “That Jason is, who by his heart and cunning / The Colchians of the Ram made destitute. / He by the isle of Lemnos passed along / After the daring women pitiless / Had unto death devoted all their males. / There with his tokens and with ornate words / Did he receive Hypsipyle, the maiden / Who first, herself, had all the rest deceived. / There did he leave her pregnant and forlorn; / Such sin unto such punishment condemns him, / And also for Medea is vengeance done.” That is, the women of Lemnos killed all the males on the island (save the father of Hypsipyle, their ruler, as she herself hid him) after Aphrodite cursed them to smell terrible for neglecting their duties towards her (another narrative states that it was because their husbands married Thracian women): this caused their husbands to spend time away from them. Angry at the neglect, they slew all the males: after killing them, they no longer stank, but it was too late to reverse their deeds. Indeed, Jason of the Argonauts, on his way to get the Golden Fleece, landed at the island for the sake of getting supplies from the island’s women. Hypsipyle and the rest of the island’s women greeted them with hospitality, and the Argonauts remained there for quite some time (2 years) before leaving (most of them found lovers among the women of the island). As mentioned by Dante, Jason of the Argonauts had impregnated Hypsipyle, but abandoned her nonetheless (he promised Medea likewise his loyalty, but abandoned her also, which caused her to murder their two young children). Dante and Virgil move on into the Second Bolgia, which is for flatterers: they are punished by being covered in filth (feces). That is, when they were alive some of the words which came out of their mouths were the equivalent of filth (that is, were degrading for them), yet they did so anyway, motivated by an extrinsic reward: now, in Hell, they remain caked in the physical representation of what they had indulged in in life for no reward whatsoever. The Third Bolgia is for the simoniacs, the religious authorities who sold offices for money. They’re punished by being buried into the earth head-first: the only things that remain above-ground are their legs, which flail about wildly. Furthermore, the portions of their body underground are cooked by fire, causing them intense pain: “Out of the mouth of each one there protruded / The feet of a transgressor, and the legs / Up to the calf, the rest within remained. / In all of them the soles were both on fire; / Wherefore the joints so violently quivered, / They would have snapped asunder writhes and bands. / Even as the flame of unctuous things is wont / To move upon the outer surface only, / So likewise was it there from heel to point.”
Dante and Virgil find Pope Nicholas III, who was being burned with a hotter flame than the rest: he made a habit of selling religious positions for money, and was being punished accordingly. They leave for the Fourth Bolgia, and they find the spot reserved for those who tried to predict the future: for trying to look into something which they had no access (that is, by attempting to look forward), fortune-tellers and soothsayers are punished by being forced to walk with their heads twisted completely behind their shoulders (again, contrapasso - where they once tried to look far ahead, now they can’t even see what’s in front of them). Some of those who are being punished in this fashion include Amphiaraus, Tiresias, Aruns, Manto, Eryphylus, Michael Scott, Guido Bonatti, and Asdente. Dante and Virgil move into the Fifth Bolgia, which contains peculators (embezzlers): they’re continuously mutilated by demons. Some demons grabbed a condemned soul to speak to Virgil and Dante as they crossed a burning lake: the soul wasn’t freed from his torment. That is, the demon who was keeping him in the air mutilated his body, causing him to break free, falling into a pool of boiling liquid. The demon who lost his victim, angry, attacked one of his comrades to vent his rage: “He turned his talons upon his companion, / And grappled with him right above the moat.” The two demons, wrestling, fell into the pool of hot liquid. Virgil and Dante, nervous, decided to leave quietly. When they were a significant distance away, the demons, deciding that they had been humiliated by Dante and Virgil, agree to chase and harass them: “Hardly the bed of the ravine below / His feet had reached, ere they had reached the hill / Right over us; but he was not afraid; / For the high Providence, which had ordained / To place them ministers of the fifth moat, / The power of thence departing took from all.” That is, the demons couldn’t leave their assigned territory: even if they wanted to chase Virgil and Dante, they would be unable to do so. They enter the Sixth Bolgia, a place for hypocrites: they’re punished by wearing extremely heavy cloaks that appear beautiful, but are in fact worthless. That is, “They had on mantles with the hoods low down / Before their eyes, and fashioned of the cut / That is Cologne they for the monks are made. / Without, they gilded are so that it dazzles; / But inwardly all leaden as so heavy / That Frederick used to put them on of straw.” Virgil and Dante come across a man who was nailed by three stakes into the ground (he was in the position of crucifixion, though he wasn’t held aloft like Christ): he was completely separated from the circle of hypocrites (the illustration of the grim proceeding shows that a nail was allotted for the piercing of each of this hands, while a single nail served for both of his feet). It then turns out that he who was crucified on the ground was the judge who counseled the Pharisees to have Jesus put to death: he must feel the weight of those who walk over him due to the nails which keep him immobile.
The Seventh Bolgia is composed of thieves: for stealing the objects of others, they’re not allowed that which is most integral to an organism: their own body. Entangled by serpents, the snakes, having supernatural power, could burn them into cinders, only for them to reform once again to suffer the same torture. As Dante put it, “People were running naked and affrighted. / Without the hope of hole or heliotrope. / They had their hands with serpents bound behind them; / These riveted upon their reins the tail / And head, and were in front of them entwined. / And lo! at one who was upon our side / There darted forth a serpent, which transfixed him / There where the neck is knotted to the shoulders. / Nor O so quickly e’er, nor I was written, / As he took fire, and burned; and ashes wholly / Behoved it that in falling he became. / And when he was on the ground was thus destroyed, / The ashes drew together, and of themselves / Into himself they instantly returned.” Dante then states that the process was akin to how a phoenix would burn itself to ashes to begin its life again once it’s five-hundred years old: however, this is a corruption of the previously stated phenomena, for the purposes of this resurrection is only for pain and prolonged suffering. Virgil and Dante then make their way to the Eighth Bolgia, reserved for evil counselors: their punishment is to be continuously burned alive in a pit. Some of the souls suffering this punishment are Ulysses (for using trickery to win the Trojan War - the Trojan Horse, that is) and Diomed. The Ninth Bolgia is composed of schismatics - those who wanted the Christian church to split apart. Some of the schismatics include Mahomet, Ali-Pier, Curio, Mosca, and Bertrand: they’re continuously punished by being forced to walk in circles as a demon cuts them open with a sword and mutilates them in various other ways that are agonizing. That is, “And one his limb transpierced, and one lopped off, / Should show, it would be nothing to compare / With the disgusting mode of the ninth Bolgia / A cask by losing center-pierce or cant / Was never shattered so, as I saw one / Rent from the chin to where one breaketh wind. / Between his legs were hanging down his entrails; / His heart was visible, and the dismal sack / That maketh excrement of what is eaten. While I was all absorbed in seeing him, / He looked at me, and opened with his hands / His bosom, saying: ‘See now how I rend me; How mutilated, see, is Mahomet; / In front of me doth Ali weeping go, / Cleft in the face from forelock unto chin; / And if all the others whom thou here beholdest, / Disseminators of scandal and of schism / While living were, and therefore are cleft thus. / A devil is behind here, who doth cleave us / Thus cruelly, onto the falchion’s edge / Putting again each one of all this ream, / When we have gone around the doleful road; / by reason that our wounds are closed again / Ere any one in front of him repass. / But who art thou, that musest on the crag, / Perchance to postpone going to the pain / That is adjudged upon thine accusations?’” Another victim in the line had a slit throat, a cut-off nose, and a missing ear, yet he still survived (again, what kind of a “loving” and “fair” god will allow for such eternal, agonizing torture? While the demons in this context are arguably terrible, the Abrahamic god is even worse for allowing the evils of the world to continue as well as acting like an utter sadist that is utterly unmatched: even totalitarian dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are incapable of torturing others for eternity). Another victim had his esophagus ripped open, causing blood to spill everywhere from the vertical cut. One of the tortured souls had been decapitated: his body, which remained alive, walked around while carrying his cranium: “A trunk without a head walk in like a manner / As walked the others of the mournful herd. / And by the hair it held the head dissevered, / Hung from the hand in fashion of a lantern, / And that upon us gazed and said: ‘O me!’” It turns out that the decapitated soul was Bertram de Born, who caused two rulers - a father and a son - to fight. Therefore, to make up for how he tore the relationship of the two people apart, his head was separated from his body.
The Tenth Bolgia is for alchemists: they’re punished by being afflicted with a variety of maladies that make their lives a living nightmare: “All the diseases in one moat was gathered / Such was it here, and such a stench came from it / As from putrescent limbs is wont to issue. / We had descended on the furthest bank / From the long crag, upon the left hand still, / And then more vivid was my power of sight / … I do not think a sadder sight to see / Was in Aegina the whole people sick.” Furthermore, many of the afflicted could barely move, and Dante eventually comes across Gianni Schicchi, Myrrha, Adam of Brescia, the wife of Potiphar (a woman who indicted Joseph for supposedly making sexual advances towards her, which ended in him being wrongfully imprisoned), and Sinon (who was one of the main architects of the Trojan Horse). Dante eventually comes across a giant (Nimrod), who was quite malevolent: “For where the argument of intellect / Is added unto evil will and power, / No rampart can the people make against it. / His face appeared to me as long and large / As is at Rome the pinecone of Saint Peter’s, / And in proportion were the other bones; … For I beheld thirty great palms of him / Down from the place where man his mantle buckles.” That is, one of his hands was cuffed to a stone, and there was a horn around him which he would blow into to express his anger. When Nimrod verbally threatened Virgil and Dante, Virgil told him to keep to his horn. They come across more giants, one of which was named Ephialtes: “We found another far more fierce and large. / In binding him, who might the master be / I cannot say; but he had pinioned close / Behind the right arm, and in front the other / With chains, that held him so begirt about / From the neck down, that on the part uncovered / It wound itself as far as the fifth gyre.” It turns out that Ephialtes had challenged the authority of the Abrahamic god: for threatening him with his strength, he no longer has the privilege to exercise it. Another giant, Antaeus, was much more calm and rational, seen in how he helped Dante and Virgil down into the ninth circle of Hell (by placing them in his palms and letting them get off unscathed). The ninth circle of Hell, as stated before, was the most severe one, as it was reserved for traitors: said traitors are punished by being frozen (from partially to completely) in an icy lake which sees no light, only darkness. The whole reasoning behind the punishment is that traitors have shown themselves unworthy of receiving love, seeing their past behavior: therefore, it is only fitting for them to be incapable of potentially harming another by being not only physically restrained, but emotionally too (when they cry, their tears are frozen). This concept can also be seen in the fact that there is no warmth at all in the ninth circle of Hell, unlike many of the others which are dominated by fire and cinders: there’s only coldness, which reflects the hearts of the inhabitants. Dante comes across numerous frozen bodies, and eventually found two conjoined together: one was savagely biting the head of the other: “When I beheld two frozen in one hole, / so that one head a hood was to the other; / And even as bread through hunger is devoured, / the uppermost on the other set his teeth, / There where the brain is to the nape united.” Dante asks the one doing the biting to explain his life. Complying, the one biting the other momentarily stopped, wiping his mouth on the hair of the person he was just harming. He states that he bites him out of justified hatred, as he is Count Ugolino: the one he is biting is Archbishop Ruggieri. In the past, Ugolino wanted to revolt against his superiors, and trusted Ruggieri with his secret: Ruggieri betrayed him to his masters, causing him to be sentenced to die of starvation. Moreover, he and his sons and grandsons were locked into the cell of a tower: the keys were then thrown away, and they were left to die of dehydration and hunger. In the beginning, he was able to keep his composure, but was still tormented by the fact that his thoughts of treachery (against his superiors and also his people) had led to his family sharing his fate. Eventually, his sons starved to death (it took six days): before they did, they begged him to eat their bodies to keep himself alive. Ugolino recounts, “‘And said they: ‘Father, much less pain ‘twill give us / If you do east of us; thyself didst clothe us / With this poor flesh, and do thou strip it off.’ / I calmed me then, not to make them more sad. / … When we had come unto the fourth day, Gaddo / Threw himself down outstretched before my feet, / Saying, ‘My father, why dost thou not help me?’ / And there he died; and, as thou seest me, / I saw the three fall, one by one, between / The fifth day and the sixth; whence I betook me, / Already blind, to groping over each, / And three days called them after they were dead; / Then hunger did what sorrow could not do.’” It should be noted that the last phrase can either be read as him eating the bodies of his sons (he was starving, after all) or his killing himself due to his pangs of hunger (or potentially the fact that his hunger directly caused him to die after much protracted torment). After telling his story, Ugolino goes right back to ravaging the head of Ruggieri, whom he loathes more than anything else. Dante then shows his personal thoughts when he writes that “Ah! Pisa, thou opprobrium of the people / … For if Count Ugolino had the fame / Of having in thy castles thee betrayed, / Thou shouldst not on such cross have put his sons.”
Moving forward, Virgil and Dante come across Lucifer himself: he is firmly entrenched in the center of Hell, as only his upper form (including his multiple massive wings) is free to move. Weeping profusely, he has three faces: each of their mouths bites a sinner, making a total of three. The three sinners are supposed to be the worst in the history of humanity, and they are Judas (for betraying Christ), Cassius (for forming a conspiracy to murder Julius Caesar, who could’ve done great things, such as reforming Rome), and Brutus (for betraying Caesar, the man who had personally ordered for his life to be spared in the Battle of Pharsalus). As Dante wrote: “Were he as fair once, as he now is foul / And lifted up his brow against his Maker, / Well may proceed from him all tribulation. / … I beheld three faces on his head! / … cameforth two mighty wings, / Such as befitting were so great a bird; / Sails of the sea I never saw so large. / No feathers had they, but as of a bat / Their fashion was; and he was waving them, / So that three winds proceeded forth therefrom. / Thereby Cocytus wholly was congealed. / With six eyes did he weep, and down three chins / Trickled the teardrops and the bloody drivel. / At every mouth he with his teeth was crunching / A sinner, in the manner of a break, / So that he three of them tormented thus. / To him in front the biting was as naught / Unto the clawing, for sometimes the spine / Utterly stripped of all the skin remained.” After seeing this, Dante’s tour of Hell is over: he and Virgil leave Hell by climbing down Lucifer. To elaborate, they found themselves on the opposite hemisphere of the world: when it comes to Dante’s portrayal of Hell, think of it as a funnel, with limbo at the top and the ninth circle of Hell at the bottom. To elaborate, limbo is the largest part of Hell and the ninth circle is relatively small (composed of only a lake). When one goes under the ninth circle, they reemerge on the opposite side of the world (the southern hemisphere). Dante ends his poem with the following lines: “The Guide and I into that hidden road / Now entered, to return to the bright world; / And without care of having any rest / We mounted up, he first and I the second, / Till I beheld through a round aperture / Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear; / Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.”
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Personal thoughts:
Inferno by Dante is a great work, as it portrays a layout of the Christian Hell that is so vivid, terrifying, and brutal that it is no wonder it was the template adopted by contemporary society. Dante’s prose may be hard to decipher at times, but the implicitness within the text only makes the poem more serious and powerful, as it causes the audience to have to pay more attention to the details, making the reading of the poem a more memorable experience. I appreciated that Dante had a large focus on the pursuit of peace in his poem, as he condemns many of the warmongers of Europe (and those which prevented a unified one, seen in how Cassius and Brutus, the two prominent assassins of Julius Caesar, were condemned to the worst punishment available for stopping a potential Golden Age of Rome) to horrific tortures in the afterlife. While Dante may be criticized for being petty when it comes to his equivalent of fan fiction (he relentlessly names many whom he viewed as responsible for Europe’s conflicts), it should be remembered that at the time (and for most of Europe’s history, to be honest) bloodshed and colossal times of crises affected many, giving Dante good reason to loathe those which pushed their individual pursuit of power, glory, money, and land over the communal good. As mentioned before, the one part of this text which I truly dislike is how the text states that the Abrahamic god should be praised and obeyed, not reviled and mocked: why should a deity who ruthlessly and barbarously tortures untold numbers of people be looked up to as a father figure? If anything, he’s an abuser and narcissist: while it’s true his creations were deeply flawed, he should have punished himself before condemning others, not to mention that he was their creator, which means that he has an ethical obligation to make things better for them, not to abuse them further. Also, if he’s truly all-powerful, he should’ve remedied his mistakes instead of blaming others for his clear stupidity, callousness, and inadequacy as a decent and moral entity. Aside from that element, Inferno was a read to be experienced. I highly recommend Inferno to anyone interested in literature, portrayals of the afterlife, mythology, morality, and justice.
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