“abandon all hope, ye who enter here…”. dante is lost in the woods. he tries to climb the...
TRANSCRIPT
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