NAVIGATION

River-Styx.net
River-Styx Sitemap
Hades: Greek /Roman Gods and Death
Egypt: Aset & Asar
Egyptian Gods
Aztec: Mictlan
Aztec Gods
Aztec Codices
Maya: Xibalba
Mayan Gods
Mayan Codices
Death Gods
The Black Death
Dance of Death
Dante's Divine Comedy
      Inferno (Hell)
      Purgatory
      Paradise
Native American Mythology
Astrology 8th House of Death
Spirituality

more offsite...
Gimme SWEEPS!
NativeUSA.org
Balko Photo
Genealogy Zeitler
Idiots List
ClassicFilmStars

13 Death

the wailing and        
                     gnashing of teeth

Detail of a manuscript in Milan's Biblioteca Trivulziana (MS 1080), written in 1337 by Francesco di ser Nardo da Barberino, showing the beginning of Dante's Comedy.

The Inferno

The poem begins on Good Friday of the year 1300, "In the middle of our life's journey" (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita), and so opens in medias res. Dante is thirty-five years old, lost in a dark wood, perhpas contemplating suicide. Conscious that he is ruining himself, that he is falling into a "deep place" where the sun is silent, Dante is at last rescued by Virgil after his love Beatrice intercedes on his behalf (Canto II), and he and Virgil begin their journey to the underworld.

Dante's layout/vision of Hell:

[Circles1-5 termed "Incontinence"]

Circle I [Limbo] - The Unbaptized, Virtuous Pagans - will never see Divine Radiance
Here also reside those who, if they lived before the coming of Christ, did not pay fitting homage to their respective deity. They are not punished in an active sense, but rather grieve only their separation from God, without hope of reconciliation. The chief irony in this circle is that Limbo shares many characteristics with Elysian Fields, thus the guiltless damned are punished by living in their deficient form of heaven. Limbo includes green fields and a castle, the dwelling place of the wisest men of antiquity, including Virgil himself. In the castle Dante meets the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. Interestingly, he also sees Saladin in Limbo.

Beyond this first circle, all of those condemned for active, deliberately willed sin are judged by Minos, who sentences each soul to one of the lower eight circles. These are structured according to the classical (Aristotelian) conception of virtue and vice.

Dante passes through the Gate of Hell, on which is inscribed the famous phrase "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", or "Abandon all hope, you who enter here." Before entering Hell completely, Dante and his guide see the Opportunists, souls of people who in life did nothing, neither for good nor evil (among these Dante recognizes either Pope Celestine V, or Pontius Pilate; the text is ambiguous). Mixed with them are the outcasts, who took no side in the Rebellion of Angels. These souls are neither in Hell nor out of it, but reside on the shores of the Acheron, their punishment to eternally pursue a banner, and be pursued by wasps and hornets that continually sting them while maggots and other such insects drink their blood and tears. This symbolizes the sting of their conscience and the repugnance of sin.

Then Dante and Virgil reach the ferry that will take them across the river Acheron and to Hell proper. The ferry is piloted by Charon, who does not want to let Dante enter, for he is a living being. Virgil forces Charon to take them, but their passage across is not described because Dante faints and does not awake until he is on the other side.

The River Acheron
---------------------------------------

Circle II - The Lustful - forever whirled about in a dark stormy wind
Those overcome by lust are punished in this circle. These souls are blown about to and fro by a violent storm, without hope of rest. Here Francesca da Rimini informs Dante of how she and her husband's brother Paolo committed adultery and died a violent death at the hands of her husband.

Circle III (Cerberus is guardian) - The Gluttonous - stuck in mud, rain, cold, dirty hail & snow
Cerberus guards the gluttons, forced to lie in the mud under continual cold rain and hail while forced to consume their own excrement. Dante converses with a Florentine contemporary identified as Ciacco about the strife in Florence and the fate of prominent Florentines.

Circle IV - The Hoarders (miserly) and The Spendthrifts - roll weights against on another
Those who were obsessed with material goods are punished in this circle. They include the avaricious or miserly, who hoarded possessions, and the prodigal, who squandered them. Guarded by Plutus, each group pushes a great weight against the heavy weight of the other group. After the weights (sometimes shown as huge money bags) crash together the process starts over again.

Circle V - The Wrathful and Sullen - they are stuck in mud to tear and mangle each other
In the swamp-like water of the river Styx, the wrathful fight each other on the surface, and the sullen or slothful lie gurgling beneath the water.

Gates or Wall of Dis

The lower parts of hell are contained within the walls of the city of Dis, which is itself surrounded by the Stygian marsh. Punished within Dis are active (rather than passive) sins. The walls of Dis are guarded by fallen angels. Virgil is unable to convince them to let Dante and him enter, and the Furies and Medusa threaten Dante. An angel sent from Heaven secures entry for the poets.

Phlegyas reluctantly transports Dante and Virgil across the Styx in his skiff. On the way they are accosted by Filippo Argenti, a Black Guelph from a prominent family.

The River Styx
---------------------------------------

Circle VI - The Heretics - buried for eternity in Hell
Heretics are trapped in flaming tombs. Dante converses with a pair of Florentines in one of the tombs: Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline, and Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti, a Guelph who was the father of Dante's friend, fellow poet Guido Cavalcanti.

River Phlegyas or Phlegethon
---------------------------------------

Circle VII (Violence) - divided into three rings:
     Outer Ring I - Violence Against Neighbors - Burning Sands
     Middle Ring II - Violence Against Self - in the Wood of Suicides
     Inner Ring III - Violence Against God - in Burning Sands (further divided into:)
          Blasphemers (who must lie on hot sand
          Userers (who must crouch on hot sand with heavy moneybags around their necks)
          Sodomites (who must wander forever on those hot sands)

This circle houses the violent. Its entry is guarded by the Minotaur, and it is divided into three rings:

Ring I - Outer ring: housing the violent against people and property, who are immersed in Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood, to a level commensurate with their sins. The Centaurs, commanded by Chiron, patrol the ring. The centaur Nessus guides the poets along Phlegethon and across a ford in the river.

Ring II - Middle ring: In this ring are the suicides, who are transformed into gnarled thorny bushes and trees. They are torn at by the Harpies. Different from the other dead, the suicides will not be bodily resurrected after the final judgment. Instead they will maintain their bushy form, with their own corpses hanging from the limbs.

Dante breaks a twig off of one of the bushes and hears the tale of Pier delle Vigne, who committed suicide after falling out of favor with Emperor Frederick II. The other residents of this ring are the profligates, who destroyed their lives by destroying the means by which life is sustained (i.e. money and property). They are perpetually chased by ferocious dogs through the thorny undergrowth. The trees are a metaphor; in life the only way of the relief of suffering was through pain (i.e. suicide) and in Hell, the only form of relief of the suffering is through pain (breaking of the limbs to bleed).

Ring III - Inner ring: The violent against God (blasphemers), the violent against nature (sodomites), and the violent against art (usurers), all reside in a desert of flaming sand with fiery flakes raining from the sky. The blasphemers lie on the sand, the usurers sit, and the sodomites wander about in groups. Dante converses with two Florentine sodomites from different groups: Brunetto Latini, a poet; and Iacopo Rusticucci, a politician.

Now, it was not Dante's position that all sodomites were destined for hell fire, for repentant sodomites can be found on the top of Mount Purgatory. Those punished here for usury include Florentines Catello di Rosso Gianfigliazzi, Ciappo Ubriachi, and Giovanni di Buiamonte, and Paduans Reginaldo degli Scrovegni and Vitaliano di Iacopo Vitaliani.

Circle VIII (ordinary fraud) - Geryon is guardian
     Bolgia 1 - Panderers and Seducers - must walk naked forever
     Bolgia 2 - Flatterers - immersed in human excrement
     Bolgia 3 - Simoniacs - held upside down in flame
     Bolgia 4 - Sorcerers, Soothsayers - heads twisted around
     Bolgia 5 - Barrators - immersed in boiling pitch
     Bolgia 6 - Hypocrites - some must wear a golden cloak weighted inside with lead
     Bolgia 7 - Thieves - change their form - snake into man
     Bolgia 8 - Fraudulent Counselors (deceivers) - soul encased by flame
     Bolgia 9 - Sowers of Scandal and Schism - bloody and ripped open
     Bolgia 10 - Falsifiers - afflicted with different types of diseases

These last two circles of Hell (8 and 9) punish sins that involve conscious fraud or treachery. The circles can be reached only by descending a vast cliff, which Dante and Virgil do on the back of Geryon, a winged monster represented by Dante as having the face of an honest man and a body that ends in a scorpion-like stinger.

The fraudulent—those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil—are located in a circle named Malebolge ("Evil Pockets"), divided into ten bolgie, or ditches, with bridges spanning the ditches:
Bolgia 1: Panderers and seducers walk in separate lines in opposite directions, whipped by demons.
Bolgia 2: Flatterers are steeped in human excrement.
Bolgia 3: Those who committed simony are placed head-first in holes in the rock, with flames burning on the soles of their feet. One of them, Pope Nicholas III, denounces as simonists two of his successors, Pope Boniface VIII and Pope Clement V.
Bolgia 4: Sorcerers and false prophets have their heads twisted around on their bodies backward, so they can only see what is behind them. (Canto XX)
Bolgia 5: Corrupt politicians (barrators) are immersed in a lake of boiling pitch, guarded by devils, the Malebranche ("Evil Claws"). Their leader, Malacoda ("Evil Tail"), assigns a troop to escort Virgil and Dante to the next bridge. The troop hook and torment Ciampolo, who identifies some Italian grafters and then tricks the Malebranche in order to escape back into the pitch.
Bolgia 6: The bridge over this bolgia is broken: the poets climb down into it and find the Hypocrites listlessly walking along wearing gold-gilded lead cloaks. Dante speaks with Catalano and Loderingo, members of the Jovial Friars. It is also ironic in this canto that whilst in the company of hypocrites, the poets also discover that the guardians of the fraudulent (the malebranche) are hypocrites themselves, as they find that they have lied to them, giving false directions, when at the same time they are punishing liars for similar sins.
Bolgia 7: Thieves, guarded by the centaur (as Dante describes him) Cacus, are pursued and bitten by snakes. The snake bites make them undergo various transformations, with some resurrected after being turned to ashes, some mutating into new creatures, and still others exchanging natures with the snakes, becoming snakes themselves that chase the other thieves in turn.
Bolgia 8: Fraudulent advisors are encased in individual flames. Dante includes Ulysses and Diomedes together here for their role in the Trojan War. Ulysses tells the tale of his fatal final voyage, where he left his home and family to sail to the end of the Earth. He equated life as a pursuit of knowledge that humanity can attain through effort, and in his search God sank his ship outside of Mount Purgatory. This symbolizes the inability of the individual to carve out one's own salvation. Instead, one must be totally subservient to the will of God and realize the inability of one to be a God unto oneself. Guido da Montefeltro recounts how his advice to Pope Boniface VIII resulted in his damnation, despite Boniface's promise of absolution.
Bolgia 9: A sword-wielding devil hacks at the sowers of discord. As they make their rounds the wounds heal, only to have the devil tear apart their bodies again. Muhammad tells Dante to warn the schismatic and heretic Fra Dolcino.
Bolgia 10: Groups of various sorts of falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, and impersonators). Falsifiers of Metals have scabs covering body. Falsifiers of Persons are changed into hogs chasing others. Falsifiers of Coins endure eternal thirst, cracked tongue, bloated belly. Falsifiers of Words have continual fever, smoke/heat cooking body.

Circle IX - (Complex or Treacherous Fraud)
     Caina - Traitors to Kindred - only heads are above ice
Circle 9, Traitors to their Country Lords, Judecca: fully covered by ice except for Judas Brutus, and Cassius who are chewed
     Antenora - Traitors to their Country: heads only above ice
     Ptolomea - Traitors to their Guests: flat on backs in ice, eyes sealed shut from tears
     Judecca - Traitors to their Benefactors (Lords) - fully covered by ice except for Judas Brutus, and Cassius who are chewed on by Lucifer.

The Ninth Circle is ringed by classical and Biblical giants. The giants are standing either on, or on a ledge above, the ninth circle of Hell, and are visible from the waist up at the ninth circle of the Malebolge. The giant Antaeus lowers Dante and Virgil into the pit that forms the ninth circle of Hell.

Here the Traitors, distinguished from the "merely" fraudulent in that their acts involve betraying one in a special relationship to the betrayer, are frozen in a lake of ice known as Cocytus. Each group of traitors is encased in ice to a different depth, ranging from only the waist down to complete immersion. The circle is divided into four concentric zones:

Zone 1: Caïna, named for Cain, is home to traitors to their kindred.
Zone 2: Antenora is named for Antenor of Troy, who according to medieval tradition betrayed his city to the Greeks. Traitors to political entities, such as party, city, or country, are located here. Count Ugolino pauses from gnawing on the head of his rival Archbishop Ruggieri to describe how Ruggieri imprisoned and starved him and his children.
Zone 3: Ptolomæa is probably named for Ptolemy, the captain of Jericho, who invited Simon Maccabaeus and his sons to a banquet and there killed them. Traitors to their guests are punished here. Fra Alberigo explains that sometimes a soul falls here before the time that Atropos (the Fate who cuts the thread of life) should send it. Their bodies on Earth are immediately possessed by a fiend.
Zone 4: Judecca, named for Judas the Iscariot, Biblical betrayer of Christ, is for traitors to their lords and benefactors. All of the sinners punished within are completely encapsulated in ice, distorted to all conceivable positions. Dante and Virgil, with no one to talk to, quickly move on to the center of hell.

River Cocyths
---------------------------------------

In Inferno, Cocytus is the ninth and lowest circle of Hell. Cocytus is referred to as a frozen lake rather than a river, although it originates from the same source as the other infernal rivers. The lake is frozen by the flapping wings of Lucifer, or Satan; his tears replenish the lake, and are then frozen by his attempts to escape via the wings.

LUCIFER

Satan is trapped in the frozen central zone in the Ninth Circle of Hell, Inferno, Canto 34. Painting by Gustav Dore

At the center is Satan, who has three faces, one red, one black, and one a pale yellow, each having a mouth that chews on a prominent traitor. Satan himself is represented as a giant, terrifying beast, weeping tears from his six eyes, which mix with the traitors' blood sickeningly. He is waist deep in ice, and beats his six wings as if trying to escape, but the icy wind that emanates only further ensures his imprisonment (as well as that of the others in the ring). The sinners in the mouths of Satan are Brutus and Cassius in the left and right mouths, respectively, who were involved in the assassination of Julius Caesar (an act which, to Dante, represented the destruction of a unified Italy), and Judas Iscariot (the namesake of this zone) in the central, most vicious mouth, who betrayed Jesus. Judas is being administered the most horrifying torture of the three traitors, his head in the mouth of Lucifer, and his back being forever skinned by the claws of Lucifer.

The two poets escape by climbing down the ragged fur of Lucifer, passing through the center of the earth, emerging in the other hemisphere just before dawn on Easter Sunday beneath a sky studded with stars.